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

by Camille Laurens

  Yet sculpture would seem to be an art that is inseparable from technique. In practice, after drawing a great number of preparatory sketches, what did Degas do in the midst of his studio while Marie struggled to maintain her pose? He sat on a kind of saddle, from which he often arose to approach his model. He touched her, traced the lines of her body, probed its density, poked at her joints, studied the insertion of the muscles. If we are to believe Gauguin, who visited Degas at work, the sculptor looked for the true in “the human carcass, the skeletal frame, its articulated movement.”23

  From this coming and going, a wire skeleton would gradually take shape, roughly corresponding to the intended figure. Its different parts — the torso, legs, etc. — would be attached with cable or string to metal plates. In a moving letter to Henri Rouart, Degas wrote: “Do you remember one day, you were saying about someone that he no longer assembled, a term used in medicine for defective minds. I’ve always remembered it. My eyesight no longer assembles, or does so with such difficulty that I’m often tempted to give up and sleep, never to wake.”24 Perhaps this composite mannequin allowed the artist to avert his anguish.

  A statuette of the naked Marie, three-quarters the size of the final work, shows that Degas made maquettes to start with, trying things, making corrections, improving this position, this proportion, and also experimenting with more or less elaborate technical solutions. Recent x-rays of the finished sculpture show it to be chock-full of random objects, starting with paintbrush handles. There were also rags, wood shavings, cotton wadding, drinking glasses, and cork stoppers, all taken from Degas’s immediate environment, a kind of haphazard improvisation in keeping with his model. His realism in fact draws its power from the perfect appropriateness of treatment to subject. His art, at once poor in means and meticulous in execution, a brilliant makeshift improvisation, was adapted to Marie, a little girl who was living in poverty and without sophistication but who nonetheless tried to achieve purity of movement. By raising the lowly to the level of art, by using crude techniques and common materials, Degas opened up and freed a vast space for creation. His eclecticism was revolutionary. A whole tendency of the art of the twentieth century would arise from this little cobbled figure. The year of its making, 1881, was also the birth year of…Picasso, for example.

  Onto this metal armature, stuffed with whatever came within reach, Degas smeared by hand or with a spatula several layers of colored wax, whose smooth surface suggested skin, though without reproducing its natural color. It’s the same wax that, variously pigmented, would also cover the human hair that Degas had bought at the wigmaker’s, the specially tailored linen bodice, and the real ballet slippers, shaded a delicate pink. Only the tutu would be added intact to the finished sculpture. The beeswax, whose pellucid aspect catches the light, was mixed with clay and plasticine, which is a greasy, claylike substance that has the advantage of remaining soft for some time, allowing the sculptor to shape and reshape the material until it approached the ideal contour. This is why Degas refused to use more solid materials. “Have it cast? Bronze is for eternity. What gives me pleasure is always having to start over.”25 And according to Renoir, the reason Degas did not exhibit the work in 1880 as planned was that he wanted to reshape the mouth, which did not satisfy him. X-rays have shown that he remodeled the head several times, lengthening the neck proportionately with a wire coiled like a spring, and repositioning the shoulders. He had a reputation for endlessly reworking his pieces, inspiring his friend J.-É. Blanche to comment: “The slightest pretext served him to torture the form, to extract from it a cruel synthesis that joined the observation of a misogynist and a surgeon.”26

