Degas’s Little Dancer, Marie van Goethem: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021.

Women’s History Month in Dance 107, 108, 109, 110, 111. The story of Marie van Goethem is both renowned and obscure: in that paradoxical combination, she is an emblem of the position of many women in dance. We know little of the real woman; vast amounts have been projected onto her.

Born in 1865, Marie van Goethem was a junior dancer of the Paris Opéra when Edgar Degas (1834-1917) sculpted her as “The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” (“La petite Danseuse de quatorze ans”). This was the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime, in 1880 (the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition); it was highly unorthodox, composed of mixed media, principally wax, but with a real bodice, a real ballet skirt, real ballet slippers, and a wig of real hair (107). 

The sculpture failed to please when it was shown in public. Some recognised its modernity; most disliked the lack of formal beauty and prettiness in this immature but real human. She was (so various voices put it) an ape, an Aztec, an incarnation of vice, a medical specimen. 

After the 1880 exhibition, Degas kept the original in his studio, where he also kept dozens of other sculptures. He lived to 1917; in art circles, his sculptures gained renown without being exhibited - the painter Renoir admired him above Rodin as the greatest sculptor of the day. 

None of his works, though, were made into bronzes until after his death. The many bronze copies of his sculptures found around the world falsify an essential fact of his sculpture: bronze, with its intimations of long duration, was the opposite of the wax and other ephemeral media with which he made his sculptures. The originals are in the Washington D.C. National Gallery; the first set of bronze copies is in the Norton Simon Gallery in Pasadena, California; the other bronzes -  made from the Norton Simon group - are valued at millions but may have little more authenticity than the museum-shop copies to be purchased at considerably lower prices.

Since Degas’s death, however, there has been a tendency to make “The Little Dancer” a symbol of all aspiring dancers, the very image of lovable talent in the bud, the dreamer of the dream. This is satisfying as long as you don’t really look at the sculpture or indeed at many other of Degas’s sculpted dancers. Particularly in Degas’s mixed-media sculptures of mature women in arabesque penchée, you see both beauty of line and failure in execution. With “The Little Dancer”, you see a teenage dancer in fourth position who fails in terms of elementary posture: Degas very precisely shows how Marie van Goethem doesn’t even stand well, even though there are many features about her (especially the arc of her arms behind her back) that reward study. 

Degas’s treatment of women is divisive and often misrepresented. Some see his female nudes as intrusively voyeuristic, many notice the elements of strain and disenchantment in his depictions of most women, and some discuss the elements in his life of misanthropy, misogyny, and pro-establishment reactionaryism. (He sculpted Marie van Goethem nude - see 108; same posture - before he then rendered her clothed.) Much nonsense is written about him: one book about “The Little Dancer” claims that Degas depicted Marie Taglioni, one critic claims that he depicted no dancers outside ballet (actually his paintings of Russian folk dancers are widely known). Some find only loveliness and charm in his dancers, others blame him for showing his dancer’s’ imperfections. I find him the great depictor of the working women of his day, a true contemporary of Ibsen in showing the conflicting pressures placed on women by nineteenth-century life. His dancers include women jumping through the air or standing on point, but many more of them are waiting, resting, tired.

Mainly Degas was a realist - but not invariably. Sometimes he slipped into caricature; on the other hand, he also felt that with ballet he was addressing a modern version of the classicism of the Greeks. “The Little Dancer” combines all these aspects of Degas’s art. She’s a very real student - and yet the arch of her waist and neck have a touch of cartoon (her nose half in the air, her spine tilting back), while her turnout and her arms let us see elements of the ideal geometries that transform a mere mortal into an image of larger essences. 

Like many artists with their models, Degas may have shown Marie van Goethem in multiple ways. She quite possibly was also the model for his statue “The Schoolgirl” (110). She has been identified as the older woman seen from behind, reading a newspaper rather than watch the dancing, in his painting “The Dance Class” (1880, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art - 111). In all these, van Goethem‘s mortal imperfections are part of her essence. 

An element of further poignancy here is that Marie herself disappeared without trace. She came from a working-class family, on the cusp of crime and prostitution as well as of the Paris Opera Ballet. She was dismissed from the Opéra for missing too many classes. Her elder sister Antoinette was jailed for stealing; her younger sister Charlotte remained at the Paris Opéra well into the twentieth century, teaching the later étoile Yvette Chauviré. But we don’t even know when or where Marie died. 

It’s odd to think of her and the older Mme Dominique (3-5 in this series) being part of the same world. Mme Dominique (1820-1885) was a dancer who had become an influential teacher and mature performer of silent roles; we know some things about her and her most celebrated students. We know far less about Marie van Goethem - and yet, thanks to a single work of art by Degas, she has been recycled in documentaries, books, a musical, a ballet, a play. Like Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring, Degas’s little dancer is now one of the most haunting and widely reproduced women in all history. 

Monday 29 March 

107: Degas’s “Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer”, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

108: Degas’s nude study of Marie van Goethem as the little dancer

109: Degas’s “Little Dancer” on display in Washington

110: Degas’s sculpture known as “The Schoolgirl”, dated as 1880 and perhaps depicting Marie van Goethem.

111: Degas’s “The Dance Class” of 1880 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). In recent years, the seated woman reading a newspaper in the foreground has identified as Marie van Goethem.