Edgar Degas: The Little Dancer aged fourteen 1878-1881
It seems fate always takes away from artists what is the most important to them: the ability to express themselves. Renoir had to attach the brush to his fingers in order to work. Monet struggled with cataract and could not see certain colors, Jawlenski and Repin had painful arthritis in their hands. Edgar Degas’ eyes began to weaken in his thirties and got even worse over time. He turned to sculpting and creating the little dancer girl.
The story of Marie was one of the tales my daughters grew up with. I told them hundreds of times at nights before sleep along with Van Gogh’s story, or Michelangelo’s and Mona Lisa’s. I told their stories in fairytale style and they listened to me with eyes wide open, mesmerized with the touching lives. Lily and Pippa asked me about everything. “Who was the little dancer really? Was Degas sad because of his eye condition? What happened with them?” Questions were pelting at me and I answered them as I could.
Edgar Degas was spending most of his time in the Parisian Opera’s backstage and rehearsal room to observe dancers. Half of his art works’ subjects were dancers. He liked their moves, dresses, and the atmosphere. But because of his weakening eyes he wanted something that did not necessarily require sharp vision: making sculptures.
Marie was an eleven years old ballet dancer when she first met Degas. She struggled to pay her dancing lessons because her father, a tailor, was sick and was unable to maintain his family anymore. Marie arranged with Degas to be his model for the tuition money in return.
Marie told him how eager she was to be the world’s most famous ballerina. Degas captured her determination and willpower in the sculpture. She stands in a ballet position, her head is raised, full of self-confidence, which can only possess who has nothing else but dreams of the future in this world.
Degas, who regarded himself as a realist artist, made a pigmented beeswax sculpture of Marie. He used a real hair wig with a ribbon, silk tutu, bodice and linen slippers to make it more realistic. He used a bunch of material for the inner armature like rope, clay, wire, and wood. My favorites are the paintbrushes he used for the arm bones. How poetic it is! He shuffled a painter tool into the statuette! He put clay over these materials then finally put the wax for the skin.
He made more versions of it in the next years, but he only exhibited this particular statuette in 1881 at the Impressionist Exhibition. He caused sensation with its harsh realistic appearance.
At that time people were not accustomed to such representation of a figure. The subject is not an ideal woman, nor a beauty from high society. She is an ordinary girl from the working class, from the underworld. Critics mocked the sculpture saying she was a monkey, a vicious, ugly person. They were not overjoyed at her unladylike looks, not to mention the fact that it was not made of some noble material like marble but rattletraps. The disappointed Degas removed the statue and kept it in a closet for the rest of his life.
Soon after he was done with the statuette, Marie was dismissed from the Opera and never appeared again. Nobody knew her whereabouts or her fate. She never knew that she became famous. Maybe not in the form she wanted to be but she definitely is the most famous ballerina in the world. Maybe she became a prostitute like her sister or a laundress like her mother, we cannot know. What we know is that her brave little statuette now stands in the National Gallery Of Art in Washington D.C., and the other versions are around the world’s best museums.
