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

by Camille Laurens

  The face of the Little Dancer undeniably has some of the features identified by the phrenologists and medical anatomists of the day as typically criminal: a sloping forehead, a protruding jaw, prominent cheekbones, thick hair. It has been reported that Edgar Degas sought out information on these physiognomic theories, which are illustrated in several of his oil portraits and monotypes of bordellos. He was not alone. Research into physiognomy was highly admired by the writers and artists of the nineteenth century. Honoré de Balzac, for instance, owned the complete works of Lavater, illustrated with six hundred engravings, from which he chose the features for his characters according to the temperament he planned to assign them: ugly face, evil soul. Émile Zola confessed to having read all of Lombroso, who helped him understand the influence of bloodlines and the hereditary nature of degeneracy. Victor Hugo visited prisoners to see whether their criminal tendencies were etched in their faces. The artist David d’Angers, a follower of F. J. Gall, carved portrait medallions illustrating his theory of bumps. When Degas, to the horror of his audience, rendered this vision of the criminal face in full, it was immediately decried as “an ethnographic aberration” and “a monster.” He acted entirely within the tenor of his times and in full awareness of the disapproval he was courting. But what was his intention in sculpting the face of his Little Dancer as he did?

  It is always hard when an artist we admire reveals serious moral or intellectual failings, even if part of the blame lies with the “times” — “it was normal for those times” — or with a defect of character. Degas’s anti-Semitism has been amply attested. He was not rabid in his beliefs, but his anti-Dreyfusard stance was vehement enough to cause a rift with his old friends the Halévys in 1897, following a heated discussion about the Dreyfus affair. Even if we believe that his animus toward Captain Dreyfus, a Jew, owed more to his great devotion to the army than to a visceral anti-Semitism, it hardly makes him likable. Similarly, we need to review Degas’s ambiguous attitude toward the opposite sex, which shows little influence of feminism. A parallel question is whether Degas believed in the fashionable physiognomic theories of his time, to the point of wanting to illustrate them by modeling his Little Dancer‘s features to resemble those of a delinquent. Did he choose her, this little working-class rat, to make her the antithesis of the young lady of good family, living proof of the eugenicist arguments of the time? Or, on the contrary, was the sculpture intended to create a needed scandal, exposing the racist roots of this pseudo-science and the abjection of society?

  Several indications argue in favor of the first hypothesis. At the 1881 exhibition where he showed the Little Dancer, Degas also presented a study called Four Criminal Physiognomies. Huysmans described the subjects thus: “Animal snouts, with low foreheads, prominent jaws, recessive chins, lashless and evasive eyes.”33 The sketches show the heads of four young men indicted for murder, drawn by Degas from life while attending their trial in August 1880, at a time when he was still working on his Little Dancer. All of Paris shared a lively interest in the “Abadie affair,” so called for the lead defendant in the case, arrested at the age of nineteen with one of his friends, Pierre Gille, sixteen, for the murder of a woman cabaret manager. A second trial followed a few months later, centered on Michel Knobloch, also nineteen and indicted five times already, who belonged to the Abadie band and had confessed to murdering a grocer’s clerk. All three were sentenced to death. The horrible nature of the crimes and the youth of the suspects, all of them from the lower depths of society, shocked the French public and revived the topical question of juvenile delinquency. One aspect also rekindled a literary quarrel. Before their arrest, Abadie and Gille had been recruited for walk-on parts in a theatrical adaptation of Zola’s L’Assommoir. The stage manager at the Ambigu Theater had gone scouting in some of the dicier quarters of Paris and hired these youths as perfect physical specimens of the degenerate milieu Zola described. In the wake of it, naturalist writers were reproached for showcasing the ugliness of the world. They were further reviled for “depoeticizing man”34 and taking pleasure in “tawdriness,” apparently to terrify the bourgeois reader by “habituating him to the horrible”35 and depriving him of his right to the beautiful.

  But this was just what interested Degas, who confided to his Notebooks his ambition to make “a study of the modern sensibility.” He was able to attend the trial regularly, thanks to one of his friends who was serving as an alternate juror. While following the trial, he drew the defendants in his sketchbook, later making several pastels.

