Edgar Degas Sculpture Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen - Essay Example

- I have tried sending you messages and tried reaching you through administration but there has been no response. I have been having difficulty finding sources on this topic and was trying to discover if you had any available that could be applied, or if you could recommend any. Below is as much of the work as I could complete without this information. The sources I have managed to find are not any more in-depth than what is cited below. Student name Instructor name Course name Date Edgar Degas' Sculpture Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen Modernity is often described as a collection of studies into the social processes that order the world we live in while remaining in a constant state of flux. If one is speaking with Marshall Berman, modernity is described as "a mode of vital experience-experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils-that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience 'modernity'" (Berman, 1982). It encompasses the social changes that are constantly taking shape, the way in which these changes are experienced and the reflection of these experiences in various circles. It is a world of definition and ambiguity, a world of static definitions and constant change. For Marshall Berman, the contradictions of modernity are characterized by a tendency to order space and time while simultaneously promoting their ruination and failure. Many of these concepts are uniquely applicable to Edgar Degas' only publicly displayed sculpture, a small wax figure of a young ballet dancer conveying a strong sense of personality entitled "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen." In describing the modern human, Berman says "they are moved at once by a will to change - to transform both themselves and their world - and by a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart" (Berman, 1982). Through this statement, it is easy to see the conflicting emotions of an individual undergoing change of any kind. Relating it to everyday life, an individual might strive to pursue a dream career by quitting their job and launching a business of their own, but at the same time be paralyzed by the fear of this new venture failing, or worse, succeeding. Either way, it represents a change in the way things have been. "To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead" (Berman, 1982). These were the ideas emerging in the world as Degas was working in his studio and the ideas that have been discovered within the small shape of his tiny dancer. The origin of the statue is not fully known. According to the foremost expert on the statue, Richard Kendall, the artist created the statue between the years of 1878 and 1881 when he was in his middle forties. This was at the height of his involvement with Impressionism and his sculpture is considered the first major sculpture associated with the movement. Impressionism is largely considered to be a movement within Modernism in which emphasis was placed on the emotional content of the image more than the physical content. Artists working during this period dedicated themselves to the depiction of human emotions as discovered through the colors and lines of their work rather than through the symbols and forms of the photograph and the machine age. In doing so, these artists were attempting to dig deep into the feeling of human experience as a means of discovering the true reality of what being human meant; in other words, to express the sublime. Lyotard (1984) describes this process as an attempt "to make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible" (78). This sublime element is brought out as the viewer's imagination becomes engaged with the various elements that remain visible or understandable. For artists like Degas, the prospect of attempting a sculpture after having had no training and spent a lifetime dedicated to painting may have been conceived as a new means of capturing this sublime element through the sense of wonder and imagination found through the focus on new, rounded forms. As artists concentrated on the essence of the experience of the art and its creation instead of the symbolic form, they discovered that emotions were generally felt the same universally even when technical elements such as symbols, shapes or colors were understood differently by different cultures (Mourad, 1997). This meant that the process of triggering an emotional response could be approached in the same way almost universally even though the forms might need to be changed. While the specific reasons and purposes for which Degas created this sculpture remain unknown, there are elements of the piece that are known. According to Kendall (et al, 1998), the model for the sculpture was Marie van Goethern who was a dancer at the Palais Garnier and was the daughter of a Belgian family then living in Paris. According to reports, her mother was a laundress and her father was a tailor. The family lived on the lower slopes of Montmartre in the rue de Douai. This placed them very close to Ludovic Halevy, a close friend of Degas and a block or so away from Degas' rented studio and apartment (Kendall et al, 1998: 42). Living as close as she did to the Degas apartments and attending the dance classes at the opera, Marie and her two sisters, Antoinette and Louise-Josephine, were able to pose on a regular basis for the artist. "Given that Marie reached the age of fourteen