She is famous the world over, but how many people know
her name? You can admire her in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden,
and Copenhagen, but where is her grave? All we know is her age, 14, and the
work she did, because it truly was work, at an age when our own children are
attending school. In the 1880s, she danced as a little rat (as girls in training
for the corps de ballet were known) at the Paris Opera, and what seems like a
dream to many of our young girls today was not a dream to her, not the happy
age of youth.
L’Age heureux was the name of a television show when I
was growing up, it featured young ballet students at the Paris Opera doing
silly things. They climbed onto the roof of the Palais Garnier, I remember, and
you were afraid something terrible would happen to them, a fall or expulsion
from the program, because discipline was very strict. I don’t remember how it
all ended—happily, no doubt, given the show’s title. The little dancer of 1880,
though, was sent home after a few years’ work, when the director grew tired of
seeing her miss rehearsal—eleven times in the last trimester alone.
But the reason was that she had another job, possibly
two other jobs, because the pittance she earned at the Paris Opera was not
enough to feed her and her family. She was an artist’s model, posing for
painters and sculptors. Among them was Edgar Degas. Did she know as she posed
in his studio that, thanks to him, she would die less completely than the other
girls? Stupid question—as though the work counted for more than the life. It
would have been no feather in her cap to know that, a century after her death, people
would still be buzzing around her in the high-ceilinged halls of museums just
as the fine gentlemen in the foyer of the Paris Opera did, that she would still
be examined up and down and from all sides, just as she was in the seamy dives
where she may have sold her body on orders from her mother—her frail body, now
turned to bronze. But maybe it did make a difference, maybe she did think about
it sometimes. Who can say?
Surely she had heard how the Mona Lisa was taken to
safety during the Franco-Prussian War, how it was returned to the Louvre after
France’s defeat, how everyone in Paris was visiting it admiringly and buying it
in reproduction, thanks to the new reprographic techniques. When she posed for
her employer for hours on end, growing tired in what was supposedly a “rest”
position, one leg forward, hands clasped behind her back, silent, did she
consider that Monsieur Degas had enough talent to make her famous too, that her
little walk-on role would one day make her a star? Did she imagine such a
future for herself—a fame that the ballet world would never grant her? It’s
possible. After all, little girls do have their dreams.
What I hope, as I look at her in triptych on a
postcard—back, front, and profile—bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York, is that she was oblivious to all that was said about her during the
first exhibition of the Little Dancer. Although it wasn’t exactly said about
her. Do you know the story of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife? Some people
stopped in front of it and said, “What a hag!” while others said, “What a
masterpiece!” Which counts for more, the painting or the model, art or nature?
Does the work of art console us for what happens in life? Certainly, the little
dancer was not expounding on the relation between actuality and representation.
Nor was anyone else.
On that April day in 1881 when the figure was first
exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, there were few who made the
distinction. Esthetes and society ladies, critics and amateurs, all crowded
together in front of the sculpture, made more impatient by the fact that the
sculpture had been announced for last year’s show but inexplicably withdrawn.
And this year, Degas had brought it to the exhibition late, fourteen days after
the opening. An empty glass case, the subject of much speculation, stood in as
a placeholder, while rumors circulated that the sculpture would not be in marble
or bronze, nor even in plaster or wood, but in wax. Normally, wax is a stage in
the process of making the final work, but the artist was choosing here to
exhibit it as the end product. And it would be dressed in real clothes, like a
doll. Wearing actual ballet slippers. What an oddity! All the same, this wasn’t
the official Salon but the exhibition mounted by the splinter group of the
Indépendants, the so-called Impressionists, who had never been very
academically minded, so it wasn’t all that surprising. Other than a portrait
carved in wood and a small bronze by Paul Gauguin, La Petite Parisienne,
Degas’s Little Dancer was the only sculpture in the show. Finally, the public
was getting a chance to see it! In the midst of canvases by Pissarro, Cassatt,
Gauguin, the figure stood in a glass case, which further piqued curiosity. They
pressed forward eagerly, approaching their faces, their monocles, to the
transparent divider; they frowned, they backed away, what the devil, hesitated,
and either fled or stood transfixed. Almost all who saw it, sensitive and
cultured as they were, reacted with horror to the Little Dancer. This isn’t
art! some people said. What a monster! Said others. An abortion! An ape! She
would look better in a zoological museum, opined a countess. She has the
depraved look of a criminal, said another. “How very ugly she is!” said a young
dandy. “She’ll do better as a rat at the Opera than as a pussy at the
bordello!” One journalist wondered, “Does there truly exist an artist’s model
this horrid, this repulsive?” A woman essayist for the British review Artist
described her as looking “half idiotic,” “with her Aztec head and expression.”
