2
Do we know what we touch? Do we know what it’s made of?
It is a mystery.
— Edgar Degas
A woman, which is to say a question, a pure enigma.
—Julien Gracq
EDGAR DEGAS AND MARIE VAN GOETHEM. One was born in 1834, the other in 1865. Both are in the studio, rue Fontaine, two living bodies, separated by thirty-one years and a world of circumstances. He has no children, she is of an age to be his daughter. He chose her because she is fourteen years old and looks to be only twelve, because she is neither very pretty nor very refined, because she has that slight look of insolence you often find in girls who have no other weapon against the world or their mothers. Did he find in her “that touch of ugliness without which there is no salvation,” as he would write to Henri Rouart about the lovely women of New Orleans?1 Did he like the ordinariness of her figure, because, to his way of thinking, “grace is in the ordinary”?2 Or was she, as it is believed, more charming than he represented her, with a less primitive face? After all, Degas had a reputation for painting without embellishing, even to the point of uglifying, especially in his depictions of women. When, in 1866, Manet saw the unbecoming portrait that Degas had painted of his wife, he was so furious that he cut out the offending section of the canvas. Degas had no interest in the clichés of feminine beauty. He did sometimes hire other kinds of models, young women of greater elegance and with more experience at the unrewarding job of posing for painters. One such was the famous Ellen Andrée, also a favorite model of Renoir and Manet; another was Eugénie Fiocre, a ballerina at the Paris Opera. But neither corresponded to his mental image at the time he turned to making his small wax statue, around 1879. He wanted this little rat, whose poverty he knew, and in whom he recognized, as he wrote in a poem, “the race of the street.”3
LET‘S IMAGINE THE SCENE. On the first day she posed, Degas had to accept the presence of Marie’s mother in the studio. The woman was no doubt eager to learn what advantage could be gained from her daughter’s new employment, and she was also anxious to preserve appearances. At the Paris Opera, as in the studio, the mothers pretended to supervise the fresh-faced recruits, all the while assessing the men. Degas had a different reputation than Renoir or Corot, who considered that a painting was finished when they felt the urge to sleep with their model. In his mid-forties and of a serious, almost haughty demeanor, he was not known to make gallant assaults on women. Besides, Marie’s elder sister had posed for him earlier and come to no harm…but she’d received no windfall either. He himself had lost his mother at the age of thirteen, was unmarried, and lived alone with his housekeeper, Sabine Neyt, who would die in 1882 and be immediately replaced by Zoé Closier, another faithful servant. His only company, then, was a woman who prepared his meals, kept house for him, and read him the newspaper. But Madame van Goethem insisted on attending the modeling session. Still water runs deep and dirty, as she knew well enough! Who could say what ideas might enter his head? But Degas refused. He didn’t want some old hen prattling away while he worked, destroying his concentration. He needed to be alone with his model. In the end, Marie’s mother agreed to stay in the pantry with the housekeeper. The main thing was to negotiate the best salary possible, higher than at the Paris Opera. And before long, she stopped accompanying her daughter.
Did Degas talk to Marie during the first modeling session? Did he explain his project to her? He had a reputation for brilliance and for voicing profound thoughts, and also for being an extraordinary conversationalist, fond of puns and jovial banter. But for him, “the Muses worked all day. At night…they danced, they didn’t speak.”4 Besides, why would he waste his gift for subtle conversation on this little girl, who “came from the oven half-baked”5 and was practically illiterate. His talk utterly charmed the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and prompted Paul Valéry to write reams of praise, but how much importance would he attach to conversing with this unpolished little rat? Degas, in any case, seemed to harbor an intellectual distrust toward women that closely bordered on contempt. Commenting on his Visit to a Museum, which was painted around the same time, Degas said he wanted “to give an idea of the boredom, despondency…and total absence of sensation that women experience in front of paintings.” It seems that Degas shared the misogyny that was rampant at the end of the nineteenth century, and which is visible in the writings of the Goncourt brothers and J.-K. Huysmans. In a collection called Certains, Huysmans wrote ironically about “ladies who, as everyone knows, take a lively interest in painting, which they understand almost as well as they understand literature — and that’s saying something.”6 Similarly, Degas attributed no esthetic sense to well-born women, or even any emotion, but it is hard to see him holding forth in this vein and expounding his “calculations on art”7 to Marie. More likely, he told her in a gruff voice what he expected of her. She was, after all, his employee at four francs a day. It was up to her to prove that she had more native intelligence than he thought, or at least some readiness at repartee, which would not be unusual in a child of the Paris streets. At least they would sometimes laugh together.
