There’s no way or reason to summarize Judd Tully’s long feature on the Degas bronzes available to read on ArtInfo.com. Instead, here’s the lead and a link to the rest:

The 74 bronzes displayed in the traveling exhibition “The Complete Sculptures of Edgar Degas,” which is just finishing a run at the Herakleidon Museum, a private museum in Athens, have thrown the art market and the elite community of Degas scholars into a tizzy. The pieces, depicting dancers, bathers, and horses, were recently cast in France from previously unknown plaster models purportedly made during the artist’s lifetime from his wax studio sculptures. Walter Maibaum, an art dealer and the head of the New York-based Degas Sculpture Project, who brought the trove to light, calls being shown the plasters in a foundry storage area in 2004, “like walking into King Tut’s tomb.”

But like the Egyptian treasure, the Degas finds could be said to carry a sort of curse. Instead of being hailed “as the greatest art discovery in the past 25 years,” as Maibaum believes they should be, the plasters, the bronzes made from them, and he himself have been attacked or shunned by the larger art world. “That’s a lot of bronze,” one anonymous critic has grumbled. “Who needs them?”

Cast in Doubt (ArtInfo.com)