“Can Art descend any lower?” she asked. Such depravity! Such ugliness! The work
and the model were conjoined in a single tide of disapproval, a wave of
hostility and hatred whose virulence surprises us today. “This barely pubescent
little girl, a flower of the gutter,” had made her entry into the history of
artistic revolutions.
Once on view, the Little Dancer was exposed—as was the
little dancer who modeled for Degas—to public stares and condemnation, to
esthetic tastes and moral distaste. Both the sculpture and the girl came in for
more contempt than admiration on that day. No one had asked her, a poor girl
whose body was her only asset, for permission to put her at risk—at risk of
displeasing and being demeaned. The shame of humiliation. It’s true that in all
likelihood she was not invited to the Salon des Indépendants. She probably
never visited the sculpture during the exhibit’s three-week run on the
Boulevard des Capucines, not far from the Paris Opera. One or another of the
ruffians and grisettes she associated with, however, may have passed along the
news in mocking tones: “Everyone is running off to admire you. Are you really
the new Mona Lisa?” But her modeling sessions for Degas were already a distant
memory. So many things had happened since, and she was now 16. What was the
point in looking back? Besides, the exhibition hall wasn’t open to the poor, to
working-class women, or to prostitutes. No one congratulated a model for her
patience, her immobility, her selflessness. Possibly for her beauty, if she was
the artist’s mistress. But that was all.
Marie [van Goethem] had not slept with Degas, as far
as we know. She hadn’t read the accounts in the newspapers either—she’d been
obliged to leave school early and barely knew how to read or write. The
sculpture received few favorable reviews. The nicest came from Nina de Villard,
companion to the poet Charles Cros, who visited the exhibition and wrote: “I
felt before this statuette one of the strongest artistic sensations I’ve ever
experienced: I have long been dreaming of exactly this.” Marie wouldn’t have
seen the review. And no one would have read her Huysmans’s encomiums, directed
at the artist in any case, not at her. The critic praised Degas for acting
boldly, for overthrowing all the conventions of sculpture, “all the models
endlessly recopied over the centuries” to produce a work “so original, so
fearless . . . truly modern.” But Huysmans was pitiless in his description of
the little dancer, with her “sickly, grayish face, old and drawn before its
time.” I like to think that in posing for the great artist with that defiant
air, which the critic Paul Mantz characterized in the following day’s Le Temps
as “bestial effrontery,” Marie foresaw the scandalized reaction of the moneyed
set and responded to it in advance with that look of insolent detachment. And I
like to believe that it speaks of her freedom, rising above all hindrances, a
twin to Degas’s own, yet very much hers, calm and nearly smiling, chin up, her
personal freedom.
When the stormy Salon of 1881 closed, Degas brought
his Little Dancer home and never showed it again to anyone. It didn’t travel to
the great Impressionist exhibition organized by Durand-Ruel in New York in
1886. It gathered dust in a corner of the studio, visibly darkening, piled up
among other sculptures, its tutu in shreds, next to ballet slippers and
photographs of dancers. But the sculpture still figured in the thoughts of
Degas’s contemporaries. In the 1890s, Henri de Régnier and Paul Helleu would
discuss the Little Dancer with the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Artists such as
Maurice Denis, Georges Rouault, and Walter Sickert mentioned it long after its
disappearance from view.
