Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece Read online

  And then, finally, this clothed sculpture struck visitors to the exhibition as obscene. While they went into ecstasies over the Venus of Milo and many other statues of women with exposed bodies, Rodin’s dancers among them—here was another sculptor fascinated by the movement of dancers — they found the clothing that covered the Little Dancer shocking. Because if she was wearing clothes, it meant that she was naked underneath! The model posed naked, as was the custom in many ateliers and art schools, and normally this was either ignored or accepted on the grounds of the higher interests of art. The nudity of classical statuary shocked no one. In painting, of course, there had been recent and memorable scandals, starting in 1863 with Manet’s Olympia and his Déjeuner sur l’herbe, in which the naked woman in the foreground looks at us mockingly. And there was Courbet. Contemporary naked women who were not Eves, not goddesses, not allegories of Truth, but women of today, ones you might meet in the street, that is what was intolerable to the public. The garments ornamenting the Little Dancer, paradoxically, pointed to her essential anatomy. The clothed nude is more obscene than the naked; the visible suggests the hidden. Her nudity might be veiled, but one was led to think about it, to visualize the conditions under which art was made, to reflect on the mores of bohemia and the wantonness of models, provoking feelings of shame and hatred.

  With this sculpture, then, Degas transgressed twice over, breaking the rules of polite society and those of academic art. His taboo-breaking revolution was both moral and esthetic. On the one hand, he chose a scabrous subject that ran afoul of moral standards; on the other, he undermined the very foundations of statuary art. While Huysmans praised Degas as an artist who rejected “the study of classical art and the use of marble, stone, and bronze,” thereby rescuing his work from a stultifying academicism, the guardians of the temple reviled Degas for “threatening the very identity of sculpture.”46 “It’s barely a maquette,” they said, and more like a piece of merchandise, something you could pick up in a bazaar. Degas was in fact well known for calling his works “wares” and “products.” His open avoidance of elitism profoundly shocked the partisans of high art. The very conservative critic Anatole de Montaiglon, scandalized by the shop windows of the dressmaker Madame Demarest, which were much talked about during the Universal Exposition of 1878, wrote with prescient irony: “These clothed mannequins in apparel shops are destined to become the latest fashion in art.”47 In the end, what was most disturbing was the inability to assign the Little Dancer to any fixed category. She was everything and its opposite: the model was a child, but she looked like a criminal; a ballet dancer, but inelegant — at once “refined and barbarous,”48 wrote Huysmans, “an admixture of grace and working-class vileness.”49 Too large to be a toy, too small for a girl of fourteen, the Little Dancer hovered between the work of art and the everyday object, the statue and the mannequin, the doll, the miniature, the figurine. She advanced a tightrope walker’s foot onto the wire stretched between the fine arts and popular culture, between poetry and prose; she was both classical and modern, realistic and subjective, esthetic and popular, common and beautiful. “This enigmatic little creature, who is at once sly and untainted,”50 suggested different interpretations while not being reducible to any, and refused to be boxed in by anything but her glass cage. The cage itself resisted any simple explanation: ordinarily, in museums, glass cases are reserved for objects — or taxidermied animals, hence the word “cage,” which was used by some (while others used the word “jar”) who found it appropriate for this “animal.” The fabric she stood on also excited speculation: the base of a statue normally has no such adornment, which is more commonly seen in commercial displays. (It works fine for Cosette’s doll, but for Degas’s statue?) The satiny fabric also suggested Courbet’s recent painting, The Origin of the World, in which a woman’s genitals are displayed against a similar white cloth. The painting had not been exhibited publicly, but a few insiders, Degas among them, were likely to have seen it. For those in the know, the obscene association would have seemed obvious and deliberate. On the other hand, Degas, though in the prime of life, already lived as a quasi-hermit, a recluse in his studio. His reputation was unblemished by any scandal, unlike Courbet’s, and no whisper of depravity attached to him. By putting a transparent obstacle between his statue and the public, by preventing his dancer from being touched, might not Degas have been displaying a haughty modesty, preserving the work’s value, its rarity, and even its sacred dimension? One hardly knows what to think.

  Even those who defended the work and saw in it “the first formulation of a new art,” in Nina de Villard’s words,51 were unsettled as to its classification. The Little Dancer might well be called “the first Impressionist sculpture,” but did it not reflect instead an extreme form of realism?