Once he’d asked her to put on her dance costume, he didn’t hesitate long over the pose. He’d already envisioned it, having seen it at the theater. He already had its outline in his mind, where “imagination collaborates with memory.”8 He didn’t make her perform an arabesque or an entrechat, some complicated choreographic movement — besides, she couldn’t hold the pose for long if he did.The pose imprinted in his brain derived more from childhood games than from dance, and it had been in his mind for almost twenty years. In the foreground of Young Spartans, a canvas dated 1860 — Marie was not yet born — the female character, whose inspiration derived from Degas’s reading of Plutarch, already makes that same slight backward movement, as though, still immature, she were hesitating between contradictory feelings about the boys in front of her. This youthful painting, to which Degas himself gave the full title Young Spartan Girls Challenging the Boys, offers a metaphor for the relation between the sexes. It was a canvas that the painter held in particular affection, since he placed it on an easel in his studio, where it greeted visitors for many years. According to Daniel Halévy, this was also the work that was with him at the end, in the room where he died, raising the possibility that this contrapposto was the last image he saw. Did this posture capture for Degas a kind of essence of developing womanhood, an in-between state that he himself perhaps knew, halfway between advancing and drawing back, attraction and refusal, an intimate paradox? At all events, one finds it in several of his works over the years with slight variations, and it is this figure that in our eyes stands as Edgar Degas’s secret signature, his cosa mentale, the material projection of his thought.
Degas demonstrated for his model how she was to pose; he mimed the gesture. “It was really very amusing to see him, raised up en pointe, his arms rounded, melding the esthetic of a ballet master with the esthetic of a painter,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt in his Journal.9 Then he corrected the pose on the model herself. He touched her arms to bring them behind her, and after that her right leg, in order to create an oblique line, and raised her chin to the desired angle. Marie would not only have to hold the pose but also remember it exactly, so as to re-create it in future sessions. Degas would dwell on this point: modeling is serious work, we are not here to pick daisies. Often, he would upbraid her: “You’re slumping, stand up straight!” or “longer in the neck,” or “the arms more extended,” and she would correct her position, just as at rehearsals. She wouldn’t have complained, the pose was one of rest — yet not entirely, as her arms thrust out behind her were not in a natural position. She would have preferred putting her hands on her hips, but it also could have been worse. She held her fourth position steadily. Degas could have worked from a photograph, as many artists already did. Delacroix, his idol, had recommended the technique to painters from the very earliest days of photography, as a way to avoid having to pay a model. But it was different for a sculptor. Degas needed Marie to be there, and he needed her to return. When he had adjusted the pose, he sketched her from every angle, highlighting his drawings in chalk and sketching in pastels on colored paper — a material that today has gone somewhat brown. It is moving to recognize the ribbon in the girl’s hair and, at the top of the sheet, her name, uncertainly spelled, in Degas’s hand: “Marie Vangutten,” and her address, “36 rue de Douai.” This intrusion of the real is troubling, it gives us access to a moment of pure presence: we are in the studio, and Degas is jotting down his little model’s contact information for fear of forgetting it. This is the beginning of their adventure together.
The many preparatory sketches indicate the technical difficulties the sculptor faced. He made twenty-six studies for the Little Dancer, both naked and clothed, from twenty or so different vantage points. He had difficulty, for instance, rendering Marie’s left foot from behind and started over several times; it shouldn’t look deformed. And how was one to make the curve of her arms look natural from every viewing angle? He also completed many close-up drawings of Marie’s face. In Four Studies of a Dancer, we see her in frontal view, a pretty, dark-haired girl with round cheeks, wide-open eyes, and a searching gaze. This is no doubt as close as we will get to her actual appearance, whereas the other drawings make her features seem coarser.
Why did Degas decide to sculpt rather than paint his model? His “bad eyes” were the reason he often gave at the start of the process. If “vision is palpation by the sense of sight,”10 he was now obliged to privilege his other senses. “I feel the need, now more than ever, to translate my impressions of form into sculpture,” he wrote the art critic François Thiébault-Sisson.11 His eyesight having deteriorated, he received “impressions of form” rather than a sharp vision of the outlines — in that sense, the term “Impressionist” may in the end apply to him. But other motivations were at play as well. Drawing a dancer, he wrote, was “to create a momentary illusion,” but yielded only “a figure without thickness, with no sense of mass or volume, something inaccurate.” Accuracy was a major concern, and truth an even greater. “Truth is something you only obtain by sculpting, because the technique places constraints on the artist, forcing him to overlook nothing essential.”12 The choice of sculpture was therefore not motivated, as is sometimes believed, by the desire “to relieve himself of the strain of painting and drawing” by resting his eyes. It was a constraint consciously assumed to obtain “more expression, more ardor, and more life” in his work as a painter. The experience of sculpture, the sensations it provided, were meant to bring greater truth to his pictorial practice and allow him to grasp something that drawing alone could not access. In his interview with Thiébault-Sisson, Degas even used the surprising term “documents.” If he “made wax figures of animals and people,” it was not, he claimed, in order to sell or even show the works: “These are exercises to get me going; documents, nothing more.” A little further on, he would use the word “experiment”: “No one will ever see these experiments…By the time I die, all of this will have disintegrated on its own, and so much the better for my reputation.”13
These words, spoken in 1897, are a little disappointing. Was the Little Dancer no more than a “document”? Was Degas somehow ashamed of this portion of his work, believing it of no importance and on the order of a sketch? Degas’s studio was littered with bits of wax, because he was always starting over with his “experiments” and was never happy with the result, as though completion were neither expected nor aimed at. Yet is there not in his depreciation of his wax sculptures an element of denial, of false modesty, of coyness? If he was telling the truth, why did he exhibit his Little Dancer in 1881? Why were 150 other statuettes found among his effects, in poor repair admittedly, but neither thrown away nor destroyed?
