The Story Behind the Statue “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”
Edgar Degas’s work was groundbreaking for its time, but critics despised the statue.
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen wasn’t widely celebrated during Degas’s life. He only put it on display once, where it received mixed — but mostly negative — reviews, as most critics did not find the statue particularly noteworthy. Art critics also fretted over the so-called average looks of the statue’s face, many of them even insulting the model’s beauty.
Although they admired the realism of the sculpting, they disliked the looks of the model enough to recommend that it not be featured in galleries again. Degas retired the statue immediately after its first exhibition, and refused to bring it out again.
However, Degas’s work was certainly groundbreaking in multiple ways. For one, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is dressed in real fabric: her clothes match that of the model rather than being sculpted onto the body of the statue, like other sculptures of the time. The subject of the piece was also novel: a young girl by the name of Marie van Goethem.
Van Goethem was a dancer for the Paris Opera Ballet, which, although it may sound quite glamorous, was not a wonderful place to work during childhood. The young girls were called “opera rats” and came from poorer backgrounds, typically struggling…