in February 1878 and that the Little Dancer was almost complete in April 1880, it would appear that the extraordinary cycle of drawings related directly or obliquely to the sculpture - some ten sheets in all, incorporating around thirty complete or partial studies of the figure - were made during this two-year period, if not in a more concentrated burst of activity" (Kendall et al 15). A number of Degas' later works reveal this same model as she grew older although she never seems to have made it as anything greater than a middle-ranked dancer. The sculpture was first exhibited in 1881 at the sixth Impressionist exhibition of Paris (Muehlig, 1979). The original wax figure stood approximately 97 cm tall and the figure itself was modeled in the nude. The figure is that of a young girl standing with one leg stretched straight out in front of her, flat-footed, which throws her hips into an unique angle as the majority of her weight is thrown onto the back foot. Her hands are clasped behind her back with her fingers intertwined. Her head is lifted up with her chin raised defiantly toward the ceiling. When she was placed on display, the statue was dressed in 'real' clothes, wearing a tiny tutu, bodice, tiny dancing shoes and a wig of real hair tied with a silk ribbon. This blend of 'real' elements placed on the unreal figure of the little dancer created a sensation when it was revealed. "Regarded by some of his contemporaries as a masterpiece of realism, by others as hideously ugly and by yet others as a brilliant fusion of history, science and popular culture, [the statuette] was an extraordinary technical achievement for an individual with little previous experience in sculpture" (Kendall et al: 1). The combination of these elements made the statue undeniably a part of the Modern movement, which its exploration of 'real' human existence as something that exists within more than without, yet with the necessity of physical reality in her form and costume. That she could be dressed up like a real girl added even more reality to the figure. Having been received in somewhat contradictory light, Degas took his statue back home with him where it stood for the remainder of his life, often being commented upon by friends and visitors. "At the 1881 Impressionist exhibition, the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen was the latest in a series of bravura performances, here pitting the largely self-taught modeler against a two-thirds life-size statuette and all the demands of construction, elaboration, and the integration of artificial and 'real' materials it entailed. Seizing yet more professional terrain, Degas asserted his originality and his dominance of an aggressively modern theme - as well as his prominence in the Impressionist enterprise - at a single stroke" (Kendall et al 5). Critical appraisal ranged from the highly complementary assessments of the figure as blossoming, bold and original (Thomson 1988: 135) to the strongly negative, describing her as ugly and indelicate (Muehlig 1979: 7). The wax figure was recast in bronze and a small number of copies were created, which are now distributed in various places throughout the world. The figure on display at the Joslyn Art Museum is dressed in a way intended to reflect the original construction as Degas envisioned it. "For the first time since the work was exhibited by the artist, the redressed Little Dancer Aged Fourteen from Joslyn Art Museum - with its full, knee-length skirt - presents us with an experience of the sculpture comparable to that of Degas' earliest audiences. Sculpturally more buoyant, visually more defined and sartorially more plausible, the figure offers new challenges to the museum visitor and specialist alike" (Kendall et al 2). Although the figure is accepted as relatively simplistic upon first sight, deeper investigation reveals unexpected new meanings applicable both during Degas' era as well as to successive generations as the figure has been studied over time. "The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen was the exemplification of a decade of study, of an art 'made for renunciations' (as he was later to call it) that can be followed across the years" (Kendall et al 5). "At least seven years before the unveiling of Degas' sculpture at the sixth Impressionist exhibition, similarly posed young dancers can be found in assorted groups of drawn or painted performers, their backs erect, their arms behind them, and a single leg thrust forward ' Gaining also in substance as Degas refined his mastery of light and shade, this intensely realized cast of dancers seems poised between the pictorial and the sculptural domain" (Kendall et al 5). Examples of this earlier study are found in Dance Class (1871) and Ballet Rehearsal on Stage (1874). "Even at this date, however, it is apparent that the near-symmetrical qualities of the posture answered a deep need in Degas' compositional project, allowing him to contrast a static figure with a more animated one, or to introduce a vertical note among the 'contortions of legs and dislocations of hips and feet' evoked by Chesneau" (Kendall et al 8; speaking about the 'ballet rehearsal' painting mentioned above) Tracing the figure through a number of Degas' paintings and sketches, Kendall (et al) asserts "The same statuesque form reappears in increasingly refined pastels and an entire series of friezelike canvases that occupied Degas into the 1880s and beyond. By now spawning offshoots of its own in every