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

  What would Degas have thought of these black-and-white photographs taken less than forty years after his death? What would he have said, this man who seemed to run from feminine beauty, about Marilyn passionately gazing at his most scandalous work or wearing a gauzy white tutu in a way that reminds us of his most famous canvases? Would he have seen in her, as we have seen in his model, both angel and beast, monster and child? The question hangs in the air, just as his relation with Marie van Goethem remains uncertain and, through her, his relationship to the other sex generally, to sex, and to the body. Daniel Halévy has reported that one of Degas’s last gestures on his deathbed in 1917 was to grab, “with a strength no one suspected him to have,” the naked arm of his young niece, who was plumping up his pillow, and to examine it fiercely in a shaft of daylight, as though to wrest its secret from it.52

  Years earlier, drawing close to a girl on the cusp of womanhood, had Degas been trying to pierce the mystery of his own anxiety? Except for a few horses, he spent his life observing, painting, and sculpting women, presenting them in the most banal typology of seduction — as dancers, prostitutes, and naked models — all the while stripping these stereotypes of their attendant attributes — beauty, grace, elegance, eroticism — to leave nothing but the weight of the real — tiredness, neglect, submission, and sometimes pleasure. Marie van Goethem carries the weight of this paradox on her slender shoulders. Mysteriously present yet preserving her distance, hovering between angel and beast, she fails to answer the question that Edgar Degas must have asked himself all his life: what is woman? “A woman, which is to say a question, a pure enigma.”53 All that survives of his quest is the impression of his fingers in the wax.

  Or else — different hypothesis — or else this quest for the feminine, this unending investigation into the enigma of woman, into her essence behind conventional appearances, led him to considerations close to his home ground and hers, despite their differences in age, sex, and circumstance, a place that the two of them had in common — she, Marie van Goethem, and he, Edgar Degas. First, the ballerina and the artist both knew that hard work was needed to achieve a formal ideal. The little Opera rat endlessly rehearsed the same movements, while the sculptor made, unmade, and remade his ever imperfect maquettes. Another thing brought them together: their refusal to accept the judgment of others, the pride they took in showing insolence. Both pitted their solitude and desire for freedom against the world, one through his bitingly witty and ironic utterances, the other by her air of defiance and effrontery. Here again, Marilyn Monroe’s words provide an echo: “Alone!!!! I am alone. I am always alone no matter what. We should be afraid of nothing but fear. What do I believe in / What is truth / I believe in myself / even my most delicate / intangible feelings.”54 In the studio, Marie van Goethem and Edgar Degas shared a physical space that was also a symbolic locus, a bubble that subsumed even the work they performed together. This place that connects them is common to both art and life, to the art of life. In it, the couple creates a unique harmony, specific to them. Marie transmits its secret, Degas translates its mystery, their eyes shut, each in his or her own way. Their gaze — the blind man’s and the young girl’s — is internal, it creates its own vision, its universe, “a kind of infinity.”55 It allows one, while maintaining a degree of comportment (posture, form, syntax), to be infused with the animal grace of being alive, the joy of one’s pure presence in the world. Depth and intensity subsist behind the smoothest surface. Tension animates the flesh without leading to action. The pose could be standing or lying down, hands clasped behind one’s back or arms outstretched, nose in the air, eyelids lowered, whatever. It assumes a kind of happy passivity, “an inactivity of the mind, slowly allowing itself to be impregnated,”56 a welcoming disposition, an abandon that promotes one’s joy of living, creating, existing. It might be possible, desirable even, to imagine a little sunlight, as a letter from Degas to the Danish painter Lorenz Frölich invites us to do. In this letter, dated November 27, 1872, Degas explains artistic creation using an image from nature: “I’ll tell you that in order to produce good fruit, you need to espalier yourself. You stay that way all your days, your arms stretched out, your mouth open to absorb what’s passing by, what’s around you, in order to draw life from it.”57

