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

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  LET‘S IMAGINE THE SCENE. On the first day she posed, Degas had to accept the presence of Marie’s mother in the studio. The woman was no doubt eager to learn what advantage could be gained from her daughter’s new employment, and she was also anxious to preserve appearances. At the Paris Opera, as in the studio, the mothers pretended to supervise the fresh-faced recruits, all the while assessing the men. Degas had a different reputation than Renoir or Corot, who considered that a painting was finished when they felt the urge to sleep with their model. In his mid-forties and of a serious, almost haughty demeanor, he was not known to make gallant assaults on women. Besides, Marie’s elder sister had posed for him earlier and come to no harm…but she’d received no windfall either. He himself had lost his mother at the age of thirteen, was unmarried, and lived alone with his housekeeper, Sabine Neyt, who would die in 1882 and be immediately replaced by Zoé Closier, another faithful servant. His only company, then, was a woman who prepared his meals, kept house for him, and read him the newspaper. But Madame van Goethem insisted on attending the modeling session. Still water runs deep and dirty, as she knew well enough! Who could say what ideas might enter his head? But Degas refused. He didn’t want some old hen prattling away while he worked, destroying his concentration. He needed to be alone with his model. In the end, Marie’s mother agreed to stay in the pantry with the housekeeper. The main thing was to negotiate the best salary possible, higher than at the Paris Opera. And before long, she stopped accompanying her daughter.

  Did Degas talk to Marie during the first modeling session? Did he explain his project to her? He had a reputation for brilliance and for voicing profound thoughts, and also for being an extraordinary conversationalist, fond of puns and jovial banter. But for him, “the Muses worked all day. At night…they danced, they didn’t speak.”4 Besides, why would he waste his gift for subtle conversation on this little girl, who “came from the oven half-baked”5 and was practically illiterate. His talk utterly charmed the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and prompted Paul Valéry to write reams of praise, but how much importance would he attach to conversing with this unpolished little rat? Degas, in any case, seemed to harbor an intellectual distrust toward women that closely bordered on contempt. Commenting on his Visit to a Museum, which was painted around the same time, Degas said he wanted “to give an idea of the boredom, despondency…and total absence of sensation that women experience in front of paintings.” It seems that Degas shared the misogyny that was rampant at the end of the nineteenth century, and which is visible in the writings of the Goncourt brothers and J.-K. Huysmans. In a collection called Certains, Huysmans wrote ironically about “ladies who, as everyone knows, take a lively interest in painting, which they understand almost as well as they understand literature — and that’s saying something.”6 Similarly, Degas attributed no esthetic sense to well-born women, or even any emotion, but it is hard to see him holding forth in this vein and expounding his “calculations on art”7 to Marie. More likely, he told her in a gruff voice what he expected of her. She was, after all, his employee at four francs a day. It was up to her to prove that she had more native intelligence than he thought, or at least some readiness at repartee, which would not be unusual in a child of the Paris streets. At least they would sometimes laugh together.

  Once he’d asked her to put on her dance costume, he didn’t hesitate long over the pose. He’d already envisioned it, having seen it at the theater. He already had its outline in his mind, where “imagination collaborates with memory.”8 He didn’t make her perform an arabesque or an entrechat, some complicated choreographic movement — besides, she couldn’t hold the pose for long if he did.The pose imprinted in his brain derived more from childhood games than from dance, and it had been in his mind for almost twenty years. In the foreground of Young Spartans, a canvas dated 1860 — Marie was not yet born — the female character, whose inspiration derived from Degas’s reading of Plutarch, already makes that same slight backward movement, as though, still immature, she were hesitating between contradictory feelings about the boys in front of her. This youthful painting, to which Degas himself gave the full title Young Spartan Girls Challenging the Boys, offers a metaphor for the relation between the sexes. It was a canvas that the painter held in particular affection, since he placed it on an easel in his studio, where it greeted visitors for many years. According to Daniel Halévy, this was also the work that was with him at the end, in the room where he died, raising the possibility that this contrapposto was the last image he saw. Did this posture capture for Degas a kind of essence of developing womanhood, an in-between state that he himself perhaps knew, halfway between advancing and drawing back, attraction and refusal, an intimate paradox? At all events, one finds it in several of his works over the years with slight variations, and it is this figure that in our eyes stands as Edgar Degas’s secret signature, his cosa mentale, the material projection of his thought.