In 1903, Louisine Havemeyer, a shrewd American
collector and future suffrage activist, offered to buy it from the artist: the
scandalous Little Dancer, by her absence, had become cloaked in mystery, a
legend. Degas refused. He wanted neither to sell the sculpture nor to have it
seen. Mrs. Havemeyer, on advice from Mary Cassatt, repeated her offer several
times, but Degas resisted the pressure and kept his small statue. He reworked
it a little, pondered the possibilities, returned to it: “I must finish this
sculpture, even if it puts my aged life at risk. I’ll continue till I drop—and
I still feel quite steady on my pegs, despite having just turned sixty-nine,”
he wrote in a letter dated to the summer of 1903. Friends suggested that he
have bronze casts made, since wax was eminently fragile. Either Degas lacked
the funds to do this, having by this time lost his fortune, or he wanted to
stay in tête-à-tête with the original—or both—but he never followed up on the
suggestion. Possibly he was applying to his own work an observation he had once
made on a Rembrandt painting that the Louvre planned to restore: “Touch a
painting! But a painting is meant to die, time is meant to walk over it, as
over everything else, whence its beauty.”
It was only after his death in 1917 that more than 150
wax statuettes, found at his home in a greater or lesser state of
deterioration, were given conservation treatment, the Little Dancer Aged
Fourteen among them. But Degas’s close circle did not let time walk over the
Little Dancer. After hesitating about whether to restore it for sale as a
unique piece, the family decided to send it to the A. A. Hébrard foundry in
Paris. There, thanks to the painter Paul-Albert Bartholomé, a friend of Degas,
22 bronze casts of the Little Dancer were made, after an initial plaster mold,
then patinated to better imitate the original wax, and finally dispersed to
various museums and private collections.
This quick and dirty decision by Degas’s heirs, which
showed little respect for the artist’s personality and wishes, was seen by some
as a betrayal. Yet making reproductions of the original did not, as Mary
Cassatt had feared, detract from the work’s artistic value, and the casts were
remarkably faithful. Looking at auction catalogs, we learn that one cast, which
included the original clothes, was sold in 1971 for $380,000. Another was
auctioned at Sotheby’s for more than £13 million. The work has inspired
investors. At the start of the 21st century, Sir John Madejski, owner of the
Reading Football Club, bought the sculpture for £5 million and sold it five
years later for £12 million. We won’t editorialize on the gross unfairness of
the worlds of art and finance, knowing how many painters ended up in mass
graves whose works now slumber in safe-deposit vaults.
Degas always lived off his painting. He was also a
voracious collector—Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Pissarro, Daumier, Corot, Sisley,
Hokusai, Van Gogh. At his death, he owned, warehoused in his home, more than
five hundred masterpieces and thousands of lithographs. But he despised money.
His father was a banker who had gone through bankruptcy, and Degas hated to see
a work of art treated as a “luxury item” when to him it was an “item of primary
necessity.” He sold single pieces—grudgingly and at high value—when he needed
the money, and he mocked his colleagues fiercely for pursuing medals, honors,
and emoluments. When it came to the Little Dancer, the administrators of the
French national museums paid scant attention to the original wax version: it
was allowed to leave the country for $160,000.
Bought in 1956 by an American citizen, Mr. Paul
Mellon, it has been in the United States ever since, a development Degas might
have approved of, since he himself spent time in Louisiana, where his mother
was born and a part of his family lived. He adored sprinkling his conversation
with English words and would probably not have objected to the expatriation of
his work, having considered emigrating himself at one point. In Paris, only one
posthumous bronze casting with tutu and ribbon is on view—at the Musée d’Orsay.