  True, Marie didn’t assume the shape of a tree in sunlight. But there’s something of the espalier in her, as there is in him. Solidly anchored in earth, her head elsewhere, she is alive. Beyond the puzzle of childhood, of the feminine, the little dancer above all expresses what a dreamed, an imagined life might be, subtracted from the vagaries of time, the weight of loneliness, the penalty of being weak and powerless — a life at once rooted in the earth and turned toward the sky. It is Degas himself, therefore, identifying at midlife with the little dancer, who appears in this masterwork. You could describe it thus: the eyes are shut like a blind man’s who sees with his whole being; the head is deaf to all criticism; the attitude has the insolence of someone who knows he is alone, someone concerned to capture the beauty of movement, while reveling in the sensation of being, a moment brimful of what is passing by. The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is him. Nothing seeps out, all is shut down and held tight, but it was certainly within a faded pink slipper that he locked his heart away — locked it away, perhaps, but while still beating time to the world. Like Marie, he doesn’t care what others say, and he despises critics, even the well-meaning ones, because to him creation is pure mystery. He doesn’t care about academicism, about pretending, about alarmed refusals. All that counts is art and one’s way of existing, of being there. Here they are then, the two of them together in this “upwelling of soul,” he and she like opened buds, the artist and the model, joined to a fugitive reality by the same desire, the wish to lead an espaliered life.

  3

  The means are as much a part of the truth as the result.

  The search for truth must itself be true;

  true research is the truth unpacked,

  whose scattered elements are reunited in the result.

  — Karl Marx

  IT IS THE END OF NOVEMBER 2016. With the intention of coming to a close, I have reread all that I have written so far and reviewed my documentation as well, in order to establish an accurate bibliography. In the past two years, I have read many books — biographies of Degas, his notebooks, his letters, but also doctoral theses and articles on the history of art and dance. And I’ve read several novels, in French and in English, that have set out to tell, or rather to imagine, the life of the little dancer, aged fourteen. One of them, The Painted Girls, was a best seller in the United States, where the original sculpture now resides. Its author, the Canadian novelist Cathy Marie Buchanan, explained in an interview that her story was based on numerous studies but was fully three-quarters fiction, due to the scarcity of documents. Another novelist, Carolyn Meyer, author of Marie, Dancing, invents a married life for the little rat, at a point long after all trace of her has been lost. The movies about her fall into the same vein. On the poster for a successful television film, Degas and the Dancer, by the Canadian director David Devine, is the tagline: “Encouraged by the great artist Edgar Degas, a young ballerina learns to have confidence in herself.” I was troubled reading these fictional accounts, whose charm escaped me, and I disliked the films for their simplistic plots. My irritation was triggered by the utter nonsense and the minor gaffes alike, but primarily by seeing Marie’s life presented otherwise than as my own research had led me to imagine it. The only image I found extraordinarily moving was the movie footage of Edgar Degas, filmed unawares by Sacha Guitry, as he walked along a busy Paris street, leaning on a cane. The writer and filmmaker Guitry comments solemnly in voice-over: “At the age of eighty, he is poor, ill-tempered, almost blind. But he is a genius.” This is the only extant film footage of the artist. I would give a great deal to spend a similar few seconds in Marie van Goethem’s company. To see her, even at an older age, even in profile, or from behind, or hidden under a hat! Adjus
ting the shoulder strap of her bodice, say, or massaging her calves! To have even a photograph. I need the reality, it is the basis of my desire. While I recognize that I too have more than once let my imagination take flight, at least I have tried not to stray from the direction of the truth, particularly with respect to a work “forcibly residing in reality.”1 I like to have, as François Truffaut said, “verification through life.” On this point at least, it was clear to me from the beginning that my project would take the form of nonfiction, also that I planned not to separate the model from the artist, that I would capture if possible some element of their relationship, out of which one of the great works of modern times arose. My affinities with the work are obviously subjective, and many other fans, both before and after me, have expressed or will express their fascination with this sculpture, just as many artists have created new work to convey its emotional or esthetic effect on them.