It’s likely that the scandal and poor reception that greeted the Little Dancer are what caused Degas, who became very cantankerous at the end of his life, to downplay his wax sculptures and claim to have made them “for [his] sole satisfaction” and not for public view, unlike his monotypes and paintings. But at least when it comes to the Little Dancer, the preparatory studies suggest the opposite progression: it’s the drawings that appear to be “experiments,” with their corrections, redrawings, and erasures. And it’s the pastels that “document” the future statue. Let’s not forget that while Degas studied painting with masters, starting in his youth, he was a complete autodidact in sculpture. In fact, thinking about the two arts, he seems to contrast surface and depth, the skin and the flesh. He asserts loud and clear that the surface, even when it seems the subject of his canvas, does not interest him, that his art does not consist of “caressing a torso’s epidermis”: “As for the frisson of skin, poppycock!” said Degas. “What matters to me is to express nature in all its aspects, movement in its exact truth, to accentuate bone and muscle, and the compact firmness of flesh.”14 What the hand grazes over in painting, it grasps in sculpture. The reality of living flesh came through as a result of kneading the flesh. “The most beautiful drawing,” said Degas, “the most carefully studied, falls short of full and absolute truth, and thus opens the door to sham.” He came close to “the full truth” thanks to modeling, “because approximation has no place there.” It is drawing, therefore, that prepares the way toward truth. Next, the hands touch the body, then they sculpt the wax, and that in turn touches the soul.
So it was that after completing various sketches of Marie in a tutu, Degas asked her to remove her clothes. She had to be naked. Only then would he be able to capture the body’s movement, its tensions, its density. Behind the screen provided for that purpose, Marie disrobed, setting her clothes down wherever she could. The studio was dusty and cluttered — Sabine was not allowed to clean there. Was Marie worldly-wise, as it is easy to imagine — a little rat tossed early into the scrum and used to hearing “words without a fig leaf”?15 Or was she sweet and submissive, used to obeying? Going by the sculpture, we might incline toward the first hypothesis, while the drawings of her face suggest the second. Was she embarrassed to stand naked before this stern man, alone with him in a jumble of easels, frames, armatures, tools, spirits, ballet slippers, powders, flasks and boxes, and cupboards filled with artworks? In fin-de-siècle Paris, relatively few models were willing to pose in the nude. The little rat of the Paris Opera was a profoundly paradoxical being, and that is why Degas chose to portray her. She lived three-quarters of the time in an artificial world where dance and lyric song expressed great tragedies against the backdrop of magnificent scenery, which was lifted on and off the stage by complicated and costly machinery. She displayed herself, both onstage and in the wings, for the pleasure of an elegant and libertine public, constantly aware of the huge disparities of the social order. During the performances where the rat had a walk-on role, she wore and admired costumes that inspired her to dream, and she used her body to interpret universal feelings. But she barely knew how to read, often had to remain silent or “speak only with her feet,” and afterward she went home to her hovel. Pulled between a make-believe world and a harsh reality, between opulence and insecurity, glitz and grime, the little rat, who was “as corrupt as an old diplomat and as naive as a savage,”16 embodied the tension that Degas sought to re-create under his fingers.
The model’s age produced another sort of tension or uncertainty, between the child and the woman, innocence and sensuality, that fascinated the artist. Without her clothes, Marie, as we see her in the nude studies Degas made in wax and charcoal, seems very young. With her large feet and flat chest, she looks undeveloped. Naked, the young model displays a visible kind of innocence, but Degas had to find a way of expressing all her ambiguity, of representing this urchin who was knowing about “vice but not life.”17 At fourteen, did Marie not have a natural modesty that made her more fragile? Or was she already used to the male gaze and the promiscuous display of her body? Perhaps she had already posed for other painters, more licentious ones. Or perhaps she was simply relieved to be performing work that was better paid and less tiring than training for the ballet, even if it meant holding a pose for hours. Antoinette, her older sister, must have told Marie about the endless sessions — as if Degas had no inkling of the pain his models endured. This was certainly true, for when he developed an interest in photography a few years later, he put his friends through agonies, making them pose for hours at a time, a practice they all complained about. Antoinette may also have warned Marie that the painter was bad-tempered, that he was never happy, that he could humiliate. But for Marie, this bearded man in a gray smock and cap, however unpleasant, was still less harsh than her ballet masters.
