Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When did Degas sculpt his "Little Dancer"?
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (French: La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans) is a sculpture begun c. 1880 by Edgar Degas of a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet dance school, a Belgian named Marie van Goethem.
By 1877 Cassatt had come into frank conflict with the official French art establishment and had had both her submissions for that year rejected by the Salon. So when Edgar Degas invited her to join the Impressionists the same year, a group similarly disaffected by the "Salon" system, she accepted with alacrity. A planned 1878 exhibition did not take place, because of what Degas judged would be competition from the World's Fair held in Paris that year, but she did hold what amounted to a show of her own at the Spring 1879 Impressionist exhibition, exhibiting a dozen oils and pastels. Exactly which works these all were is not now known with certainty, but it is likely that "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair" was amongst them.
Degas was born in London, to film and TV screenwriter Brian Degas and radio and television presenter Maggie Clews, and lived in Little Venice. He was educated at Hill House School in Knightsbridge before spending several years "between parents" in Barcelona, Menorca and New York City. Moving back to London at the age of 12, Degas attended Emanuel School in Wandsworth, where, under the direction of Jeremy Edwards, he appeared in "Twelfth Night" (with a 15 year old Naveen Andrews), "Death of a Salesman", and "Arsenic and Old Lace". Degas also attended Junior Guildhall at the Barbican for several years under the tutelage of Charles Wegner. Degas credits both Edwards and Wegner with "planting theatre into me, and knocking the ego out of me" and was thrilled when years later they came to see his West End debut in "Stones in His Pockets".
Art historian Richard Kendall published a scholarly account of the history of Degas's sculpture, Degas and the Little Dancer, with contributions by Douglas Druick and Arthur Beale.[16] The BBC Two documentary The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, produced in 2004, closely examines the sculpture, the model, the circumstances of her life, and the critical reaction to the work. Cathy Marie Buchanan's novel, The Painted Girls, presents a fictionalised account of the life of Marie van Goethem, the model for the sculpture,[17] as does Carolyn Meyer's young adult novel Marie, Dancing[18] and Laurence Anholt's children's picture book Degas and the Little Dancer.[19] In 2014, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. premiered the stage musical, Little Dancer, inspired by the story of the young ballerina immortalized by Edgar Degas in his famous sculpture. On September 12, 2016, Dr. Gregory Hedberg presented a paper entitled "Unraveling the Mysteries of Degas’ Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen," at the French Institute, Alliance Français, in New York City.[20]
Auguste Rodin at first was very impressed by Monet's 'vibrating works' and Degas' unique understanding of spatial relationships. As an artist and an author of art reviews, Rodin published multiple works supporting this style. He claimed that Monet and Degas' work created the illusion "that art captures life through good modeling and movement". In 1881, when Rodin first sculpted and produced his own works of art, he rejected his earlier notions. Sculpting put Rodin into a predicament that he felt no philosopher nor anyone could ever solve; how can artists impart movement and dramatic motions from works so solid as sculptures? After this conundrum occurred to him, he published new articles that didn't attack men such as Manet, Monet, and Degas intentionally, but propagated his own theories that Impressionism is not about communicating movement but presenting it in static form.
Marie Geneviève van Goethem (or Goetham or Goeuthen; born 7 June 1865) was a French ballet student and dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet, and the model for Edgar Degas's statue "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" ("La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans").
Degas's paintings, pastels, drawings, and sculptures are on prominent display in many museums, and have been the subject of many museum exhibitions and retrospectives. Recent exhibitions include "Degas: Drawings and Sketchbooks" (The Morgan Library, 2010); "Picasso Looks at Degas" (Museu Picasso de Barcelona, 2010); "Degas and the Nude" (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2011); "Degas' Method" (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 2013); "Degas's Little Dancer" (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 2014) and "Degas: A passion for perfection" (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2017-2018).
Edgar Degas was both an avid photographer and a collector of Japanese prints. His "The Dance Class" "(La classe de danse)" of 1874 shows both influences in its asymmetrical composition. The dancers are seemingly caught off guard in various awkward poses, leaving an expanse of empty floor space in the lower right quadrant. He also captured his dancers in sculpture, such as the "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years".