  Is that the person Marie found across from her, an unappealing combination of the misogynist and the surgeon? Does the sculpture offer nothing more than the “cruel synthesis” of a clinical examination and sexist disgust? That’s not what it makes us feel, however. Still, the relationship between Degas and his model remains a mystery. Pauline, one of his favorites, claimed to have danced naked with him in his studio — he liked having such rumors circulate. But his letters and contemporary testimony show that, while the painter may have enjoyed good relations with the dancers who posed for him, it never went beyond the stage of well-meaning paternalism. He sometimes interceded with the management of the Paris Opera to obtain a salary increase for one or a role in a ballet for another; it amused him, nothing more. Most likely he retained a natural sense of class — and gender — superiority. We will never know what he thought of the First International Conference of Women’s Rights, convened in Paris in 1878. He was often to be found at cafés: the Nouvelle Athènes, the Rat Mort, which was open all night, the Brasserie des Martyrs, where ballerinas and bohemians mingled, whose company he much preferred to the crowd around Zola. But his life sank into an ever greater solitude. “A sickly man, neurotic, suffering from ophthalmia,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt. He is not known to have had any romantic attachments, whether long-term or short, a fact definitely out of keeping with his time and place. And when we consider how eagerly the Goncourt brothers seized on any sliver of gossip, the fact that there is none about Degas in their Journal is significant. Any number of nineteenth-century painters seduced or married their models, or made their wife their muse. Delacroix, one of Degas’s masters, describes in his Journal the “valiant battles” he waged with lust during sessions with his model, battles that he lost more than once: “How lovely she was, naked and in bed!”27 he wrote about one of his young sitters, a girl of fifteen. About another, he wrote more crudely: “I risked the pox for her.” Corot squarely made sex a corollary of studio work. Puvis de Chavannes would punctuate his sessions with his paid model by saying, “Would you like to see the…of a great man?”28 And Whistler, Monet, Rodin, Renoir, Bonnard, and so many other contemporaries of Degas also stepped over the line in their relationships with the young women who sat for them. The model who is at once muse and mistress has been a commonplace in art since the beginning.

  Degas did not fit the stereotype. He was famously chaste. For the greater part of his life, his company at home consisted of two successive housekeepers, whose cooking and discretion he appreciated, period. He is not suspected of having taken any liberties. His celibacy has been attributed to his misogyny. His distrust of women stemmed, according to some sources, from contracting a venereal disease at a brothel in early youth. He made unflattering quips about women, and they were more provocative than those made by Corot, Renoir, and a good number of fin-de-siècle writers, who said such things as a matter of course. Renoir did not approve of educating the weaker sex, for instance, believing its effects might be terrible, namely “that future generations would make love very poorly”!29 Was Degas afraid of women? It’s possible, judging from the qualifiers he attached, though jokingly, to the women in his circle: “your terror-inspiring wife,” “your formidable spouse,” are phrases that appear often in his letters. Ambroise Vollard confirmed it: “A kind of shyness, mixed with an element of fear, kept him away from women.”30 Manet reported to Berthe Morisot the rumors circulating about the painter of dancers: “He is not capable of making love to a woman, either in speech or in act.”31 A woman friend defended “the artist without a muse”: “Extreme oversensitivity was clearly the source of his exaggerated fear that a woman, by the power of her love, might exert undue influence over his work.”32 He did at one point consider getting married and having children, but without much conviction. As he traveled to visit cousins in New Orleans in 1872, the idea crossed his mind: “I have a thirst for order. And I no longer look at women as the enemy of this new mode of being. Acquiring, even producing a few children, would that be too terrible? Not really.”33 He appears to have been motivated more by convention than by passion, however, and despite his fears of living a life of regret, he never brought himself to marry or cohabit. The reason must lie in his art. Degas put art making above all other forms of activity. It occupied his mind, his body, and his soul. All his desire, all his sensuality, wer
e turned toward the work itself, and the model was only the work’s pretext. “Is not work the only good we can possess whenever we like?”34 he wrote in August 1882 to his friend Bartholomé. Paul Valéry distinguished between “finite passions,” such as love, ambition, and desire for money, and the infinite, obsessive passion that drove Degas: the desire to create and progress ever further in his art. “Is an artist a man?” he asked rhetorically.35 The answer he later gave was: “A painter has no private life.”36

  For him, art transcended all else and was “made of renunciations.” This is what Vincent van Gogh grasped about him and, in crude terms, wrote to his friend Émile Bernard in August 1888: “Why do you say that de Gas can’t get hard? De Gas lives like a little law clerk and doesn’t like women, knowing that if he liked them and fucked them often, he would become deranged and inept at painting. The painting of de Gas is virile and impersonal precisely because he has resigned himself to being nothing more than a little law clerk with a horror of riotous living. He looks at human animals stronger than himself getting hard and fucking, and he paints them well, for the very reason that he makes no great claims to getting hard-ons.” Van Gogh continued: “If, for our part, we want to get a hard-on over our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to fucking only a little…It’s enough for our weak and impressionable artist brains to give their essence to creating paintings.”37