Degas approached Marie. He made a tight circle around her. “My nose close to my model, I examine her,” he said. The object for him was “to sum up [the model] in a small piece, but one whose structure is solid and doesn’t lie.”18 The imperative was always to arrive at truth. Solidity and firmness were correlates. Despite what one might imagine about ballet, Degas was more interested in earth than in air. Marie, like the eventual sculpture, was firmly planted on both feet, which were placed in rulebook position; her balance came from being anchored to the ground. Her small and lanky but well-muscled body resembled the bodies of our dancers today, giving her a “modern look, very Parisian and honed.”19 In order to measure and compare the different parts of the body correctly, Degas used a special instrument, a proportional divider, which frightened the models when he brought the point too close to their faces, sometimes gashing them. The jottings in his notebooks have the look of surrealist poems: “the hands are 9 noses,…the arm from shoulder to wrist is 2 heads,…”20 His measurements then had to be reduced to the scale he had chosen, which was less than life-sized. Yet respecting proportions was not his top priority. Without going as far as Ingres, his master, who blithely disregarded human proportions, once adding three vertebrae to an odalisque’s back, Degas took occasional liberties with anatomical reality. “The arms are too long, and this from the man who, yardstick in hand, measures proportions so meticulously,” joked Gauguin.21 In this case, it’s the Little Dancer‘s right leg that seems abnormally long, intentionally accentuating the sense of relaxed stretching. Although Degas did not make his sculpture life-sized, he could have done so, as Marie was less than five feet tall, but a recent scandal had rocked the art world. In 1877, Rodin was criticized for using molds taken directly from his models to make The Age of Bronze and other statues. Mold making was widely used in the nineteenth century by various scientific disciplines to preserve an object’s impression, but it was felt to detract from the artistic value of sculpture. The artist was meant to “represent” reality, not replicate it or trace it directly from nature. As Renoir put it crudely, a work shouldn’t “stink of the model.”22 That’s what made the difference between art and mere skill or technical expertise. Taking a direct mold from nature should be kept for anatomical models, which the sculptor might use for inspiration but nothing more. To ward off this line of criticism and avoid polemics, Degas altered the scale of his works. All his sculptures are less than life-sized.
Yet sculpture would seem to be an art that is inseparable from technique. In practice, after drawing a great number of preparatory sketches, what did Degas do in the midst of his studio while Marie struggled to maintain her pose? He sat on a kind of saddle, from which he often arose to approach his model. He touched her, traced the lines of her body, probed its density, poked at her joints, studied the insertion of the muscles. If we are to believe Gauguin, who visited Degas at work, the sculptor looked for the true in “the human carcass, the skeletal frame, its articulated movement.”23
From this coming and going, a wire skeleton would gradually take shape, roughly corresponding to the intended figure. Its different parts — the torso, legs, etc. — would be attached with cable or string to metal plates. In a moving letter to Henri Rouart, Degas wrote: “Do you remember one day, you were saying about someone that he no longer assembled, a term used in medicine for defective minds. I’ve always remembered it. My eyesight no longer assembles, or does so with such difficulty that I’m often tempted to give up and sleep, never to wake.”24 Perhaps this composite mannequin allowed the artist to avert his anguish.
A statuette of the naked Marie, three-quarters the size of the final work, shows that Degas made maquettes to start with, trying things, making corrections, improving this position, this proportion, and also experimenting with more or less elaborate technical solutions. Recent x-rays of the finished sculpture show it to be chock-full of random objects, starting with paintbrush handles. There were also rags, wood shavings, cotton wadding, drinking glasses, and cork stoppers, all taken from Degas’s immediate environment, a kind of haphazard improvisation in keeping with his model. His realism in fact draws its power from the perfect appropriateness of treatment to subject. His art, at once poor in means and meticulous in execution, a brilliant makeshift improvisation, was adapted to Marie, a little girl who was living in poverty and without sophistication but who nonetheless tried to achieve purity of movement. By raising the lowly to the level of art, by using crude techniques and common materials, Degas opened up and freed a vast space for creation. His eclecticism was revolutionary. A whole tendency of the art of the twentieth century would arise from this little cobbled figure. The year of its making, 1881, was also the birth year of…Picasso, for example.