  Contemporary art historians have sought to compare Degas’s portraits to the originals. During a symposium on Degas at the Musée d’Orsay in 1988, one of the great specialists on the nineteenth century, Douglas Druick, brought together Degas’s drawings and the anthropometric photographs of the accused that were made by the Department of National Security at the time of the gang’s arrest in 1880 and preserved at police headquarters. The comparison shows very clearly that Degas accentuated certain facial features to bring them in line with the trending ideas of criminal ethnography. He gave the young men lower foreheads, more recessive chins, and a more animalistic aspect than they had in reality. It therefore seems that Degas wanted his drawings to reflect theories of social delinquency that he subscribed to. Remembering that he chose to exhibit his Criminal Physiognomies together with his Little Dancer, linking them by their obvious resemblance — their faces seem to attest to a hateful blood relationship — we can reasonably surmise that Degas did for his dancer what he’d done for the youths in court and altered his young model’s natural features to resemble those of a criminal. Of course, she never murdered anyone, but according to Dr. Lombroso her offense was no less serious: “Prostitution is the form that crime takes in women.”36 For their power to deprave, “girls” of a certain kind were subject to the same contempt and the same efforts at suppression as murderers. And this, in fact, is how Marie was perceived by all the reviewers — as a prostitute, either actual or prospective, a painted woman. The critic Paul Mantz voiced this general feeling, attributing to Marie “a face marked with the hateful promise of every vice.”37 And viewers compared her to a “monkey” or an “Aztec,” relegating her, as Douglas Druick noted, “to the earliest stages of human evolution.”38 She was thought to look “dull” and “without any moral expression.” She was likened to an animal, fit only to be “trained” for the stage. She was seen as a specimen suitable for the Musée Dupuytren, where wax replicas of human bodies with various illnesses were exhibited (was she not herself made of wax?) and various pathologies were displayed in glass jars (was she not herself in a “cage” made of glass?). Or she belonged in the newly opened Ethnographic Museum on the place Trocadéro.

  At this juncture, we may be startled to realize that Marie van Goethem probably did not look like Degas’s sculpture, that what we see is not her true face, for he also gave those features to others, to men older than she, to women in a shadowy brothel, and to a well-known cabaret singer. He probably flattened the top of her skull and altered her facial angle to make her jutting chin a kind of “plebeian muzzle,” as he wrote in one of his poems. When we look at the preparatory drawings for this sculpture, we see how he changed her face to give it the hallmarks of a savage, quasi-Neanderthal primitivism, a precocious degeneracy. He literally altered her nature. The contrast with the delicate portraits Degas made of his own sister Marguerite, who had fine features, a genteel oval face, and neatly combed hair, is extreme. It is hard not to loathe this forty-something conformist who, in modeling his wax, manipulated a very young girl for reasons that have nothing to do with art or esthetics. Art need not be an exact imitation of life, but must we accept that a young creature be sacrificed to the suspect ideology of the artist?

  Yet Degas never set the artist above the rest of mankind, nor did he consider himself a privileged being. Such superciliousness would hardly correspond to what we know of him. More pertinently, it’s hard to believe that Edgar Degas limited his ambition to
being an ethnographer of the working-class environment. True, the critic Charles Ephrussi praised the sculpture as “scientifically exact,” but was the artist’s intention to pursue science? Was his aim to provide a clinical description documenting a kind of “criminal aspect” at an early stage? This is hard to believe, especially from Degas, who was so passionate about his art.

  On the other hand, the artist may have had a moral goal in mind. Those who knew him well often described him as a moralist. “Art,” said Degas, “is not what you see, but what you make others see.” By sculpting this little dancer into a criminal, was he not holding up a mirror to the viewers who protested at the sight of her? Those who decoded the signals given by this sculpture — evil, vice, ruination — had the chance to interpret them in light of their own lives and the society around them. Might not a different fate befall this sickly child were there no men to lead her astray and no women to despise her? While Degas may have accentuated her animalistic side, he did no less when painting the clientele of brothels — big-bellied men with sloping foreheads and porcine snouts — again with the intention of denouncing social hypocrisy. Was it not a subscriber to the Paris Opera, in a novel by Richard O’Monroy, who explained cynically: “I have a passion for the beginners, the little rats still living in poverty. I enjoy being the Maecenas who discovers budding talent, who sees beyond the bony clavicles and work-reddened hands to forecast a future flowering”?39 It was these respectable men who, in their way, fashioned the Marie van Goethems of the world and created little “criminals” — victims, actually. And the discomfort that many visitors to the 1881 exhibition felt came from the fact of being subscribers to the Paris Opera themselves, who suddenly found the object of their private desires exposed to public view and made uglier by their own perversion. Furthermore, Degas engaged Marie van Goethem to pose for other sculptures and paintings whose meaning was altogether different. Her face, for instance, is perfectly recognizable in a statuette called The Schoolgirl, made in 1880, around the same time as the Little Dancer. A well-dressed young lady, not bareheaded this time but wearing a hat, and not in a tutu but a long skirt, carries a stack of books. Nothing shocking, nothing “venal.” Here is what Marie might have become if economic necessity and social inequality had not kept her from it, although stamped with the same supposedly criminal features: a charming schoolgirl. Over the course of his career, Degas had a number of models from eighteen to twenty years old. In choosing Marie van Goethem and in spelling out her age, Degas was underlining what should have been obvious to all: that she was a child. A little girl who had barely reached puberty, she was already a lost soul in everyone’s eyes. If he chose to reveal her ugliness, knowing that the public of his day equated physical and moral ugliness, it was because he aimed to be unsettling. He wanted to show reality, not flatter the tastes of the bourgeois. And he succeeded beyond his expectations: in representing a young girl of this type, he disturbed the French in part because, recently defeated in the Franco-Prussian War, they were ready to attribute the Prussians’ victory to their superior moral and intellectual education — so one might read in the daily papers, and so one might hear at café counters. The nineteenth-century bourgeois were terrified—but are not the bourgeois in every age? — at the prospect of a new generation rising after them that was devoid of principles and therefore capable of destroying them. Degas only awakened this anxiety.