  Degas, if we are to believe Van Gogh and a fair number of his contemporaries, saw sex as nothing more than a threat to his art and women as “human animals,” females of the species. When he painted them bathing, as he said himself, it was “as if beasts were cleaning themselves.” With women of his own rank, he needed to diminish or even degrade them before he would paint them. He only agreed to paint the portrait of a quite beautiful woman friend if she would wear “an apron and a bonnet, like a maidservant.”38 There again, Renoir drove in the same nail: “Make a portrait of your concierge,” he said. “Have you ever seen a society woman whose hands you would enjoy painting? Women’s hands are lovely to paint, as long as they are hands that perform housework!”39 Women had no intellectual side for Renoir, nor did painting. The female body had another meaning for him: “I couldn’t work without a model. Even if I hardly look at her, she is absolutely necessary to me to plump up my eyes. I love to paint a bosom, the folds of a stomach…A breast is round, it’s warm!”40 The model, he also said, is there “to arouse me.” To arouse me, to plump up my eyes: we see the divide that separates him from Degas. The sensuality of Renoir, who spoke of “making love with his paintbrush,” finds no echo in Degas, for whom the body was without spirit or emotion. For him, the body never became flesh, which is to say capable of opening itself up, making room for another, being welcoming. It’s all no more than a false welcome — in brothels — or a veneer of beauty over a background of shabbiness — at the Paris Opera. Paul Gauguin admired the distance Degas maintained while giving himself entirely to his art: “Degas’s dancers are not women. They are machines in motion, with gracious lines, prodigious for their balance.”41 But for a number of his contemporaries, Degas was above all a voyeur who liked “to look through the keyhole,” a painter of dancers and brothel scenes because only vice interested and inspired him. His most famous metaphor supports this point of view: “Art is vice. You don’t marry it lawfully, you rape it.”42 Despite this provocative stance, Renoir praised Degas for “his quasi-religious side, so chaste, which puts his work on such a high level” and which “grows greater still when he looks at young girls.”43 Even his most fervent admirers recognized in him a kind of two-headed Janus. Daniel Halévy, the son of his friend Ludovic, considered him “one of the classical giants of virtue,” full of greatness.44 At the same time, he was shocked by Degas’s seeming cruelty and condemned his intention in the Little Dancer to “humiliate the poor girl, a little monkey dressed in tulle and spangled in gold, making a mockery of her.”45 The ambiguity that attaches to Edgar Degas, “divided against himself,”46 seems indissoluble. His mood swings were legendary, plunging him into the abyss: “I am sad, although lighthearted — or the reverse,” he liked to say. Known for his love of paradox in conversation, he was himself paradoxical to his acquaintance. A declared misanthrope, a man who presented himself as hard and misogynistic, Degas offered a schoolgirl’s image as a metaphor for his own deepest being: “I have locked away my heart in a pink satin slipper.”47