Onto this metal armature, stuffed with whatever came within reach, Degas smeared by hand or with a spatula several layers of colored wax, whose smooth surface suggested skin, though without reproducing its natural color. It’s the same wax that, variously pigmented, would also cover the human hair that Degas had bought at the wigmaker’s, the specially tailored linen bodice, and the real ballet slippers, shaded a delicate pink. Only the tutu would be added intact to the finished sculpture. The beeswax, whose pellucid aspect catches the light, was mixed with clay and plasticine, which is a greasy, claylike substance that has the advantage of remaining soft for some time, allowing the sculptor to shape and reshape the material until it approached the ideal contour. This is why Degas refused to use more solid materials. “Have it cast? Bronze is for eternity. What gives me pleasure is always having to start over.”25 And according to Renoir, the reason Degas did not exhibit the work in 1880 as planned was that he wanted to reshape the mouth, which did not satisfy him. X-rays have shown that he remodeled the head several times, lengthening the neck proportionately with a wire coiled like a spring, and repositioning the shoulders. He had a reputation for endlessly reworking his pieces, inspiring his friend J.-É. Blanche to comment: “The slightest pretext served him to torture the form, to extract from it a cruel synthesis that joined the observation of a misogynist and a surgeon.”26
Is that the person Marie found across from her, an unappealing combination of the misogynist and the surgeon? Does the sculpture offer nothing more than the “cruel synthesis” of a clinical examination and sexist disgust? That’s not what it makes us feel, however. Still, the relationship between Degas and his model remains a mystery. Pauline, one of his favorites, claimed to have danced naked with him in his studio — he liked having such rumors circulate. But his letters and contemporary testimony show that, while the painter may have enjoyed good relations with the dancers who posed for him, it never went beyond the stage of well-meaning paternalism. He sometimes interceded with the management of the Paris Opera to obtain a salary increase for one or a role in a ballet for another; it amused him, nothing more. Most likely he retained a natural sense of class — and gender — superiority. We will never know what he thought of the First International Conference of Women’s Rights, convened in Paris in 1878. He was often to be found at cafés: the Nouvelle Athènes, the Rat Mort, which was open all night, the Brasserie des Martyrs, where ballerinas and bohemians mingled, whose company he much preferred to the crowd around Zola. But his life sank into an ever greater solitude. “A sickly man, neurotic, suffering from ophthalmia,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt. He is not known to have had any romantic attachments, whether long-term or short, a fact definitely out of keeping with his time and place. And when we consider how eagerly the Goncourt brothers seized on any sliver of gossip, the fact that there is none about Degas in their Journal is significant. Any number of nineteenth-century painters seduced or married their models, or made their wife their muse. Delacroix, one of Degas’s masters, describes in his Journal the “valiant battles” he waged with lust during sessions with his model, battles that he lost more than once: “How lovely she was, naked and in bed!”27 he wrote about one of his young sitters, a girl of fifteen. About another, he wrote more crudely: “I risked the pox for her.” Corot squarely made sex a corollary of studio work. Puvis de Chavannes would punctuate his sessions with his paid model by saying, “Would you like to see the…of a great man?”28 And Whistler, Monet, Rodin, Renoir, Bonnard, and so many other contemporaries of Degas also stepped over the line in their relationships with the young women who sat for them. The model who is at once muse and mistress has been a commonplace in art since the beginning.
Degas did not fit the stereotype. He was famously chaste. For the greater part of his life, his company at home consisted of two successive housekeepers, whose cooking and discretion he appreciated, period. He is not suspected of having taken any liberties. His celibacy has been attributed to his misogyny. His distrust of women stemmed, according to some sources, from contracting a venereal disease at a brothel in early youth. He made unflattering quips about women, and they were more provocative than those made by Corot, Renoir, and a good number of fin-de-siècle writers, who said such things as a matter of course. Renoir did not approve of educating the weaker sex, for instance, believing its effects might be terrible, namely “that future generations would make love very poorly”!29 Was Degas afraid of women? It’s possible, judging from the qualifiers he attached, though jokingly, to the women in his circle: “your terror-inspiring wife,” “your formidable spouse,” are phrases that appear often in his letters. Ambroise Vollard confirmed it: “A kind of shyness, mixed with an element of fear, kept him away from women.”30 Manet reported to Berthe Morisot the rumors circulating about the painter of dancers: “He is not capable of making love to a woman, either in speech or in act.”31 A woman friend defended “the artist without a muse”: “Extreme oversensitivity was clearly the source of his exaggerated fear that a woman, by the power of her love, might exert undue influence over his