  Misty Copeland, the first African American ballerina to have been named a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater — in June 2015, after a journey full of twists and turns — decided to put on the stage the main poses of the ballerinas in Degas’s paintings. It is striking to see her re-create perfectly in three dimensions the stance of the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, whose body type she shares. Like Marie van Goethem, Misty Copeland comes from a large, impoverished family. Raised by her mother, she lived on social welfare before entering dance school and finding her way, despite the fierce opposition of the gatekeepers, who considered her skin color a barrier to a major career in ballet. When she assumes the pose of Degas’s young model, she does more than simply call to mind the Little Dancer. She also evokes the tragedy of black slaves, whose image was displayed at colonial exhibitions in the form of wax mannequins. Her reenactment of Degas’s sculpture takes on universal import as a denunciation, through her own story and that of the little dancer, of all the obstacles that must be surmounted to avoid exclusion. And success is not granted to all.

  Degas may have signed on — sometimes ambiguously — to the more progressive causes of his time, but other artists have since extended, deepened, or subverted his visionary work. This is the case, for instance, with Damien Hirst. This British visual artist, who has often exhibited real objects and animals in glass cases, has also created two monumental sculptures that reproduce the posture of Degas’s Little Dancer in a very recognizable way. One of them, The Virgin Mother, shows a naked young girl, her feet in fourth position, her face tilted upward, one hand behind her back and the other on her pregnant stomach. The statue is divided in two longitudinally. On one side, the smooth bronze offers a troubling resemblance to Degas’s work; on the other, bright reds and oranges simulate the cutaway view of a medical illustration: we see an anatomical rendering of the naked skull, the eye in its orbit, the flayed muscles of the arm, torso, and thigh, the mammary glands, as well as the fetus head-down in its mother’s uterus. As small as Degas’s sculpture is, Damien Hirst’s is enormous. This giantess who is missing half her skin, is she intended to revive in the public mind the accusations of monstrosity raised against the original? Or recall the wax anatomical models that the Little Dancer was compared to at the 1881 exhibition? By calling his sculpture The Virgin Mother, Damien Hirst also makes glancing references to the Virgin Mary and to Mlle van Goethem’s Christian name. All these allusions reopen the semifantastical questions raised by Degas’s work and its model, both of them a mix of the trivial and the sacred, the virginal and the monstrous. And every viewer — or is it just me? — has to struggle deep down with her obsessions, in which the lost innocence of childhood and the sacred horror of life inside a human body play their part. Another of Damien Hirst’s sculptures, Verity, reprises the same pregnant figure, half in cutaway, but holding a sword in one hand, and in the other, behind her back, carrying a scale. It is “an allegory of truth and justice.” Is it not ironic, I ask myself, to represent these eternal figures from the art of the classical world in the form of cadavers undergoing dissection? Neither truth nor justice for the little dancer. A body slated to disappear. Death, and only death.

  Looking, not without revulsion, at Damien Hirst’s work, I find myself thinking that this is where things go wrong. Because I can feel that things go wrong here. This is neither truth nor justice. It’s not right to make an allegory of her. Not right to disembody her, not right to flay her, I tell myself. Something is missing — something that passes through reality but transcends it, this is how I feel the question, sharply and confusedly. A sentence of Roland Barthes’s pops into my head: “What writing demands…is the sacrifice of a little of the writer’s Imaginary, and to assure thereby, through his language, the assumption of a little reality.”2 This is what’s missing: a little reality. A residue that no history can erode, a thing that does not cease to not be written. I reread Paul Valéry’s description of Degas’s studio: “The room was pell-mell —with a basin, a dull zinc tub, stale bathrobes, a danseuse modeled in wax with a real gauze tutu, in a glass cage, and easels loaded with charcoal sketches of snub-nosed, twisted models, with combs in their fists, held around a thick length of hair gripped tight in the other hand.”3 The statue presided over the room, just as it occupies the center of Valéry’s sentence, imperial and humble at the same time. The Little Dancer seems to draw toward itself and swallow up all reality, until it feels that there is and can be no reality, in this text that claims to offer an account of it. No narrative encompasses reality. More even than in the bronze casts, reality inheres in the wax sculpture whose arms are falling off in a corner of the studio. All this is obvious enough. And for my part, I have only made some sentences with the help of secondhand information, scraps borrowed from others, not saying much of anything. I have stirred up images and hot air. I mull over my incompetence. Although he is still an enigma, much is known about Degas, thanks largely to Henri Loyrette, his eminent biographer. But about Marie? “You don’t even know the date of her death,” I tell myself over and over, depressed and insomniac. I judge myself harshly, I interrogate myself through the night: how do you know what you know, and why don’t you know what you don’t know? I feel remorse for having dealt with Marie as an object of study, filled in with anecdotes the way her sculpture is filled in with bric-a-brac, but I haven’t brought to it the genius she deserves. When it comes to her, her reality, I have said nothing, shown nothing. I know nothing.