Flaherty and Ahrens’ next musical, "Little Dancer", featured direction and choreography by Susan Stroman. Inspired by the famous sculpture, "Little Dancer, Aged 14" by Edgar Degas, the musical had a reading in 2010 at Lincoln Center Theater and a developmental lab production in June 2010. The show premiered at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater in October 2014. The cast included Rebecca Luker, Boyd Gaines and Tiler Peck. The musical is inspired by true events,[and] focuses on the relationship between a young ballerina and 19th century French painter and sculptor Edgar Degas. Much of the action is set in the Paris Opera Ballet. A re-working of the show, now titled “Marie” (after the name of the young ballerina), will have its west coast premiere at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre in March 2019.
The sculpture is one-third life size and was originally sculpted in wax, a somewhat unusual choice of medium for the time. It is dressed in a real bodice, tutu and ballet slippers and has a wig of real hair. All but a hair ribbon and the tutu are covered in wax. The 28 bronze repetitions that appear in museums and galleries around the world today were cast after Degas' death. The tutus worn by the bronzes vary from museum to museum.
Degas's only showing of sculpture during his life took place in 1881 when he exhibited "The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years". A nearly life-size wax figure with real hair and dressed in a cloth tutu, it provoked a strong reaction from critics, most of whom found its realism extraordinary but denounced the dancer as ugly. In a review, J.-K. Huysmans wrote: "The terrible reality of this statuette evidently produces uneasiness in the spectators; all their notions about sculpture, about those cold inanimate whitenesses ... are here overturned. The fact is that with his first attempt Monsieur Degas has revolutionized the traditions of sculpture as he has long since shaken the conventions of painting."
Degas's work was controversial, but was generally admired for its draftsmanship. His "La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans", or "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years", which he displayed at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, was probably his most controversial piece; some critics decried what they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming". In part Degas' originality consisted in disregarding the smooth, full surfaces and contours of classical sculpture ... [and] in garnishing his little statue with real hair and clothing made to scale like the accoutrements for a doll. These relatively "real" additions heightened the illusion, but they also posed searching questions, such as what can be referred to as "real" when art is concerned. The suite of pastels depicting nudes that Degas exhibited in the eighth Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 produced "the most concentrated body of critical writing on the artist during his lifetime ... The overall reaction was positive and laudatory".
To construct the statue, Degas used pigmented beeswax, with a metal armature, rope, and paintbrushes covered by clay for structural support.[10]
Edgar Degas ( or ; born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, ; 19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917) was a French artist famous for his paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings. He is especially identified with the subject of dance; more than half of his works depict dancers. Regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, he rejected the term, preferring to be called a realist. He was a superb draftsman, and particularly masterly in depicting movement, as can be seen in his rendition of dancers, racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and for their portrayal of human isolation.
Degas's style reflects his deep respect for the old masters (he was an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age) and his great admiration for Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. He was also a collector of Japanese prints, whose compositional principles influenced his work, as did the vigorous realism of popular illustrators such as Daumier and Gavarni. Although famous for horses and dancers, Degas began with conventional historical paintings such as "The Daughter of Jephthah" (c.1859–61) and "The Young Spartans" (c.1860–62), in which his gradual progress toward a less idealized treatment of the figure is already apparent. During his early career, Degas also painted portraits of individuals and groups; an example of the latter is "The Bellelli Family" (c.1858–67), a brilliantly composed and psychologically poignant portrayal of his aunt, her husband, and their children. In this painting, as in "The Young Spartans" and many later works, Degas was drawn to the tensions present between men and women. In his early paintings, Degas already evidenced the mature style that he would later develop more fully by cropping subjects awkwardly and by choosing unusual viewpoints.
By the late 1860s Degas had shifted from his initial forays into history painting to an original observation of contemporary life. Racecourse scenes provided an opportunity to depict horses and their riders in a modern context. He began to paint women at work, milliners and laundresses. "Mlle. Fiocre in the Ballet La Source", exhibited in the Salon of 1868, was his first major work to introduce a subject with which he would become especially identified, dancers.
Between 1878 and 1881, Degas drew, painted and sculpted Marie in artworks including "Dancer with Fan", "Dancing Lesson", "Dancer Resting", numerous preparatory sketches, and most famously in "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years". He frequently attended ballet performances at the Paris Opera and often observed classes at the dance school. By posing for Degas, Marie likely earned five to six francs per four-hour sitting.
The foundation owns a complete collection of 74 bronze sculptures by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, including a casting of "The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen." According to a number of experts, Degas, after meeting with criticism for his first sculpture "Little Dancer," had privately accumulated plasters for sculptures that were not found until after his death. They feature dancers, horses, bathers, etc. Apart from the M.T. Abraham Foundation, as of 2010 only four museums worldwide have near-complete collections.
