Edgard Degas - La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans / The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, ca. 1880
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La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans / The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, is a sculpture begun c. 1880 by Edgar Degas of a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, a Belgian named Marie van Goethem aged 14 at the time.
When it was exhibited in 1881, the work, presented in a glass case, surprised by the uncompromising realism of the figure, whose treatment by the wax technique and the use of real accessories accentuated the illusion of reality. Proofs from the original were published in bronze by the founder Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard and are exhibited in several museums around the world.
The sculpture represents a young ballerina standing in a very ordinary resting position for ballerinas, feet out, leaning on the back leg, a position similar to the "fourth" one of the five positions of classical ballet, hands behind her back, bust raised and head thrown back. Anyone who has been a dancer can imagine that the young girl is pulling her arms back and raising her chin to stretch, as is common when listening to corrections from the teacher, or when memorizing the exercises shown by the latter. She is dressed in a silk bustier, a tulle tutu , stockings and ballet slippers. Her hair is tied with a satin ribbon. The original sculpture, whose body is made of colored wax imitating the texture of human skin, was dressed in real fabric accessories, and a hair wig made by Mrs. Cusset, a wig maker. The bronze proof only retains the hair ribbon and the skirt as real accessories, the rest being covered with various colored patinas which differentiate the body from the clothes.
The shape and color of the tutu have been a subject of debate since the exhibition Degas and the Little Dancer at the Joslyn Art Museum in 1998. The original skirt was a long, romantic-style tutu made of muslin (this style is also called a "Degas tutu" ). The bronze examples used a shorter, stiffer type of tutu, inspired by the original tutu of the 1881 wax figure, which was in a state of disrepair, which curator Richard Kendall felt did not match the original garment that was exhibited in 1881. His version of a bouffant, knee-length white tutu, based on preparatory drawings by Degas and contemporary documents, caused controversy in the art world .
The young dancer who served as the model for Degas' sculpture was named Marie Genevieve van Goethem. She was born on June 7, 1865 of a tailor father and a laundress mother, both Belgians living in a poor neighborhood in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Marie van Goethem and her two sisters Antoinette and Louise-Joséphine were placed by their mother at the Paris Opera where they were ballet students. Marie and her older sister Antoinette were also models, their names are mentioned in Degas' notebooks. Little information emerges from her biography.
Property of the painter until his death in 1917, it was found in his studio among the 73 sculptures saved and restored by the sculptor and close friend of the painter Paul-Albert Bartholomé. In 1921 it was cast in bronze from a cast of the plaster original, by the founder Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard. The original print was exhibited at the Hébrard gallery in 1922. The original wax and the first bronze print were the property of the Hébrard heirs until 1955, when they were acquired by the collector Paul Mellon who donated them subject to usufruct to the National Gallery of Art in Washington .
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Among the proofs from the original, issued in bronze by the founder Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard, 29 copies are listed and preserved in museums and private collections. The original wax is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC , donated by Paul Mellon after he acquired it with all of Degas' waxes from the founder Hébrard. The post-mortem bronze prints, made by Hébrard, are exhibited in particular at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in New York or at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen , and in several other major museums around the world.
This work was first announced in the catalogue of the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, but it was not exhibited there. The following year, during the sixth exhibition , the glass display case that was supposed to house it remained empty for ten days, and then the work was exhibited.
Because of the technique used and its realism, the sculpture caused surprise and scandal, even among the painter's admirers such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, who spoke of the "discomfort" that the sight of the sculpture could arouse in the public.
Criticism was rife; in the English magazine Artist, an essayist wrote "Can art sink any lower?" Paul Mantz, in his article in the newspaper Le Temps, was one of the most critical of the treatment of the appearance of the Little Dancer : "why is her forehead... like her lips, marked by such a deeply vicious character?"
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