  In his writings on Degas, Jacques-Émile Blanche compares him to his contemporaries. He contrasts him, for instance, with Gustave Moreau, famous for his Salomes, who sought refuge in myths, symbols, and abstraction because his “small stock of humanity” kept him apart “from life and ugliness,” whereas Degas took on the most seemingly vulgar subjects and extracted a beauty from them “not previously seen by painters.” Moreau and Degas, Blanche adds, were both “Savonarolas of esthetics,” zealous workers in service to perfection of form. But esthetics did not lead to the same endpoint for both. Gustave Moreau worked to captivate and seduce. By contrast, Blanche wrote, “Degas did not seduce, he frightened.”40 And because Degas was well-born, his provocations carried all the more weight. To unsettle so as to stimulate thought, to make art that was critical and served truth, though truth might be cruel, such were the aims of Edgar Degas, in his extreme modernity. He said as much in his Notebooks, writing about Rembrandt’s Venus and Cupid: “He has introduced that element of surprise which provokes us to think and awakens our minds to the tragedy inherent in all works where the truth about life is bluntly expressed.”41 Surely the same applies to the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Degas intended this sculpture to give a sense of surprise, a salutary shock, opening the viewer’s mind by presenting not an elegant work that would flatter his esthetic sense but a societal tragedy, to which he was contributing. The earliest critics of the work did, in fact, react with terror. Here is Louis Énault: “She is absolutely terrifying. Never has the tragedy of adolescence been represented with more sadness.” For Degas, “the truth about life” was not to be found, as Michel Leiris would say about a certain kind of estheticizing literature, in the “vain graces of the ballerina,” but in the tragic and already determined — tragic because already determined — destiny of this very young girl. Truth was the foundation block of modernity. Cézanne must have had this in mind when, in 1905, he made his famous promise to Émile Bernard: “I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.”42

  As to the “element of surprise” that he admired in Rembrandt, Degas achieves it in this sculpture not from the commonness of the subject or the reference to social misfortune alone. The manufacture of the work was in itself a great source of surprise and astonishment. In the first place, the Parisian public of the nineteenth century was not used to seeing wax sculptures — where were the marbles of Rodin, the bronzes of Carpeaux? True, specialists would have known the figurines of Antoine Benoist, notably his portrait of Louis XIV in Versailles, but these “wax puppets,” as La Bruyère called them, had been out of fashion since the end of the seventeenth century. A few polychromed statues had attracted the interest of collectors, but they were little known to the general public. And aside from two or three Madonnas, also dressed and wearing makeup, in a few scattered churches, the visitor would never have seen a statue wearing real clothes and a horsehair wig — or could it possibly be a wig made of real human hair? More accurately, the visitor would have known such objects, but not in the context of an exhibition hall dedicated to art, not shown as a work of sculpture. He would have seen wax figures of humans at the milliner’s, in the dress shop, and in the windows of the early department stores. He would have seen them at the Musée Dupuytren, in the Cordeliers Convent, which displayed reproductions of human bodies affected by a variety of pathologies, malformed fetuses, likenesses of murderers, and anatomical wax models displaying terrifying venereal diseases. He would have seen them at fun fairs, as entertainment, and at universal expositions, in the context of colonial ethnography — this is how he would have learned what the indigenous peoples of far-off countries looked like. He would have seen them at Madame Tussaud’s in London, the first museum to showcase life-sized wax sculptures that perfectly replicated the features, aspect, and clothing of famous figures. He would have seen them from 1865 to 1867 at the Musée Hartkoff, on the passage de l’Opéra, and at the Musée Français on the boulevard des Capucines, where the model-maker Jules Talrich exhibited statues of literary and mythological characters. And, the following year, he would see them at the Musée Grévin, which was patterned after Madame Tussaud’s. As in London, the museum revived the ancient tradition of wax death masks, but using contemporary models, life-sized, in their full glory and their best finery. The Musée Grévin even featured one of the famous dancers at the Paris Opera, the Spanish star Rosita Mauri, wearing one of her ballet costumes. Her likeness was among those chosen for the museum’s inaugural show in June 1882.