  I read and reread Huysmans’s description, written in 1881. The sculpture is what he describes, of course, but a contemporary of Marie’s is speaking, someone who literally lived at the same time as she, a witness:

  Her head painted, angled slightly back, her chin raised, her mouth half-open in her sickly, gray-brown face, which is pinched and old before its time, her hands joined together behind her back, her chest flat under a close-fitting white bodice whose cloth has been kneaded with wax, her legs in position for a fight, admirable legs that are well-accustomed to exercise, nervous and twisted, crowned as by the pavilion of her muslin skirts, her neck stiff, encircled by a leek-green ribbon, her hair falling down to her shoulders and gathered at the nape, decorated with a ribbon similar to the one around her neck, an actual pony tail, such is the dancer who becomes animated under one’s gaze and seems to want to leave her pedestal.4

  What impresses me in this portrait, and what I discover after the umpteenth reading, is the tension here between life and death. Huysmans shows the little statue as ready to “leave [its] pedestal,” to become animated with the independent life of its model, and at the same time what he is describing is a cadaver, with its mouth half open, its face waxen, its neck stiff. Also, with its eyes half closed, as in a face where the muscles no longer obey the will, where the eyelids reopen although they’ve been closed. I recognize this out from under look that the dead sometimes have — I know my dead. When we admire the bronze casts of the sculpture in museums, we forget that the original was made of wax, and so we no longer see its grayish, deathly tint. Death is a material, death is a color that we don’t
want to remember. This may have been the real reason the Little Dancer was so poorly received in 1881, the quiet cause of the near-unanimous aversion it generated. It isn’t vice that makes people shriek with horror, or insolence, or esthetic revolution. But death does — the scandal of it. By using the same material that death masks are made of, the artist is not just embracing a tradition: he gives us to think. About life, about death. About beginnings (age fourteen) and resolutions (dying). At the end of a century when, to use the words of historian Anne Carol, embalming was “a Romantic passion,” Degas used his art in service to the crazy idea that the dead could be kept alive in uncorrupted bodies. His small statue, which borrows from techniques used in medicine and the manufacture of everyday objects, is also and perhaps above all a meditation on the power of artistic creation and of sculpture in particular. One of the first visitors to the exhibition compared the Little Dancer to an Egyptian mummy, to general puzzlement. All the same…there’s a modicum of embalmment to this statue. Like photography, an art that also interested Degas in those years, and like film, which was in its infancy, Degas’s sculpture seems to say “this once existed,” a phrase whose inevitable pendant, as Barthes has observed, is “this no longer exists.” About photography, Barthes says, “It certifies, if we can put it this way, that the corpse is alive…The photograph is the living image of something dead.”5 But we could say the opposite about this wax statue: it is the dead representation of a living person. Marie was there, right in front of Degas, talking, laughing maybe, protesting, heaving sighs, and he sculpted her muscles and skin with all possible accuracy. But her hair is sticky with wax, and her face has a gray-brown hue; her bodice and slippers are smeared with wax, as with a layer of glue or mud. This gives the work its genius, its power to exercise a painful fascination: she rises in a state of living death to confront the world, so all can see her.