You can always pick up a reproduction in synthetic resin on the Internet for
twenty dollars or so. And there are postcards, of which I have bought many over
the years, long before I ever planned to write this book, just because I liked
the little dancer. I’ve always liked her, she intrigues and moves me. Her image
has accompanied me for a long time, it sits on my desk, my shelves. She has her
nose in the air, not looking at me, but I feel her close all the same,
observing me though in a different way. Every time I enter a museum where she
is on view and to which, for some still secret reason, I’ve come expressly to
see her, I feel my heart leap.
The Story of an Iconic Statue: Behind Degas’s Little
Dancer. Who Was Marie van Goethem?
By
Camille Laurens. LitHub , November 20, 2018.
Following a passionate investigation, Camille Laurens
recounts in her book, La petite danseuse de quatorze ans, the tragic fate of
the young Marie Van Goethem. In conversation with Martine Kahane, honorary
general curator, Musée d'Orsay , Paris, the writer talks about her attachment to
Degas, author of this world-famous sculpture, a tender and scandalous portrait
of a "little criminal".
Obsession is unhealthy, and it is maybe imperative to
the creation of art, which is all that needs be said about that profession.
Good artists transform private obsession into something that can be shared:
Nicholson Baker on John Updike, John McPhee on geology, Karl Ove Knausgaard on
himself, or the French writer Camille Laurens on Edgar Degas, the (sort of)
subject of her new book, “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.”
Look past the earnest subtitle (“The True Story Behind
Degas’s Masterpiece”), because this isn’t a book about the truth, and it’s an
open question whether the titular art work—a sculpture of a ballerina, hands
clasped behind her back—is a masterpiece at all. “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”
is a strange hybrid of art history and art appreciation, a personal narrative
that reads like a novel. I have no interest in the Impressionists (Laurens says
that the artist himself disliked the moniker, proposing instead the frankly
horrible “Intransigents”), but the author’s obsession is, if not contagious, at
least fascinating.
Laurens begins her elliptical and odd little book by
telling us about her desire to know more about the subject of Degas’s work:
“Did she know as she posed in his studio that, thanks to him, she would die
less completely than the other girls?” She’s talking, of course, about gender
and power. The names of Lisa del Giocondo, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit,
and a million so-called courtesans don’t endure as da Vinci, Sargent, and
Fragonard, even if their likenesses do.
Degas’s model was a girl named Marie van Goethem. That
she was a dancer with the Paris Opéra sounds sweet—visions of chubby toddlers
in pink bodysuits and white tights, approximating grace. Laurens conjures
something quite different. “Boys could rent out their arms to work in the mines
or on the farm,” she writes, “girls rented out their legs, their bodies.”
Ballet is somehow utterly cosmopolitan: both high culture and its sordid
obverse. “Children reached sexual majority at the age of thirteen, according to
an 1863 law—the age had previously been eleven,” the author explains.
“Backstage, procurement was the quasi-official function of a mother, who was
expected to ‘present’ her daughter to male admirers.”
It’s hard to know whether Degas was motivated to capture
high culture or low morals. He was not the only artist to find ballet an
alluring metaphor. Laurens cites a writer named Ludovic Halévy, known for a
scandalous serial set in the seamy world backstage. Balzac and Zola also wrote
on the subject, and here, evoking the grim reality of the life of the “little
rat,” as girls like Marie were known, Laurens herself can’t resist a fictional
flourish, conjuring a life that she can’t really ever know much about. “Her
feet were often bloody and her poorly tended sores infected,” she writes of
Marie. “When she arrived home at the tiny apartment she shared with her family,
there was no running water. She couldn’t wash her sweaty body until the
concierge saw fit to bring water, unless she went back downstairs herself, got
in line at the water pump, and lugged the bucket back to the apartment without
spilling.”
While Laurens is captivated by Marie, there’s simply more
known about Degas. It’s only a biography in the most roundabout way; we learn
of the artist’s eye troubles, that he had an American mother (is it therefore
fitting that Paul Mellon bought the original “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”?),
that he wrote sonnets.