work.”32 He did at one point consider getting married and having children, but without much conviction. As he traveled to visit cousins in New Orleans in 1872, the idea crossed his mind: “I have a thirst for order. And I no longer look at women as the enemy of this new mode of being. Acquiring, even producing a few children, would that be too terrible? Not really.”33 He appears to have been motivated more by convention than by passion, however, and despite his fears of living a life of regret, he never brought himself to marry or cohabit. The reason must lie in his art. Degas put art making above all other forms of activity. It occupied his mind, his body, and his soul. All his desire, all his sensuality, were turned toward the work itself, and the model was only the work’s pretext. “Is not work the only good we can possess whenever we like?”34 he wrote in August 1882 to his friend Bartholomé. Paul Valéry distinguished between “finite passions,” such as love, ambition, and desire for money, and the infinite, obsessive passion that drove Degas: the desire to create and progress ever further in his art. “Is an artist a man?” he asked rhetorically.35 The answer he later gave was: “A painter has no private life.”36
For him, art transcended all else and was “made of renunciations.” This is what Vincent van Gogh grasped about him and, in crude terms, wrote to his friend Émile Bernard in August 1888: “Why do you say that de Gas can’t get hard? De Gas lives like a little law clerk and doesn’t like women, knowing that if he liked them and fucked them often, he would become deranged and inept at painting. The painting of de Gas is virile and impersonal precisely because he has resigned himself to being nothing more than a little law clerk with a horror of riotous living. He looks at human animals stronger than himself getting hard and fucking, and he paints them well, for the very reason that he makes no great claims to getting hard-ons.” Van Gogh continued: “If, for our part, we want to get a hard-on over our work, we must sometimes resign ourselves to fucking only a little…It’s enough for our weak and impressionable artist brains to give their essence to creating paintings.”37
Degas, if we are to believe Van Gogh and a fair number of his contemporaries, saw sex as nothing more than a threat to his art and women as “human animals,” females of the species. When he painted them bathing, as he said himself, it was “as if beasts were cleaning themselves.” With women of his own rank, he needed to diminish or even degrade them before he would paint them. He only agreed to paint the portrait of a quite beautiful woman friend if she would wear “an apron and a bonnet, like a maidservant.”38 There again, Renoir drove in the same nail: “Make a portrait of your concierge,” he said. “Have you ever seen a society woman whose hands you would enjoy painting? Women’s hands are lovely to paint, as long as they are hands that perform housework!”39 Women had no intellectual side for Renoir, nor did painting. The female body had another meaning for him: “I couldn’t work without a model. Even if I hardly look at her, she is absolutely necessary to me to plump up my eyes. I love to paint a bosom, the folds of a stomach…A breast is round, it’s warm!”40 The model, he also said, is there “to arouse me.” To arouse me, to plump up my eyes: we see the divide that separates him from Degas. The sensuality of Renoir, who spoke of “making love with his paintbrush,” finds no echo in Degas, for whom the body was without spirit or emotion. For him, the body never became flesh, which is to say capable of opening itself up, making room for another, being welcoming. It’s all no more than a false welcome — in brothels — or a veneer of beauty over a background of shabbiness — at the Paris Opera. Paul Gauguin admired the distance Degas maintained while giving himself entirely to his art: “Degas’s dancers are not women. They are machines in motion, with gracious lines, prodigious for their balance.”41 But for a number of his contemporaries, Degas was above all a voyeur who liked “to look through the keyhole,” a painter of dancers and brothel scenes because only vice interested and inspired him. His most famous metaphor supports this point of view: “Art is vice. You don’t marry it lawfully, you rape it.”42 Despite this provocative stance, Renoir praised Degas for “his quasi-religious side, so chaste, which puts his work on such a high level” and which “grows greater still when he looks at young girls.”43 Even his most fervent admirers recognized in him a kind of two-headed Janus. Daniel Halévy, the son of his friend Ludovic, considered him “one of the classical giants of virtue,” full of greatness.44 At the same time, he was shocked by Degas’s seeming cruelty and condemned his intention in the Little Dancer to “humiliate the poor girl, a little monkey dressed in tulle and spangled in gold, making a mockery of her.”45 The ambiguity that attaches to Edgar Degas, “divided against himself,”46 seems indissoluble. His mood swings were legendary, plunging him into the abyss: “I am sad, although lighthearted — or the reverse,” he liked to say. Known for his love of paradox in conversation, he was himself paradoxical to his acquaintance. A declared misanthrope, a man who presented himself as hard and misogynistic, Degas offered a schoolgirl’s image as a metaphor for his own deepest being: “I have locked away my heart in a pink satin slipper.”47