  Degas demonstrated for his model how she was to pose; he mimed the gesture. “It was really very amusing to see him, raised up en pointe, his arms rounded, melding the esthetic of a ballet master with the esthetic of a painter,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt in his Journal.9 Then he corrected the pose on the model herself. He touched her arms to bring them behind her, and after that her right leg, in order to create an oblique line, and raised her chin to the desired angle. Marie would not only have to hold the pose but also remember it exactly, so as to re-create it in future sessions. Degas would dwell on this point: modeling is serious work, we are not here to pick daisies. Often, he would upbraid her: “You’re slumping, stand up straight!” or “longer in the neck,” or “the arms more extended,” and she would correct her position, just as at rehearsals. She wouldn’t have complained, the pose was one of rest — yet not entirely, as her arms thrust out behind her were not in a natural position. She would have preferred putting her hands on her hips, but it also could have been worse. She held her fourth position steadily. Degas could have worked from a photograph, as many artists already did. Delacroix, his idol, had recommended the technique to painters from the very earliest days of photography, as a way to avoid having to pay a model. But it was different for a sculptor. Degas needed Marie to be there, and he needed her to return. When he had adjusted the pose, he sketched her from every angle, highlighting his drawings in chalk and sketching in pastels on colored paper — a material that today has gone somewhat brown. It is moving to recognize the ribbon in the girl’s hair and, at the top of the sheet, her name, uncertainly spelled, in Degas’s hand: “Marie Vangutten,” and her address, “36 rue de Douai.” This intrusion of the real is troubling, it gives us access to a moment of pure presence: we are in the studio, and Degas is jotting down his little model’s contact information for fear of forgetting it. This is the beginning of their adventure together.

  The many preparatory sketches indicate the technical difficulties the sculptor faced. He made twenty-six studies for the Little Dancer, both naked and clothed, from twenty or so different vantage points. He had difficulty, for instance, rendering Marie’s left foot from behind and started over several times; it shouldn’t look deformed. And how was one to make the curve of her arms look natural from every viewing angle? He also completed many close-up drawings of Marie’s face. In Four Studies of a Dancer, we see her in frontal view, a pretty, dark-haired girl with round cheeks, wide-open eyes, and a searching gaze. This is no doubt as close as we will get to her actual appearance, whereas the other drawings make her features seem coarser.

  Why did Degas decide to sculpt rather than paint his model? His “bad eyes” were the reason he often gave at the start of the process. If “vision is palpation by the sense of sight,”10 he was now obliged to privilege his other senses. “I feel the need, now more than ever, to translate my impressions of form into sculpture,” he wrote the art critic François Thiébault-Sisson.11 His eyesight having deteriorated, he received “impressions of form” rather than a sharp visio
n of the outlines — in that sense, the term “Impressionist” may in the end apply to him. But other motivations were at play as well. Drawing a dancer, he wrote, was “to create a momentary illusion,” but yielded only “a figure without thickness, with no sense of mass or volume, something inaccurate.” Accuracy was a major concern, and truth an even greater. “Truth is something you only obtain by sculpting, because the technique places constraints on the artist, forcing him to overlook nothing essential.”12 The choice of sculpture was therefore not motivated, as is sometimes believed, by the desire “to relieve himself of the strain of painting and drawing” by resting his eyes. It was a constraint consciously assumed to obtain “more expression, more ardor, and more life” in his work as a painter. The experience of sculpture, the sensations it provided, were meant to bring greater truth to his pictorial practice and allow him to grasp something that drawing alone could not access. In his interview with Thiébault-Sisson, Degas even used the surprising term “documents.” If he “made wax figures of animals and people,” it was not, he claimed, in order to sell or even show the works: “These are exercises to get me going; documents, nothing more.” A little further on, he would use the word “experiment”: “No one will ever see these experiments…By the time I die, all of this will have disintegrated on its own, and so much the better for my reputation.”13

  These words, spoken in 1897, are a little disappointing. Was the Little Dancer no more than a “document”? Was Degas somehow ashamed of this portion of his work, believing it of no importance and on the order of a sketch? Degas’s studio was littered with bits of wax, because he was always starting over with his “experiments” and was never happy with the result, as though completion were neither expected nor aimed at. Yet is there not in his depreciation of his wax sculptures an element of denial, of false modesty, of coyness? If he was telling the truth, why did he exhibit his Little Dancer in 1881? Why were 150 other statuettes found among his effects, in poor repair admittedly, but neither thrown away nor destroyed?

  It’s likely that the scandal and poor reception that greeted the Little Dancer are what caused Degas, who became very cantankerous at the end of his life, to downplay his wax sculptures and claim to have made them “for [his] sole satisfaction” and not for public view, unlike his monotypes and paintings. But at least when it comes to the Little Dancer, the preparatory studies suggest the opposite progression: it’s the drawings that appear to be “experiments,” with their corrections, redrawings, and erasures. And it’s the pastels that “document” the future statue. Let’s not forget that while Degas studied painting with masters, starting in his youth, he was a complete autodidact in sculpture. In fact, thinking about the two arts, he seems to contrast surface and depth, the skin and the flesh. He asserts loud and clear that the surface, even when it seems the subject of his canvas, does not interest him, that his art does not consist of “caressing a torso’s epidermis”: “As for the frisson of skin, poppycock!” said Degas. “What matters to me is to express nature in all its aspects, movement in its exact truth, to accentuate bone and muscle, and the compact firmness of flesh.”14 What the hand grazes over in painting, it grasps in sculpture. The reality of living flesh came through as a result of kneading the flesh. “The most beautiful drawing,” said Degas, “the most carefully studied, falls short of full and absolute truth, and thus opens the door to sham.” He came close to “the full truth” thanks to modeling, “because approximation has no place there.” It is drawing, therefore, that prepares the way toward truth. Next, the hands touch the body, then they sculpt the wax, and that in turn touches the soul.

