Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Age Fourteen

We're standing in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in a gallery entirely devoted to the work of Edgar Degas. The VMFA is really fortunate to have a large collection of sculpture, paintings, and works on paper by Degas. Thanks to the Mallon family, we're enjoying a large and important corpus of works by this very important artist. And it was always in the vision of Paul and Bonnie Mallon to have a specific gallery dedicated to Edgar Degas. That gallery has always been centered around the Degas dancer. So we have this bronze cast of this very iconic sculpture. So interesting to make this a centerpiece of the gallery because when we think about Degas, we don't normally think about sculpture. That was the surprise that happened to the heirs and to people responsible for doing the catalog of his work when they entered this studio after he had passed away to realize that it was filled with wax and terracotta sculptural work. So he's got all these waxes in the studio, but this sculpture alone gets exhibited at the 1881 Impressionist Exhibition. The version that got exhibited is today in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. When the public saw it in 1881, they were astounded. They said it was ugly. They said it was frightening, embarrassing. Obscene. In his use of fabric and ribbon and wax, Degas is using materials that are unusual and then taking this very mundane, anti-heroic subject of the young dancer, age 14, and she's not at all idealized in that academic tradition. Her body isn't perfect. The position that she holds her head in is awkward. Even her shoulders that kind of roll forward, even as she pulls her arms back, her legs in fourth position, there's nothing really graceful here. But something that I find really interesting is that the presence of large wax figures, at the time, you could see in fashion shops, was very much associated with commerce. What was shocking about it was that it was being presented as art, surrounded by lots of other works of art, and the original sculpture definitely recalled things in popular culture. Wax museum figures, like at Madame Tussauds. And in fact, a wax museum opened the following year in Paris. Indeed, the wax version of the sculpture is exhibited at the Impressionist Salon of 1881, where people knew that what they were seeing was modernism in the making. Even within that context of expecting to see modern art, this was challenging. This was going too far, yes. And let's talk about that word modern. What do we mean when we talk about this as modern sculpture? We can think about bronze sculptures as memorializing, as heroicizing, often presenting very ideal figures. But Degas has completely broken with those traditions to create something of his time. And that's part of what we mean by modern. At first glance, we're seeing a young girl in a position that not a lot of people would see in the context of a show at the opera. It's probably just she's trying to relax a form of tension that anyone would have before entering the stage. You're not supposed to see that. However, and that is where the embarrassing aspect is, you could be allowed to witness this if you were a man of substantial means who could belong to the group of what we called opera abonné. We know that he was fascinated with the world of the opera. What we often see in those compositions is the presence of those men dressed in black, often surrounding or surrounded by female dancers. And it's very interesting to notice that those figures of wealthy men who paid an extra to have special access to behind the scenes fascinate Degas. He is himself a bourgeois. He is himself an abonné. And he's aware of all the dark behind the scenes situations of lascivious gaze on those young women. There was a kind of assumption of sexual availability for these working class girls who didn't have the same kind of expectations of propriety that an upper class or a bourgeois woman would have. Then we can sort of understand that it would have been awkward for a viewer to come and look at. We're uncomfortable in the position that we've been placed in by the artist. In a way, not that dissimilar from Manet's Olympia or from Manet's later painting, the Bar at the Follies Bergère, where we're put in the position of a male spectator or of a male customer. And all of this is very much about the city and about women in public spaces and a kind of intermixing of classes. And the opera house had recently been built and it's a fabulously decorated building that was the centerpiece of the new modern Paris. And it's hard to overstate the importance of the kind of celebrity culture that surrounded people who performed there. Because it was made of wax, it was put under a bonnet of glass. So the reference to specimens of naturalia was also very much present in his mind, something that is very impressionistic, is the modeling creates that texture that is unperfect, very much flesh looking like, or like even meat. And he just puts it as an object to admire, reflect about. In that way, it's difficult to look at. I think that it's difficult to look at because there's tension and there's fragility and there is vulnerability. She knows she's looked at and she probably knows that she shouldn't be looked at and she probably doesn't want to be looked at, but there's nothing she can do. And again, it brings us back into in which position we are put by the artist when we look at her. Today, this figure might look beautiful. We don't have that expectation of the ideal in art the way that people in the 19th century did. And artists were always looking back to the past to create images of ideally beautiful, perfect figures. But what Baudelaire and so many artists did in the second part of the 19th century was to call for an art that demonstrated a kind of modern beauty, that you didn't have to go back to the ancients to find beauty or back to the Renaissance. There was beauty in the modern, industrial, urban world. Maybe we can also look at it from the perspective of beauty in the ugly, the idea that you go and look into the gruesome, to the uncomfortable repertoire of subjects to find scenes that will strike you with beauty, a beauty that's not immediate, that's not obvious, that's not calling for idealism or calling for perfection, but on the contrary, calling for emotions and shock. It also helps contextualizing the effort of the Impressionist generation to be modern. While at the same time, kind of very much being the heirs of earlier generations who had already started that conversation about what is modern, what is revolutionary, what is forward-thinking and bringing new themes on the table for people to enjoy art, to understand the perspective of creativity.