Impressionism has lost its power to surprise; it’s hard
to feel shocked about Manet’s nude picnicker when you’ve seen Carolee
Schneemann’s work. But Laurens’s account of the 1881 exhibition where “Little
Dancer” débuted gets at why the piece was so odd. It was wax, usually a
preparatory stage before being cast in metal. The figure was dressed in real
clothes and shoes, and displayed under glass. And it was decidedly unbeautiful.
“The face of the Little Dancer undeniably has some of the
features identified by phrenologists and medical anatomists of the day as
typically criminal,” Laurens notes. “A sloping forehead, a protruding jaw,
prominent cheekbones, thick hair.” At the same exhibition, Degas showed four
sketches of young men being tried for murder, which he had drawn from life;
those, too, are informed by the day’s prevailing belief that physiognomy
contained destiny.
Whether Degas was making a point about his subject’s
sexual depravity cannot be answered. Even his position on the Dreyfus affair,
one moral litmus test for that era, is opaque. Maybe it doesn’t matter. “Little
Dancer” was not a success. The artist declined to show it again, and refused to
sell it. Upon his death, his heirs had the wax cast in bronze, in an edition of
twenty-two. The original now resides in the National Gallery, in Washington,
D.C.; the casts are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, and
other such institutions.
Laurens wants to treat Marie, transformed by Degas into
an object, as this book’s subject. It’s quixotic, but also magical. I thought
of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel Laureate whose novels often use the conventions
of crime stories but offer little resolution or satisfaction. In Laurens’s
work, as in so many of Modiano’s stories, the thread unravels into maddening
loose ends.
Indeed, Laurens cites Modiano, specifically his work
“Dora Bruder,” which is about a young Jewish girl whose life he attempts to
reconstruct; he follows her to Auschwitz, but Modiano’s book is, Laurens notes,
“full of unanswered questions, of unfinished answers, of ‘maybes’ and ‘nevers.’
” The same is true of the book she has written. “When it comes to her, her
reality, I have said nothing, shown nothing,” Laurens writes. “I know nothing.”
She has not solved a mystery (even if she turns up some
interesting tidbits from various archives), but Laurens has done something more
challenging: she’s captured what it feels like to think. Her enthusiasm, the
million little connections that she makes between the dancer, the artist, and
her own life, subsume the reader. Laurens tells of reading an article on Degas
by Martine Kahane, the head librarian of the Paris National Opera. Though the
article is twenty years old, Laurens contacts her immediately, asking questions
about Marie. A few weeks ago, I was seated at a dinner next to a woman, also a
librarian; when the conversation turned to art, she mentioned that her
great-aunt had been the first collector to bring a work by Claude Monet to the
United States. That great aunt was Louisine Havemeyer, and, in 1903, she tried to
buy “Little Dancer” from Degas. He rebuffed her. Reading this in Laurens’s
book, I was seized with a desire to contact her immediately, to share this clue
that points to nothing but mere coincidence.
Laurens shows that coincidence may be the only
reliable fact of life, a refrain familiar to anyone who has read Modiano. Is it
meaningful to note, as she does, that “Little Dancer” was created in 1881, the
year of Picasso’s birth, or is it meaningful only because she notes it?
Unanswered are the questions of what art is for, who Marie was, and even
whether or not Laurens likes Degas. I take this as a measure of her success as
a critic. Some questions can’t be answered, but that doesn’t mean they
shouldn’t be asked.
Camille Laurens’s “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” Is a
Fascinating Hybrid, and Obsessed with Obsession. By Rumaan Alam. The New Yorker , November 20, 2018
“Why do you say that de Gas [sic] can’t get hard?”
Vincent van Gogh wrote to his friend, artist Émile Bernard, in 1888. “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.”
In the letter, the “Starry Night” painter was referring
to the French impressionist Edgar Degas, who famously depicted 19th-century
ballerinas in moments between grand jetés and pirouettes, stretching and
resting and adjusting leotards on canvases that today hang in The Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City, Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The National Gallery in
London and many, many other museums.
Less famously, he was a celibate misogynist who saw women
as “‘human animals,’ females of the species.”