IN THIS CONTEXT, what is to be made of the Little Dancer? What is Degas telling us about her? That she is prone to vice? To crime? Really? Only that? If he had wanted to show us her budding depravity, would he not have sexualized her more? At that time, of course, the image of a dancer in itself represented vice. But so young? He specified her age in the work’s title, after all, though it was not usual. What meaning are we to assign to her half-closed eyes? Some have interpreted the girl’s offered face as an invitation to sensuality, and the forward thrust of her hips as a sexual signal, unsettling, a provocation that makes the viewer uneasy. But are the almost closed eyes of the Little Dancer truly watching the stranger who is about to grab her and kiss her on the lips? Are they not directed inward instead, oblivious to others? Do they not telegraph a kind of absence from the world? Unlike an artist such as Balthus, who, fifty years on, would make his passion for very young girls plain, Degas does not try to capture an erotic aura. When Balthus paints thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Lolitas in ankle socks with their underwear showing, their eyes closed, and stretching next to a cat, he means to capture, so he explains, the mystery inherent in adolescence at the dawn of womanhood and sexuality: “Adolescent girls stand for the future, before the transformation that will perfect their beauty. A woman has already found her place in the world, an adolescent has not. The body of a woman is already whole. The mystery is gone.”48 The sense we get from Degas’s sculpture is similar to what Balthus describes, but the young girl’s mystery is less overtly erotic, at least for today’s spectators. And if Marie stood for the future in the eyes of contemporary viewers, it was a closed-off future, leading only to her isolation. Her mystery therefore comes closer to what Rilke has suggested about Balthus, whom he described as “the painter of young girls, who are offered to every desire, but in a closed world that sends them back to their own solitude.”49 If we replaced “young girls” in this sentence with “dancers,” would this not aptly describe Degas’s world, and more specifically his Little Dancer Aged Fourteen? “The painter of dancers” created few landscapes and outdoor scenes; most of his subjects are found in performance halls, brothels, cafés — places where women, even when they are with others, even accompanied, are alone and with no opening to the world outside. Of course, the Little Dancer, being a sculpture, is freer in space than Degas’s painted subjects. But let’s not forget the glass cage that imprisoned her and the negative reception that greeted her when the sculpture was first shown. Is she not “offered to every desire,” even the most unacceptable, but then dismissed “back to her own solitude”? Her nearly closed eyes suggest the way a person who is alone might plunge into herself to escape from suffering. With her veiled gaze, her inner emotions are hard to discern; her raised chin would indicate that she has no wish to communicate with anyone. Although alone, she accepts her solitude. Her impudence is not a come-on but a refusal of engagement. She asks for nothing. On the contrary, she prompts us to ask questions. What is she thinking about? What is her inner world like? Do her face and pose reflect concentration or relaxation? Boredom or pleasure? Is she taking herself elsewhere, and if so, to what foreign parts? Is she filled with a sense of her own self or does she savor the vacuum at her core? What lies behind her closed eyes, her skinny chest? Tears, dreams, unspeakable emotions? Or a kind of absence, a beneficent nothingness in suspended time? The sculpture provides no answer. Degas provides no answer. The work skirts around all answers, just as the model stays in balance between childhood and womanhood, between innocence and lechery, between presence and elusiveness.
It’s not by chance that Marilyn Monroe posed next to the Little Dancer in 1956. The black-and-white snapshot was taken after the filming of Bus Stop, at the house of producer William Goetz, a wealthy art collector. The actress was thirty years old and already a star, but her face in the photograph, which is right up close to the little rat’s, has that pure, lost, searching look that her fans know well. This woman, the embodiment of childish femininity, but also of eroticism and sexuality, seems in perfect osmosis with the sculpted presence. Perhaps it is because, like Marie van Goethem, she was neglected by her mother as a child and is remembering the young Norma Jean Baker, an anonymous girl, who married at sixteen knowing nothing of the world. “You’re not a scared, lonely little girl anymore,” she wrote in 1955. “Remember, you sit on top of the world…it doesn’t feel like it.”50 Around the same time, she had a nightmare: she dreamt that a surgeon cut open her stomach, and the only thing he found was “finely cut sawdust, like that of a Raggedy Ann doll.”51 How can one not think back to Degas’s sculpture, its empty insides? Along with Goya, whom Monroe liked “for his monsters,” Edgar Degas was one of the actress’s favorite artists. And so, although she had never taken ballet lessons as a child like Audrey Hepburn and other Hollywood actresses, Marilyn had agreed two years earlier, in homage to the painter of dancers, to pose in a tutu for the famous series of photographs by Milton Green. Her appearance in those photos has a moving fragility. The sex symbol has been replaced by a vulnerable young woman, clearly tired and distraught, a ballerina overcome by loneliness, a soul sister to the Little Dancer.
