![]() ![]() ![]() Degas, Laurens argues, was fascinated not with the ravishing ballerina but with the laboring dancer, “the wearying work of rehearsals, the dancer’s body bent and weighted down with effort.” Degas’ sculpture as well as his paintings of ballet dancers-or opera rats, as they were known-broke the rules of both polite society and academic art to powerful and lasting effect. So explains author Camille Laurens in Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a new book on the life of Degas’ most easily recognizable subject, whose name Marie van Goethem is nowhere near as. In focusing on Degas’ model, she spins a compelling and tragic tale of poverty, power, and the arts that raises questions about the artist’s responsibility to his subject. In this nonfiction work about the anonymous young woman who posed for the famous impressionist artist, French novelist Laurens ( Who You Think I Am, 2017) frankly explores “the louche world” of dance in nineteenth-century Paris, the exhausting and vulnerable job of the artist’s model, and her own journey as an amateur researcher. ![]() Not many people today look at Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, Degas’ iconic sculpture of a young girl in tutu and point shoes, and think “criminal.” But in 1880s Paris, that is exactly what the critics saw. ![]()
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