medium at the artist's disposal, including further wax sculptures, this resonant image effectively carried the echo of the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen into the artist's last years" (Kendall et al 8). Kendall et al illustrates how Degas captured the transitional moment of a young girl's life within the lines of the statuette. "As with so many aspects of its identity, the place of the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen in this professional saga is defined only by its imprecision, the model seemingly poised between childhood and maturity, between the potential of a highly trained young body and the moment of its artistic fulfillment. Typically, a fourteen-year-old pupil would have been studying for six or seven years and making frequent if largely decorative contributions to stage productions, perhaps as one of the disheveled sprites in the background of At the Theater: Woman with a Fan, the fairy presences among the light and color of the Baltimore Dancers of the attendants in Dancers in the Wings. Fourteen was specified as the age when the 'rat was no longer a rat' by Nestor Roqueplan, a mid-century director of the opera, and Martine Kahane has referred to the 'transitory state' - both sexual and technical - of this phase in a dancer's career. It is unlikely to have been a coincidence that Degas chose such a moment as the subject of his sculpture, rejecting the pre-pubescent innocence of the ballet pupil in Ballet Girl in Repose, on the one hand, and the ready-formed elegance of the etoile - which attracted so many of his successors to the theme - on the other. In his sequence of drawing of Marie van Goethem, we seem to watch as Degas negotiates her uncertain status, defining a long-limbed, flat-chested adolescent in Three Studies of a Nude Dancer, responding to the figure's slightly fuller forms in Study of a Nude and progressing to the rounded, assertive hips and shoulders of the emergent woman in the later clothed variants. If in these latter studies her transmutation is accentuated by the curves of the dancer's costume, the possibility that Degas recorded a real evolution in the girl's body over the months and years of the sculpture's fabrication" (18-19). The author provides a brief summary of the various interpretations of the lines of the statue as she was received by her critics. Many of these focused on the austere lines of her limbs, claiming that she was either younger or older than the title of the statue claims: "The proof that this young girl of fourteen years is not real ' is that she has nothing of youth about her; her thinness is dryness, it is the thinness, the stiffness of age, not of childhood" (Elie de Mont cited in Kendall et al 19). Other critics felt her harsh lines were the result of an unfortunate life spent in the gutter that made her old before her time while others recognized in her the harshness and damage inflicted upon the body as a result of the training she's received as a dancer. However, Kendall argues with these points of view indicating that looking at the actual ideals of the age in choosing 'ideal' dancers, the statuette indicates Marie might have been among the ideal forms for the dance. "Far from being a poor specimen, the attitude of Marie van Goethem suggests that she would have been among the more successful products of the opera dance school, her proportions considered near-ideal and her limbs already well adapted to the trials ahead. Dance instructors of today still value many of the qualities she exhibits, such as the ample 'turn-out' running from foot to hip, the supple back, flexible ankles, and long legs and arms, irrespective of their contribution to her glamour and poise" (20). "Not for the first time, it would appear, we find ourselves confronted by visual information about the Little Dancer that is tantalizingly opaque; by a pupil who does not practice, a performer who is not represented on stage (such a pose would be inconceivable in a ballet production), and a tired athlete who is not fully at ease. Tangential thought they may seem, such features of Marie van Goethem's position have a direct bearing on the detailed appearance of the sculpture and on its reception by Degas' contemporaries. If there is no implied audience, there is hardly a need for gorgeous costume or the continuous, simpering smile urged upon debutantes; if the model is not understood to be in class, she does not need to follow the textbook or show herself to best advantage; and if she is caught in some in-between world that is neither rehearsal nor recreation, she might well retreat into her thoughts, behind the 'half-closed eyes' that were noted by one observer in 1881" (Kendall et al 20). "In his wax statuette, Degas has again side-stepped the obvious, spurning the perfection of the performance and the anonymity of the rehearsal hall for a more ill-defined moment, a glimpse of the model when she is self-absorbed and somewhat off her guard" (Kendall et al 21). Works Cited Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Kendall, Richard; Edgar Degas, Douglas W. Druick, Arthur Beale, Joslyn Art Museum. Degas and the Little Dancer. Yale University Press, 1998. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mourad, R.P. "At the Forefront: Postmodern Interdisciplinarity." The Review of Higher Education. Vol 29, N. 2, (1997): 115-140. Muehlig, Linda D. Degas and the Dance, 5-27 April May 1979. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art, 1979. Read More