Artwork Title: The little fourteen-year-old dancer

The little fourteen-year-old dancer, 1879-1881

Edgar Degas

Artwork Title: The little fourteen-year-old dancerArtwork Title: The little fourteen-year-old dancerArtwork Title: The little fourteen-year-old dancer
At the 1881 ‘impressionist’ group exhibition Degas unveiled a large wax sculpture of an immature ballerina (of which this is a bronze version), which he provocatively clad in real clothing. Critics were scandalised, accusing him of having dredged ‘the lower depths of dance’, choosing his dancer from among the ‘most hatefully ugly’. Degas’ model, ballet student Marie Van Goethem, the daughter of a tailor and a laundress and part-time prostitute, was later to abandon her dance studies and disappear into Paris’ underworld. Degas produced sculptures in his studio from the 1860s until the 1910s. He modelled them in wax, over steel wire and cork armatures. Never satisfied, he made, destroyed and remade them repeatedly, his primary subjects being thoroughbred racehorses, female dancers and women at their toilette. As Degas’ eyesight deteriorated in his later years, making 3-dimensional figures fulfilled a physical and emotiona.... (https://artblart.com/tag/edgar-degas-mendiante-romaine/)
Uploaded on Apr 12, 2013 by Rose Yao

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