So explains author Camille Laurens in Little Dancer Aged
Fourteen, a new book on the life of Degas’ most easily recognizable subject,
whose name ― Marie van Goethem ― is nowhere near as iconic as the diminutive
statue that depicts her in a perpetual fourth-position stance.
Laurens’ book arrives at a cultural moment when the
morality of the artist-subject relationship has landed under heightened
scrutiny. In December, two sisters penned a petition challenging the Met’s
decision to exhibit a painting by the Polish-French modern artist Balthus,
showing a 12-year-old girl in repose, her skirt upturned and her underwear
exposed. The petition renewed a debate over the kind of conduct (between older,
mostly male artists and historically young and female subjects) history is
willing to not only condone but exalt.
Today, discussions about artists’ unsavory methods often
revolve around sexuality and consent: whether artists abused their power in the
process of creating art, engaged in sex that might not have been consensual and
then used their creative practice as a shield to protect themselves.
Degas’ statue “Little Dancer, Age 14” poses a somewhat
different idea of dynamics between artist and subject, though one similarly
fraught with gendered power imbalances. Laurens posits that it’s highly
unlikely Degas sexually abused 14-year-old van Goethem, because Degas was a
well-documented celibate, his abstinence rooted in a disgust of womankind. But
that disgust, Laurens argues, is a forgotten aspect of the modern art pioneer’s
story ― as is his role in ruining the life of a girl whose image helped propel
him to fame in the first place.
We don’t always know what occurred between painters and
their subjects in the privacy of a studio, but some male artists have made it
easy to surmise. “How lovely she was, naked in bed,” French Romantic painter
Eugène Delacroix said about one 15-year-old subject. Another artist, Puvis de
Chavannes, was known to end his modeling sessions by asking, “Would you like to
see the ... of a great man?” Laurens writes.
These men typify the predatory artist archetype at the
center of today’s Me Too conversation, which could be used to describe men like
Harvey Weinstein or, allegedly, Terry Richardson. But Degas’ abuse looked
different. His is more familiar to pockets of the internet occupied by incels ―
heterosexual, cellibate men who breed a distrust of and hatred for women.
Laurens traces Degas’ misogyny back to his youth, when he
is thought to have contracted a venereal disease from a brothel. As an adult,
Degas fraternized with few women aside from his housekeepers. He feared them,
his friends believed, especially with regard to how they’d interfere with the
quality of his work. His friend and fellow artist Jacques-Emile Blanche
described him as “a misogynist and a surgeon” when he crafted van Goethem’s
image. He was a voyeur who adopted the attitude of a father figure, a
chauvinist critic who embodied the basics of toxic masculinity.
Over time, Degas’ painted odes to the Paris Opera have
taken on the rosy glow of nostalgia, all that tulle and ribbonry obscuring
darker intentions. His impressionist ballerinas adorn coffee mugs and hang in
dorm rooms, as universally and unequivocally beloved as Claude Monet’s “Water
Lilies.” In museums, young girls assume the dancers’ poses for cute photo ops.
Yet when Degas painted ballerinas, he saw neither budding talent nor charming
naiveté. He saw “little rats,” Laurens finds.
Girls who became ballerinas ― at as young as 8 years old
― worked 10 to 12 hours a day, six to seven days a week, under devastating
conditions. (One ballerina died after her tutu lit on fire during a rehearsal.)
After reaching “sexual maturity” at 13, girls were often paid to have sex with
men waiting in the opera’s wings. They earned the nickname “rats” because the
animals were known to transmit syphilis.
For Degas, the fact
that young dancers had sex with old men read not as abuse on the part of the
latter but as sin on the part of the former. He assumed girls’ transactions
with powerful men meant they could pull strings from behind the scenes, a
thought that elicited both horror and fascination. Degas clearly saw something
vital in his recurring subjects, who spurred quotes from him like, “I have
locked away my heart in a pink satin slipper.”
