Essay#16: on Degas and an uneasy beauty
Edgar Degas is known for his ballerina drawings. He drew them for 40 years and made more than a thousand pictures. Yet his most controversial work, named “the most famous ballerina in the world”, is not a painting but a sculpture. The only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime.
Shown only once in 1881, “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” provoked shock and outrage. Not because it was a nearly naked, malnourished child but because she was “ugly”. Contemporaries called her “a young monster”, “a flower of precocious depravity”, “an ideal of ugliness”. The dancer seemed too real. This was emphasized by details: real hair, silk hair ribbon, linen bodice, muslin tutu, and satin slippers. Some critics claimed that Degas was a misogynist: he dared to show women not as marble goddesses but creatures of flesh, sweat, and pain.
Degas was an adept of painful beauty. To him, art was a battle. He advised “to do the same subject over and over again, ten times, a hundred times.” His figures are caught in the middle of the gesture. Blurred and sliding, they are ready to continue moving the moment you shift the glance. The painter harnessed this complex mix of lightness and precision through relentless studies of every gesture and hundreds of sketches.
The seamy side of beauty is the center of Degas’ artwork. His ballet artworks rarely feature the shows and instead focus on pain and dullness of enduring rehearsals and classes. “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” is no different. Her pose is tense, body is contorted, face is bored, muscles quiver. In fact, the dancer looks like a teenager forced to do something she doesn’t want to. You can easily imagine a real 14-year-old girl who is tired to waste hours posing for Degas during two years.
Her name was Marie Geneviève van Goethem. She was a daughter of a tailor and a laundress, also known as a prostitute. Marie’s family history was nothing special among other “opera rats”, as Parisians called the students of the Opera dance school. Ballerinas’ beauty was a common subject for sale, and “little rats” sought protectors among wealthy visitors of the Opera. Those men are frequent attendants of Degas paintings. You can easily note them: they always wear black. Not only dancing girls, but their pictures were in high demand. The paintings deemed sexual and were so popular among collectors that Degas called them “my merchandise”.
Degas intentionally made the girl look withdrawn. Isolation is the red-line of his works. He exposed the tension between an individual and others, picturing people entirely bored and alone in the crowd. If he lived a century later one might think Degas illustrated Sartre’s saying: “Hell is other people”. But Degas shared the ideas of contemporary poet Charles Baudelaire who celebrated the “heroism of modern life” and saw the dark new modern beauty in decadence: things falling apart and deviating from standards.
Since 1881, Degas never showed his statues in public. A few were exposed in his office — he jokingly called them “my daughters”. His death revealed another 150 pieces made of beeswax, clay, plasticine, and cords of wire. Half of them, including the “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer”, were cast in bronze in 22 copies. In 2009 one of the copies was sold for 19 million dollars, the others are in major art collections of the world.
Once outcast, uneasy beauty of a little dancer today is ultimately appreciated.