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  IN THIS CONTEXT, what is to be made of the Little Dancer? What is Degas telling us about her? That she is prone to vice? To crime? Really? Only that? If he had wanted to show us her budding depravity, would he not have sexualized her more? At that time, of course, the image of a dancer in itself represented vice. But so young? He specified her age in the work’s title, after all, though it was not usual. What meaning are we to assign to her half-closed eyes? Some have interpreted the girl’s offered face as an invitation to sensuality, and the forward thrust of her hips as a sexual signal, unsettling, a provocation that makes the viewer uneasy. But are the almost closed eyes of the Little Dancer truly watching the stranger who is about to grab her and kiss her on the lips? Are they not directed inward instead, oblivious to others? Do they not telegraph a kind of absence from the world? Unlike an artist such as Balthus, who, fifty years on, would make his passion for very young girls plain, Degas does not try to capture an erotic aura. When Balthus paints thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Lolitas in ankle socks with their underwear showing, their eyes closed, and stretching next to a cat, he means to capture, so he explains, the mystery inherent in adolescence at the dawn of womanhood and sexuality: “Adolescent girls stand for the future, before the transformation that will perfect their beauty. A woman has already found her place in the world, an adolescent has not. The body of a woman is already whole. The mystery is gone.”48 The sense we get from Degas’s sculpture is similar to what Balthus describes, but the young girl’s mystery is less overtly erotic, at least for today’s spectators. And if Marie stood for the future in the eyes of contemporary viewers, it was a closed-off future, leading only to her isolation. Her mystery therefore comes closer to what Rilke has suggested about Balthus, whom he described as “the painter of young girls, who are offered to every desire, but in a closed world that sends them back to their own solitude.”49 If we replaced “young girls” in this sentence with “dancers,” would this not aptly describe Degas’s world, and more specifically his Little Dancer Aged Fourteen? “The painter of dancers” created few landscapes and outdoor scenes; most of his subjects are found in performance halls, brothels, cafés — places where women, even when they are with others, even accompanied, are alone and with no opening to the world outside. Of course, the Little Dancer, being a sculpture, is freer in space than Degas’s painted subjects. But let’s not forget the glass cage that imprisoned her and the negative reception that greeted her when the sculpture was first shown. Is she not “offered to every desire,” even the most unacceptable, but then dismissed “back to her own solitude”? Her nearly closed eyes suggest the way a person who is alone might plunge into herself to escape from suffering. With her veiled gaze, her inner emotions are hard to discern; her raised chin would indicate that she has no wish to communicate with anyone. Although alone, she accepts her solitude. Her impudence is not a come-on but a refusal of engagement. She asks for nothing. On the contrary, she prompts us to ask questions. What is she thinking about? What is her inner world like? Do her face and pose reflect concentration or relaxation? Boredom or pleasure? Is she taking herself elsewhere, and if so, to what foreign parts? Is she filled with a sense of her own self or does she savor the vacuum at her core? What lies behind her closed eyes, her skinny chest? Tears, dreams, unspeakable emotions? Or a kind of absence, a beneficent nothingness in suspended time? The sculpture provides no answer. Degas provides no answer. The work skirts around all answers, just as the model stays in balance between childhood and womanhood, between innocence and lechery, between presence and elusiven
ess.

  It’s not by chance that Marilyn Monroe posed next to the Little Dancer in 1956. The black-and-white snapshot was taken after the filming of Bus Stop, at the house of producer William Goetz, a wealthy art collector. The actress was thirty years old and already a star, but her face in the photograph, which is right up close to the little rat’s, has that pure, lost, searching look that her fans know well. This woman, the embodiment of childish femininity, but also of eroticism and sexuality, seems in perfect osmosis with the sculpted presence. Perhaps it is because, like Marie van Goethem, she was neglected by her mother as a child and is remembering the young Norma Jean Baker, an anonymous girl, who married at sixteen knowing nothing of the world. “You’re not a scared, lonely little girl anymore,” she wrote in 1955. “Remember, you sit on top of the world…it doesn’t feel like it.”50 Around the same time, she had a nightmare: she dreamt that a surgeon cut open her stomach, and the only thing he found was “finely cut sawdust, like that of a Raggedy Ann doll.”51 How can one not think back to Degas’s sculpture, its empty insides? Along with Goya, whom Monroe liked “for his monsters,” Edgar Degas was one of the actress’s favorite artists. And so, although she had never taken ballet lessons as a child like Audrey Hepburn and other Hollywood actresses, Marilyn had agreed two years earlier, in homage to the painter of dancers, to pose in a tutu for the famous series of photographs by Milton Green. Her appearance in those photos has a moving fragility. The sex symbol has been replaced by a vulnerable young woman, clearly tired and distraught, a ballerina overcome by loneliness, a soul sister to the Little Dancer.