The three-foot-tall wax figure, enclosed under glass, wears a silk bodice, a short tulle and gauze tutu, and fabric ballet slippers, and has human hair tied in a satin ribbon. The result elevates and honors Marie, while searching for a truth beyond reach.ĭegas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen premiered at the Salon des Indépendants in April 1881-referred to now as the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition, a collective of artists who, in response to near-universal rejection, renounced the conservative constraints of the official salons.
Exploring scant personal records in relation to well-documented accounts of conditions among fin de siècle Paris’s working poor, Laurens attempts to excavate something of Marie’s life. Linking model to artist, Laurens theorizes Marie’s life via Degas’s archives and notes.
In Camille Laurens’s book of the same name, Marie takes center stage, alongside the author’s fascination with her subject, in an engaging work that combines elements of #metoo, “ history from below,” critical art history, and autobiography. Her death and the scope of her life remain unknown, but she is immortalized, trapped forever in adolescence, in Edgar Degas’s famed sculpture, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. Marie Geneviève Van Goethem, aka "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen" by Carolyn Merrittīorn June 7, 1865, in the then-slum of Montmartre, Paris, to impoverished Belgian immigrants, she was the middle of three children.
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