  Degas is lumped in with the Impressionists, but it is only because he took part in the secessionist movement of the early 1860s that defined a group in opposition to the reigning academicists. Unable to exhibit in the official salons, a number of artists, including Renoir, Monet, and Manet, took over a parallel exhibition hall known as the Salon des Refusés. But this salon, which only lasted a few years, was subject to violent attacks. Edgar Degas then joined with Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, all of them tired of the hostility of the official authorities, to form an association dedicated to mounting their own exhibitions. In December 1873, they adopted the generic name Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs, but were ironically rechristened the “Impressionists” by a critic who singled out Monet’s canvas Impression, Sunrise. The Impressionists: the name would stick, to the great displeasure of Edgar Degas, who had proposed the name “Intransigents” and considered himself part of a “realist movement.” This separation from the others explains much about Degas. The critics were well aware of it. “Proximity is not kinship,” they noted, and although Degas exhibited alongside Pissarro, Sisley, and Monet, “he was an alien in their midst.”52 His friend Jacques-Émile Blanche underlined the fact in his recollections: “Monsieur Degas was called an ‘Impressionist’ because he belonged to the group of painters Monet christened with that name; but Monsieur Degas was among them as an outsider. He painted emphatically, instead of ‘suggesting’ by rough signs, or equivalents, as those landscapists did who, not yet daring to call their sketches ‘paintings,’ classified them as ‘impressions.’“53

  He painted emphatically, instead of suggesting. He didn’t seduce, he frightened. It’s worth bringing these two phrases of Jacques-Émile Blanche’s together. They express the essence of Degas’s work, at least during those years: he emphasized and he frightened. He emphasized in order to frighten. He “impressed” but in a different way than his painter friends. Huysmans, following Blanche’s lead, contrasted him to Gustave Moreau, whose work, he wrote, lay “outside any particular time, flying into the beyond, soaring in dreams, far from the excremental ideas secreted by a whole nation.” Degas, on the contrary, belonged to that family of painters “whose mind is far from nomadic, whose stay-at-home imagination cleaves to the actual period,” and whose work is entirely taken up with “this environment that they hate, this environment whose blemishes and shames they scrutinize and express.”54 It is the eternal battle in the arts between those who live in their imaginations and those who are fiercely committed to reality. Huysmans not only placed Degas in the latter group but named him one of its most personal masters, “the most piercing of them all,” who, by his “attentive cruelty,” gave “so precise a sensation of the strange, so accurate a rendition of the unseen, that one wonders at being surprised by it.”55 Degas, though he admired the work of Gustave Moreau, could be cuttingly sarcastic about the imaginary accessories in his paintings: “He wants us to believe that the gods wore watch chains.”56 But though he drew a line between himself and artists such as Moreau, who took their inspiration from mythology and the ideal, he was not to be confused with the Impressionist school
then coming into its own. It was true that the Impressionists, like Degas, had broken away from historical, mythological, and religious subjects, from the pomp of their predecessors. Renoir, for example, described his relief at escaping the sculpture hall of the Luxembourg Museum and “those terrified and too-white statues,”57 diametric opposites of the Little Dancer. Degas also shared the Impressionists’ love of contemporary scenes and their taste for technical inventiveness and creative freedom. But unlike them, he hated to work outdoors and was passionately attached to drawing, and therefore to the outline. More significantly, he looked at the world with less forgiving eyes, and his vision was orders of magnitude less lighthearted. While Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro expressed their wonderment at nature and its vision-blurring tricks of light, while Mary Cassatt, Auguste Renoir, and Berthe Morisot presented charming scenes of middle-class and family life, with women and children shown in all their beauty, Edgar Degas captured an unfiltered reality and provoked disquieting sensations. He questioned society. In this sense, he was much more a realist than an Impressionist. His contemporaries, in fact, reproached him for pushing his realism to extremes. It was all well and good to tear down “the partition dividing the atelier from ordinary life,”58 but he went too far in applying “the major rule of naturalism,” which was to exaggerate physical and moral ugliness. Even his friends deplored his tendency always to “search within the real for the defective grain.”59 Just taking representations of childhood, we won’t find much in common between the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and Berthe Morisot’s Eugène Manet and His Daughter in the Garden at Bougival, painted the same year, or Renoir’s Child with a Bird, both of which feature lovely little girls who are happy and protected. On this score, critics spoke of the Impressionists’ “social blindness,” which divided them from Degas. Despite his reputation as a haughty bourgeois, Degas has more in common here with such predecessors as Millet, who was attentive to rural poverty, and to contemporaries now somewhat fallen from favor, such as Fernand Pelez, a painter of street urchins.