  But in the Salon des Indépendants, the viewer felt almost offended. He hadn’t gone to the fair or to the to
y store, hadn’t gone to the milliner’s. He wasn’t attending a universal exposition, in search of exoticism; nor had he come to be frightened by anatomical monstrosities. No, he was there to discover works of contemporary art. And what did he see in a glass case, presented on a satin cloth as though it were an ethnographic curiosity or artifact? A doll, a common wax doll! Somewhat larger than an ordinary doll, maybe — the sculpture measured just over three feet in height, the size of an average three-year-old —not as pale in color as a doll, nor as closely imitating human skin, but entirely unworthy of a sculptor. Would Rodin ever have thought to gussy up his statues in this way? Insanity. In his review, Huysmans harked back to the polychrome sculptures of Spain, assigning a sacred dimension to the Little Dancer by comparing it to the Christ in the Burgos Cathedral, “whose hair is actual hair, whose thorns are actual thorns, whose drapery is actual fabric,”43 but the link was tenuous. And Degas’s dancer was in no way as attractive as the Tanagra figurines that had been on view at the Louvre for the past dozen years. Certain art historians noted that the lost-wax technique Degas used had been invented by the bronze casters of ancient Egypt, who also colored their sculptures, thus linking the Little Dancer to the Seated Scribe, one of the Louvre’s masterpieces. But for the public as a whole, the sculpture stood outside the artistic tradition as an object of popular culture, like the dolls that had been mass-produced since the middle of the century. And when you thought about it, there were many dolls more beautiful than this one, hand-painted, with silky hair and eyes of colored glass. Some were even automated. Among the displays of new technology at the Universal Exposition of 1878 were a variety of dolls: a Gypsy that danced, a little girl who walked, and a crying baby. The French of that period had a passion for dolls, and they figure in many paintings by Renoir, Gauguin, Pissarro, and Cézanne. Little rich girls had a good laugh or a good cry (as I did a hundred years later) reading the Countess of Ségur’s The Misfortunes of Sophie, in which the little heroine treats her wax doll to a hot bath and watches in horror as the doll melts away! The doll that Jean Valjean gives to Cosette in Les Misérables has left a deep mark on the book’s more self-possessed readers and brought everyone else to tears: “Against a backdrop of white napkins, the shopkeeper had placed an enormous doll, almost two feet tall, wearing a pink crêpe dress and a golden crown of wheatears, with real hair and enamel eyes. All that day, this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of passersby under the age of ten, and yet there was not in Montfermeil a mother sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to offer it to her child.”44 Cosette’s love of dolls was shared by the Parisian public. The manufacturer Montanari made a fortune turning out wax dolls and figurines; the Schmitt and Jumeau companies competed to create the most ingenious mechanisms, the most realistic costumes — Indian, Mexican — thereby flattering the public’s taste for ethnographic curiosities and exoticism. According to Degas’s first biographer, Paul Lafond, the artist kept a collection of Neapolitan dolls in traditional costume in his dining room. He attended the puppet theater in the Tuileries Gardens regularly. He did not hide that he had thoroughly studied the fabrication of dolls, as well as the mechanisms of automatons and the research on locomotion by Étienne-Jules Marey. He also revealed that he had consulted Madame Cusset, a famous wigmaker, to make his dancer a beribboned ponytail. But once again, the public questioned what this had to do with the fine arts. The art critic George Moore, who was a great admirer of Degas’s wax sculptures, would later offer this comment: “Strange dolls — dolls if you will, but dolls modeled by a man of genius.”45 Meanwhile, the controversy raged.