  So it was that after completing various sketches of Marie in a tutu, Degas asked her to remove her clothes. She had to be naked. Only then would he be able to capture the body’s movement, its tensions, its density. Behind the screen provided for that purpose, Marie disrobed, setting her clothes down wherever she could. The studio was dusty and cluttered — Sabine was not allowed to clean there. Was Marie worldly-wise, as it is easy to imagine — a little rat tossed early into the scrum and used to hearing “words without a fig leaf”?15 Or was she sweet and submissive, used to obeying? Going by the sculpture, we might incline toward the first hypothesis, while the drawings of her face suggest the second. Was she embarrassed to stand naked before this stern man, alone with him in a jumble of easels, frames, armatures, tools, spirits, ballet slippers, powders, flasks and boxes, and cupboards filled with artworks? In fin-de-siècle Paris, relatively few models were willing to pose in the nude. The little rat of the Paris Opera was a profoundly paradoxical being, and that is why Degas chose to portray her. She lived three-quarters of the time in an artificial world where dance and lyric song expressed great tragedies against the backdrop of magnificent scenery, which was lifted on and off the stage by complicated and costly machinery. She displayed herself, both onstage and in the wings, for the pleasure of an elegant and libertine public, constantly aware of the huge disparities of the social order. During the performances where the rat had a walk-on role, she wore and admired costumes that inspired her to dream, and she used her body to interpret universal feelings. But she barely knew how to read, often had to remain silent or “speak only with her feet,” and afterward she went home to her hovel. Pulled between a make-believe world and a harsh reality, between opulence and insecurity, glitz and grime, the little rat, who was “as corrupt as an old diplomat and as naive as a savage,”16 embodied the tension that Degas sought to re-create under his fingers.

  The model’s age produced another sort of tension or uncertainty, between the child and the woman, innocence and sensuality, that fascinated the artist. Without her clothes, Marie, as we see her in the nude studies Degas made in wax and charcoal, seems very young. With her large feet and flat chest, she looks undeveloped. Naked, the young model displays a visible kind of innocence, but Degas had to find a way of expressing all her ambiguity, of representing this urchin who was knowing about “vice but not life.”17 At fourteen, did Marie not have a natural modesty that made her more fragile? Or was she already used to the male gaze and the promiscuous display of her body? Perhaps she had already posed for other painters, more licentious ones. Or perhaps she was simply relieved to be performing work that was better paid and less tiring than training for the ballet, even if it meant holding a pose for hours. Antoinette, her older sister, must have told Marie about the endless sessions — as if Degas had no inkling of the pain his models endured. This was certainly true, for when he developed an interest in photography a few years later, he put his friends through agonies, making them pose for hours at a time, a practice they all complained about. Antoinette may also have warned Marie that the painter was bad-tempered, that he was never happy, that he could humiliate. But for Marie, this bearded man in a gray smock and cap, however unpleasant, was still less harsh than her ballet masters.

  Degas approached Marie. He made a tight circle around her. “My nose close to my model, I examine her,” he said. The object for him was “to sum up [the model] in a small piece, but one whose structure is solid and doesn’t lie.”18 The imperative was always to arrive at truth. Solidity and firmness were correlates. Despite what one might imagine about ballet, Degas was more interested in earth than in air. Marie, like the eventual sculpture, was firmly planted on both feet, which were placed in rulebook position; her balance came from being anchored to the ground. Her small and lanky but well-muscled body resembled the bodies of our dancers today, giving her a “modern look, very Parisian and honed.”19 In order to measure and compare the different parts of the body correctly, Degas used a special instrument, a proportional divider, which frightened the models when he brought the point too close to their faces, sometimes gashing them. The jottings in his notebooks have the look of surrealist poems: “the hands are 9 noses,…the arm from shoulder to wrist is 2 heads,…”20 His measurements then had to be reduced to the scale he had chosen, which was less than life-sized. Yet respecting proportions was not his top priority. W
ithout going as far as Ingres, his master, who blithely disregarded human proportions, once adding three vertebrae to an odalisque’s back, Degas took occasional liberties with anatomical reality. “The arms are too long, and this from the man who, yardstick in hand, measures proportions so meticulously,” joked Gauguin.21 In this case, it’s the Little Dancer‘s right leg that seems abnormally long, intentionally accentuating the sense of relaxed stretching. Although Degas did not make his sculpture life-sized, he could have done so, as Marie was less than five feet tall, but a recent scandal had rocked the art world. In 1877, Rodin was criticized for using molds taken directly from his models to make The Age of Bronze and other statues. Mold making was widely used in the nineteenth century by various scientific disciplines to preserve an object’s impression, but it was felt to detract from the artistic value of sculpture. The artist was meant to “represent” reality, not replicate it or trace it directly from nature. As Renoir put it crudely, a work shouldn’t “stink of the model.”22 That’s what made the difference between art and mere skill or technical expertise. Taking a direct mold from nature should be kept for anatomical models, which the sculptor might use for inspiration but nothing more. To ward off this line of criticism and avoid polemics, Degas altered the scale of his works. All his sculptures are less than life-sized.