Degas’ disdain for
women ― and ballerinas in particular ― is writ across “Little Dancer” itself,
whose sculptural features were altered to emphasize van Goethem’s moral
degeneracy. Degas subscribed to physiognomy, which presumes that criminal
behaviors are passed on genetically and thus manifest in physical features. And
so he flattened van Goethem’s skull and stretched her chin so she appeared
especially “primitive,” a visual reflection of an internal state.
Made of pigmented beeswax, clay and metal armature, and
dressed in genuine clothing and slippers, the sculpture was initially derided
for resembling a common wax doll. The unvarnished ugliness Degas produced was a
shock to the 19th-century art world at large. But the insults he endured were
benign in comparison with those lobbed at the subject herself, who was
described by an art critic as having a “sickly, grayish face, old and drawn
before its time.”
Attitudes changed over the years, though, as is the case
for so much art not appreciated in its immediate era. Degas’ “Little Dancer,”
which the artist worked on for four years, was eventually canonized as an
inflection point in art’s evolution toward modernity. It was, as one critic
later wrote, “so original, so fearless ... truly modern.”
Of course, van Goethem didn’t reap the benefits of this
artistic triumph. Laurens found, searching through the Paris Opera’s account
books, that in 1882, a year after the completion of Degas’ sculpture, she was
incrementally docked in pay and eventually fired from her dancing post. Laurens
reasoned that modeling interfered with her rehearsals until the company
eventually got fed up and let her go.
There are no traces of her life after this point ― no
records of marriage, childbearing, arrest or death. “Marie disappeared without
a trace,” Laurens concludes. “The little dancer flew away. Her mortal remains
most likely lie not in a sepulcher but a communal grave.”
In her book’s final chapters, Laurens comes to a grim
conclusion: “If Edgar Degas hadn’t chosen Marie as his model for the Little
Dancer, she would probably have stayed on at the Paris Opera. ... By sticking
to dance, she would have avoided the descent into hell whose signs are all too
clear.”
Laurens cannot uncover exactly what transpired between
Degas and van Goethem between 1878 and 1881, but she does provide a few alarming
details, culled from research between 2014 and 2016. For instance, to measure
van Goethem’s physical proportions, Degas used a special instrument that
sometimes slashed models’ faces, Laurens writes. As artist Jacques-Emile
Blanche said, “Degas did not seduce, he frightened.”
What Laurens does state with assuredness is that van
Goethem is part of an unfortunate pantheon of overlooked artistic subjects ―
mostly women, many children ― whose value as human beings was trumped by their
role as “muse.”
One such woman is Linda, the pubescent subject of Pablo
Picasso’s 1905 “Fillette à la corbeille fleurie,” which sold for $115 million
at auction earlier this year. Historians zealously researched the painting’s
provenance leading up to the sale, but details of Linda’s life went
unaddressed, save for the fact that she probably “died sadly young.” Like van
Goethem, her image was valued over her labor, her suffering and her story.
Laurens’ scholarship seeks to amend history’s gendered
bias, undoing the persistent myth that a woman’s greatest accomplishment is
inspiring a man’s creative genius. Her objective is simple: Treat van Goethem
as a human rather than a catalyst. In that sense, Little Dancer echoes Sarah
Weinman’s true-crime novel The Real Lolita, which tells the story of Sally
Horner, whose kidnapping and rape inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel.
With Little Dancer, Laurens broaches the persistent
contemporary problem: What do we do with beloved artworks with unsavory origin
stories? Don’t look away, Laurens urges by example. On the contrary, dig deeper
into the work itself and the people who collaborated to create it. It’s
tempting to project fantasy onto history, casting humans as geniuses or
monsters, temptresses or victims. But art history isn’t as simple as canceling
bad actors and celebrating unsung heroes.
Little Dancer pierces through Degas’ rose-tinted
reputation to depict an artist who is no hero and a subject who is no ghost.
The Story Behind Degas’ ‘Little Dancer’ Is Disturbing,
But Not In The Way You Expect. By Priscilla Frank. The Huffington Post , November 21 ,
2018.
