The Little Fourteen–Year–Old Dancer is an adored impressionist piece sculptured by Edgar Degas. Degas presented the piece at the sixth impressionist exhibition in the spring of 1881, and public exhibition he ever did. Originally named by the artist, Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, the piece has become one of the most acclaimed artworks of well-known bronze casts produced after the artist’s death. She did not attract much admiration in her first appearance. Many know Degas as an artist of dance, and some critics originally dismissed his sculptures, claiming that lacked the quality of good art. Most critics claimed that she was ugly, but acknowledged the realism of the piece, as well as its revolutionary nature. The sculpture had a mixed media of wax statuette dressed in real clothes, which made her very innovate because was a ‘modern subject.”
The model of the figure, Marie van Goethen was a ballet student at the Paris Opéra, where the artists painted and drew. Marie was a daughter to a Belgian a laundress and a Belgian tailor. The first process of the sculpture involved making a reddish-brown wax sculpture on her in the nude. In order to bring a naturalistic effect, Degas dressed three-quarters of the sculpture of her clothes made of real fabrics and a real hair tied with a ribbon. When the wax sculpture appeared in exhibition, contemporaries were overwhelmed by the unprecedented realism of the piece. The artist was also able to bring out the pain and stress the dancers underwent during ballet training by a barely adolescent girl.
Following the death of the artists, his followers decided in the early 1920 to make bronze casts of the original wax (Hudson 25). They produced many versions, all in bronze with exception of the dancer’s silk ribbon and gauze tutu. Recent studies into the castings of this sculpture, which, by the time of casting had spent forty years in the studio of the artist. The artiste rubbed pigmented waxes in the flesh areas. They painted the bodice with cream color, but a pigment wax aided in making the lower body parts darker. Additionally, they dipped the skirt in a mixture of pigment and animal glue to create an aged effect.
Young, beautiful, and poor, the ballet students were regarded as potential targets of male “protector.” Degas considered and understood the plight of the Little Dancer, what contemporary reviewer Joris-Karl Huysmans called the “terrible reality” (Failing 1). The piece is a very touching, poignant piece of art in which a little girl of fourteen, in spited of hardships she faces, both psychological and physically, struggles for a measure of dignity, with her head held high, though arms are uncomfortably stretched behind her back. Based on the evolution of sculpture, this piece is a groundbreaking work of art. The Little Dancer gives the liberating idea that any technique or media can convey the desired information, and many other sculptures draws from the piece (Hudson 125). The artist presented a working-class subject, though not a conventional one, with both compassion and realism, but without moralizing. In doing so, he effortlessly highlighted the hard tension between art and life
In this famous sculpture by Degas, she stands posed in a relaxed fourth position, her belly forward, back arched, hands clasped tight behind her back. The posture taken by the piece seems as if it wants to move. The legs stand apart and look very strong. Another important part of the piece is that it looks like nothing more than a young woman approaching her maturity stage. French artists tended to make their work look perfect and stylish. There was more into it, considering that the body appeared different from traditional ballet dancers. The texture of the body is fine, giving it a sensual feeling.
Another aspect is that the piece appears very skinny, with a protruding jaw and belly. The sculpture features the four-sided poses of African and particularly Egyptian art. In Egyptian art, the arms of the piece hand down parallel to one another, the head faces straight forward, and no twist to the shoulders or hips. Degas followed all these “rule,” with the only deviation being that he positioned the arms of his piece behind her back, but they are still parallel. Degas’ subject has one leg forward and the other leg back beneath the figure. For many years, Egyptian statue did not maintain symmetry in body parts with exception of the leg. The only deviation Degas made on this was that he turned the right foot out to the right and the left out to the left, resting the body into a classic fourth-position at rest ballet pose, with equal weight distribution.
Another interesting feature of the sculpture is her closed eyes, which may give the impression that the artists did not have the time to place eyes on the piece. The piece does not have a pleasing piece, while the posture taken by her seems arrogant and commandeering. Her pose suggests the opposite of her face, it is elegant and graceful, the leaned up head and closed eye makes it perfect. The piece is dressed in real materials, including hair, a vest of pink silk, dancing slippers and a tutu. This is the greatest modern innovation ever experienced while visiting museums. She is dressed in ballerina with real clothes that brings the contrast between the world of fiction and reality. The clothes are relatively short indicating the sense of elegance and modernity that the artists wanted to portray.
In conclusion, the Little Dancer represents a groundbreaking piece of art. The artist employed a media necessary to convey the desired effect in the sculpture. The use of real materials such as clothes, shoes, and hair gives the piece an emotional appeal as something almost natural. Degas took realism to a new level by depicting the society in which he lived as practically scientific with no shade of hypocrisy. The bronze edition was an effort to preserve the original piece the death of Degas. This formal analysis of the Little Dancer helped change the way I view art. One is that I will make it a hobby to visit museums and develop a relationship with people who define a new meaning for the word art, with every new work they create. I also learned that it does not take many to appreciate a piece as quality art. This work of Degas, particularly, the wax piece presented an inspirational piece of art.
Work cited
Degas, Edgar. Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, modeled 1880–81; cast 1919–21, bronze, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Image © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Failing, Patricia. Unraveling the Mysteries of Degas’s Sculpture. ARTnews. 11 May 2011. Web 27 Feb 2014 http://www.artnews.com/2011/05/01/unraveling-the-mysteries-of-degass-sculpture/
Hudson, Suzanne. The Art of Writing About Art. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2014. Print.