What would Degas have thought of these black-and-white photographs taken less than forty years after his death? What would he have said, this man who seemed to run from feminine beauty, about Marilyn passionately gazing at his most scandalous work or wearing a gauzy white tutu in a way that reminds us of his most famous canvases? Would he have seen in her, as we have seen in his model, both angel and beast, monster and child? The question hangs in the air, just as his relation with Marie van Goethem remains uncertain and, through her, his relationship to the other sex generally, to sex, and to the body. Daniel Halévy has reported that one of Degas’s last gestures on his deathbed in 1917 was to grab, “with a strength no one suspected him to have,” the naked arm of his young niece, who was plumping up his pillow, and to examine it fiercely in a shaft of daylight, as though to wrest its secret from it.52
Years earlier, drawing close to a girl on the cusp of womanhood, had Degas been trying to pierce the mystery of his own anxiety? Except for a few horses, he spent his life observing, painting, and sculpting women, presenting them in the most banal typology of seduction — as dancers, prostitutes, and naked models — all the while stripping these stereotypes of their attendant attributes — beauty, grace, elegance, eroticism — to leave nothing but the weight of the real — tiredness, neglect, submission, and sometimes pleasure. Marie van Goethem carries the weight of this paradox on her slender shoulders. Mysteriously present yet preserving her distance, hovering between angel and beast, she fails to answer the question that Edgar Degas must have asked himself all his life: what is woman? “A woman, which is to say a question, a pure enigma.”53 All that survives of his quest is the impression of his fingers in the wax.
Or else — different hypothesis — or else this quest for the feminine, this unending investigation into the enigma of woman, into her essence behind conventional appearances, led him to considerations close to his home ground and hers, despite their differences in age, sex, and circumstance, a place that the two of them had in common — she, Marie van Goethem, and he, Edgar Degas. First, the ballerina and the artist both knew that hard work was needed to achieve a formal ideal. The little Opera rat endlessly rehearsed the same movements, while the sculptor made, unmade, and remade his ever imperfect maquettes. Another thing brought them together: their refusal to accept the judgment of others, the pride they took in showing insolence. Both pitted their solitude and desire for freedom against the world, one through his bitingly witty and ironic utterances, the other by her air of defiance and effrontery. Here again, Marilyn Monroe’s words provide an echo: “Alone!!!! I am alone. I am always alone no matter what. We should be afraid of nothing but fear. What do I believe in / What is truth / I believe in myself / even my most delicate / intangible feelings.”54 In the studio, Marie van Goethem and Edgar Degas shared a physical space that was also a symbolic locus, a bubble that subsumed even the work they performed together. This place that connects them is common to both art and life, to the art of life. In it, the couple creates a unique harmony, specific to them. Marie transmits its secret, Degas translates its mystery, their eyes shut, each in his or her own way. Their gaze — the blind man’s and the young girl’s — is internal, it creates its own vision, its universe, “a kind of infinity.”55 It allows one, while maintaining a degree of comportment (posture, form, syntax), to be infused with the animal grace of being alive, the joy of one’s pure presence in the world. Depth and intensity subsist behind the smoothest surface. Tension animates the flesh without leading to action. The pose could be standing or lying down, hands clasped behind one’s back or arms outstretched, nose in the air, eyelids lowered, whatever. It assumes a kind of happy passivity, “an inactivity of the mind, slowly allowing itself to be impregnated,”56 a welcoming disposition, an abandon that promotes one’s joy of living, creating, existing. It might be possible, desirable even, to imagine a little sunlight, as a letter from Degas to the Danish painter Lorenz Frölich invites us to do. In this letter, dated November 27, 1872, Degas explains artistic creation using an image from nature: “I’ll tell you that in order to produce good fruit, you need to espalier yourself. You stay that way all your days, your arms stretched out, your mouth open to absorb what’s passing by, what’s around you, in order to draw life from it.”57
True, Marie didn’t assume the shape of a tree in sunlight. But there’s something of the espalier in her, as there is in him. Solidly anchored in earth, her head elsewhere, she is alive. Beyond the puzzle of childhood, of the feminine, the little dancer above all expresses what a dreamed, an imagined life might be, subtracted from the vagaries of time, the weight of loneliness, the penalty of being weak and powerless — a life at once rooted in the earth and turned toward the sky. It is Degas himself, therefore, identifying at midlife with the little dancer, who appears in this masterwork. You could describe it thus: the eyes are shut like a blind man’s who sees with his whole being; the head is deaf to all criticism; the attitude has the insolence of someone who knows he is alone, someone concerned to capture the beauty of movement, while reveling in the sensation of being, a moment brimful of what is passing by. The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is him. Nothing seeps out, all is shut down and held tight, but it was certainly within a faded pink slipper that he locked his heart away — locked it away, perhaps, but while still beating time to the world. Like Marie, he doesn’t care what others say, and he despises critics, even the well-meaning ones, because to him creation is pure mystery. He doesn’t care about academicism, about pretending, about alarmed refusals. All that counts is art and one’s way of existing, of being there. Here they are then, the two of them together in this “upwelling of soul,” he and she like opened buds, the artist and the model, joined to a fugitive reality by the same desire, the wish to lead an espaliered life.