A while ago I went to see the Scottish National Gallery’s A Taste for Impressionism: Modern French Art from Millet to Matisse. As someone who often prefers sketches to high-glossed paintings, impressionist art really calls to me. Give me bourgeois ennui if it comes with sunshine or translucent opera gloves. Give me the politics of the gaze and workplace alienation. Give me the art of modern life, over a hundred and fifty years ago.
In the exhibition, I was drawn to works by Degas (who preferred the term ‘realist’). His pictures of ballet dancers, mostly students or the corps de ballet, often capture moments before or after performance. Rehearsing, standing in the wings, sitting on the piano. They capture what I find most appealing about the idea of ballet and theatre: the world behind the scenes.
I had two books as a child featuring Degas. One was about three kittens born at the Paris Opéra called Bijou, Bonbon and Beau, causing havoc and making their way into artworks. The other told the story of Degas’ model Marie van Goethem and the creation of one of his most famous sculptures: La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Little Dancer of Fourteen Years).
There’s an irony to these storybooks, with their charming illustrations imitating the style of an irascible misogynist whose antisemitic views were astringent even for his contemporaries. This romanticisation of ballet as a fantasy marketed primarily to little girls sits uneasily with the Parisian historical context, when working class dancers were referred to as les petits rats (little rats) and expected to provide sexual favours for the gentlemen peering at them through opera glasses. In viewing the pictures, we participate in this voyeurism, an artistic trick beloved of the time, inviting us either to enjoy or feel uncomfortably complicit.
Although her body is immortalised in museums, we know little about Marie van Goethem. She likely wasn’t paid much for her modelling. Shortly after the sculpture was put on display, Marie was dismissed for missing too many dance lessons, last mentioned in the historical record frequenting taverns of ill repute. Art historians have picked up on the ambiguity of Degas’ representations of dancers, particularly the Little Dancer. Are they slightly mocking, even cruel?
When the Little Dancer was first exhibited in 1881 (a painted waxwork, not the bronze casts we see today) critics responded with dehumanising language, reflecting ideas of the working-class and poor as occupying the lower rungs of evolutionary development. Marie’s features were deemed to suggest a life of ‘vice’ and depraved moral character. One review described her as having ‘something of the foetus about her, and one is tempted to enclose her in a jar of alcohol’. Another: ‘This poor little girl is like an incipient rat, who thrusts her little muzzle forward with bestial effrontery.’ In one of his documentaries, Waldemar Januszczak asks whether this was part of Degas’ intent, likening the petit rat to a real rat. Was the Little Dancer ‘a cruel Darwinian pun’?
The full list of media for the Washington National Gallery of Art’s Little Dancer reads slightly spookily, as if this version of Marie is a wax effigy for manipulation:
pigmented beeswax, clay, metal armature, rope, paintbrushes, human hair, silk and linen ribbon, cotton and silk tutu, linen slippers, on wooden base
Degas’ use of real tutu, wig and Marie’s own hair ribbon enhance the work’s unnerving doll-like quality. It also reminds me of later artists’ purposing fabric and tights in sculpture, like Louise Bourgeois or Sarah Lucas, playing with ideas of objectification, attraction and repulsion.
For me, the association between textiles, care and intimacy, the soft tactility of fabrics like satin and tulle, does create a sense of dignity and tenderness in the Little Dancer, added to by the slight wrinkling of Marie’s tights on her legs. After all, despite Degas’ misogyny he mentored and collected the work of artists Mary Cassatt and Suzanne Valadon. Still, whatever empathy Degas had didn’t do much for Marie’s material circumstances, although we don’t know for certain what happened to her.
Ballet has a conflicted image in today’s mainstream culture. A popular ambition in children’s media, yet frequently constructed onscreen as a kind of artistic mafia, sexualised and punishing. Degas’ art shines a light on our contradictory cultural constructions of this art form, the enduring fascination of glamour and grubbiness.
Reading recommendation: Elizabeth Guffey on disability and Impressionism:
‘“Monet had cataracts.” “Degas went blind.” “Renoir was paralyzed.” Indeed, the history of Impressionism is often told as a history of impairment hiding in plain sight. But each time such legends are repeated without carefully considering how disability and ableism shaped both Impressionist art and its reception, we miss the opportunity to place Impressionism within a broader critique of the idea of normalcy itself.’
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