Degas created a substantial number of other sculptures during a span of four decades, but they remained unseen by the public until a posthumous exhibition in 1918. Neither "The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" nor any of Degas's other sculptures were cast in bronze during the artist's lifetime. Degas scholars have agreed that the sculptures were not created as aids to painting, although the artist habitually explored ways of linking graphic art and oil painting, drawing and pastel, sculpture and photography. Degas assigned the same significance to sculpture as to drawing: "Drawing is a way of thinking, modelling another".
After Degas' death, his heirs (brother and sister's children[5]) made the decision to have the bronze repetitions of La Petite Danseuse and other wax and mixed-media sculptures cast. The casting took place at the Hébrard foundry in Paris from 1920 until 1936 when the Hébrard foundry went bankrupt and closed.[6] Thereafter, "Hébrard" Degas Little Dancer bronzes were cast at the Valsuani foundry in Paris until the mid-1970s.[7] Sixty-nine of Degas' wax sculptures survived the casting process. One copy of La Petite Danseuse is currently owned by the creator and owner of Auto Trader, John Madejski. He stated that he bought the sculpture by accident. That copy was sold for £13,257,250 ($19,077,250) at Sotheby's on February, 3rd 2009.[8] Another Hébrard Little Dancer bronze failed to sell at a November 2011 auction at Christie's.[9]
After Degas's death, his heirs found in his studio 150 wax sculptures, many in disrepair. They consulted foundry owner Adrien Hébrard, who concluded that 74 of the waxes could be cast in bronze. It is assumed that, except for the "Little Dancer Aged Fourteen", all Degas bronzes worldwide are cast from "" (i.e., cast from bronze masters). A "surmoulage" bronze is a bit smaller, and shows less surface detail, than its original bronze mold. The Hébrard Foundry cast the bronzes from 1919 until 1936, and closed down in 1937, shortly before Hébrard's death.
The original wax sculpture was acquired by Paul Mellon in 1956. Beginning in 1985, Mr and Mrs Mellon gave the National Gallery of Art 49 Degas waxes, 10 bronzes and 2 plasters, the largest group of original Degas sculptures. Little Dancer was among the bequests. In 1997, the Airaindor-Valsuani foundry in France began casting a limited edition of Degas bronzes from the pre-1903 Little Dancer plaster. One such Little Dancer bronze is owned by the M.T. Abraham Foundation, which, at times, is lent to other institutions and museums including the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.[15] Like the various states of many of Degas' prints, the Valsuani bronzes record the first version of Degas' Little Dancer, while the Hébrard casts record the second and final state of the sculpture.
Pople won the Glover Prize for landscape painting in March 2012 with a work that included the figure of Martin Bryant, the convicted perpetrator of the Port Arthur Massacre in the foreground of the landscape of Port Arthur. Later in that year, a work entitled "Degas's Night" which included Degas' sculpture "Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" on the background of red-light district in Darlinghurst, New South Wales was also the cause of controversy.
Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas met by chance at the Louvre in 1862, and after an intense conversation and Manet's demonstration on the art of etching, they became lifelong friends. Sometime in 1868 Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Manet is reclining on a couch and Suzanne appears to be seated at a piano. The mystery that surrounds the portrait by Degas is the fact that the painting has been slashed from top to bottom and right through the likeness of Suzanne. The supposition is that Manet, for an unknown reason, cut the painting. Manet might have slashed the painting because he did not like the way Suzanne was painted, or because he was feuding at the time with Degas, or he might have been angry with his wife. When Degas saw what had been done to his painting he demanded its return, and he took it back. Degas intended to re-paint the likeness of Suzanne at the piano and he reiterated his intention to Ambroise Vollard in conversation with him around the turn of the century. Degas never got around to fixing the painting and it remains in its slashed state in the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art in Japan.
His inspiration for dance is Remo D’souza, according to his remarks in the DID audition, he says, "Remo Sir is also a mindblowing dancer. Whenever I meet him, it's only dance that we discuss. He's a person with such wonderful dance techniques that one is left simply wondering ‘Ki kya idea hai bhai, yeh step to dhoom macha dega". He himself is a big inspiration to many budding dancers.
With Boyd Gaines as Degas, and Rebecca Luker and New York City Ballet principal dancer Tiler Peck as adult and young Marie, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts premiered the Susan Stroman, Lynn Ahrens, and Stephen Flaherty stage musical, "Little Dancer", from October 25 to November 30 2014.