  It is therefore difficult to accept the Little Dancer‘s title to being “the first Impressionist statue,” given that the sculpture’s very technique, its three-dimensionality, and its accessories further accentuated its realism. It is also a work whose fragile material provided an analogue for the state of contemporary society, a society that came into being at a time when literature was dominated by an exceedingly harsh strain of naturalism. We should remember, however, that Émile Zola, though the leader of this school of writing, rejected what he called “photographic realism” in painting. In 1878, he criticized Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers for being “bourgeois by reason of its exactitude,”60 though he would soften toward the painter in subsequent years and praise him for his “courage” as a truth teller. What made the difference between a flat, dutiful verisimilitude and inspired realism was obviously talent — Degas’s palette, for instance, with its greens, blues, and pinks, was far removed from nature. Degas was certainly looking for reality, but “what he asked of reality was the new.”61 For him, as for Delacroix before him, “everything was a subject,” there were no marginal or vulgar motifs. Chafing at the label of “Impressionist,” Degas would have preferred to be identified as an “Intransigent.” And we can see why: he doesn’t compromise with the truth. Stripped of any effect that might embellish reality, his sculpture clashed with bourgeois taste, just as the novels of Zola and Maupassant did, disappointing the imagination and offering an art “pruned of all fancy,” which no doubt had its place, according to the critic Paul Mantz, “in the history of cruel arts.”62 Unlike most of the Impressionists, he didn’t emphasize the sort of classic beauty presented in ideal form by earlier masters. In the words of art critic Joseph Czapski, “Degas discovered another beauty in the reality around him…a totally new and tragic beauty.”63 Going further, Czapski attributes to Degas “the discovery of ugliness, which the painter changes into artistic beauty, the discovery of baseness and brutality, which, transposed, becomes a perfect work of art.”64 If Degas broke the harmony that pervaded the art of his admired predecessors, it was to express, Czapski continues, “the moral tragedy of the period…the material and spiritual upheavals of his time, and that was his greatness.” But, he concludes, “morally, philosophically, religiously, it represented a collapse of something, a tragedy.”65

  * * *

  —

  MARIE VAN GOETHEM was an instance of this tragedy, its witness, its model, its fetish, its symbol. Degas’s masterpiece, in its modernity, may mark a break with the esthetic past, but the “collapse of something” also corresponds to someone’s lived reality: Marie was there, she is in the work. That’s why the story of the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen can’t end here. What is still missing, what I have not found — I who seek to know everything about her — is something that is neither moral nor philosophic nor religious, or rather something that is all those things together. Beyond the physical, and beyond the critical reviews, what is missing is her soul. Degas’s ghost instantly takes issue, the painter having always objected strenuously to talk of the soul and “the influence of the soul.” “We speak a less pretentious language,” he said, claiming to be subject only to “the influence of the eyes.”66 The word “soul” may be in disuse, permeated with religion — and the thing itself may be unlocatable — but it pertains to all works of art, beyond what the senses perceive. The sculpture cannot simply embody a period, a state of society, an esthetic, nor even a modernist or avant-garde movement. What makes it a universal work of art is precisely what evades all these meanings, however strong or essential they may be, what transcends them. And at the other end of the equation, it is what each person may find there for herself, outside of time, in attunement with her own personal narrative.

  Huysmans described Degas’s brand of realism as “an art expressing an expansive or abridged upwelling of soul, within living bodies, in perfect accord with their surroundings.” Zola, for his part, wrote that the work of art is “a corner of creation viewed through a particular temperament.”67 Marie van Goethem was that corner of creation — a modest fragment, neither particularly visible nor particularly attractive — and Degas was that temperament — visual, tactile, and very solitary. What were they doing together? Why were they both there? What “upwelling of soul” or what spirit was born of this couple? By what mystery, by what detours, by what desires? What was happening in these living bodies, whose encounter would give birth to a work of art and give rise to an extended future existence for themselves?

  2

  Do we know what we touch? Do we know what it’s made of?

  It is a mystery.

  — Edgar Degas

  A woman, which is to say a question, a pure enigma.

  —Julien Gracq

  EDGAR DEGAS AND MARIE VAN GOETHEM. One was born in 1834, the other in 1865. Both are in the studio, rue Fontaine, two living bodies, separated by thirty-one years and a world of circumstances. He has no children, she is of an age to be his daughter. He chose her because she is fourteen years old and looks to be only twelve, because she is neither very pretty nor very refined, because she has that slight look of insolence you often find in girls who have no other weapon against the world or their mothers. Did he find in her “that touch of ugliness without which there is no salvation,” as he would write to Henri Rouart about the lovely women of New Orleans?1 Did he like the ordinariness of her figure, because, to his way of thinking, “grace is in the ordinary”?2 Or was she, as it is believed, more charming than he represented her, with a less primitive face? After all, Degas had a reputation for painting without embellishing, even to the point of uglifying, especially in his depictions of women. When, in 1866, Manet saw the unbecoming portrait that Degas had painted of his wife, he was so furious that he cut out the offending section of the canvas. Degas had no interest in the clichés of feminine beauty. He did sometimes hire other kinds of models, young women of greater elegance and with more experience at
the unrewarding job of posing for painters. One such was the famous Ellen Andrée, also a favorite model of Renoir and Manet; another was Eugénie Fiocre, a ballerina at the Paris Opera. But neither corresponded to his mental image at the time he turned to making his small wax statue, around 1879. He wanted this little rat, whose poverty he knew, and in whom he recognized, as he wrote in a poem, “the race of the street.”3