Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

August 15, 2018
French novelist and essayist Laurens (Who You Think I Am, 2017, etc.) considers the history and meanings surrounding Edgar Degas' famous sculpture and the young woman who posed for it.Young dancers gazing wistfully at Little Dancer Aged Fourteen will be sobered by this biography of the young woman, Marie van Goethem, who posed for its creator. In the book's effective opening third, Laurens vividly sketches out a history of the abuses of child labor in Paris in the 1880s. At 14, Marie was not so much an aspiring and inspired dancer at the Paris Opera as someone forced to play walk-on roles to help support an impoverished family. At the barre, she joined other illiterate young girls, known as "little rats." To supplement their meager pay, the teenage girls were encouraged to work the opera house's foyer and its backstage areas, performing sexual favors for patrons. The girls' mothers, Marie's probably included, encouraged the assignations. No wonder, then, that Marie willingly endured physically painful postures for sculptor and painter Degas: The assignment paid better wages and freed the young woman from the advances of old men (Degas was largely indifferent to any sort of relationship). No wonder, too, that one critic described Degas' rendering of Marie's face as "sickly, grayish...old and drawn before its time." Laurens brings her commentary up to date in a telling comparison of Degas' work to images of Marilyn Monroe. In 1956, Monroe donned a tutu and posed next to the statue. The photos suggest, the author writes, "a ballerina overcome by loneliness, a soul sister 'Little Sister.'" The narrative's final third fails to cap the work, trailing off into unanswerable questions about Marie's fate as a woman; the faint clues Laurens found about Marie's adult life led nowhere. A somewhat opaque personal commentary describing the author's deep feelings for the statue and its subject ends the work on a note of melancholy.A tale of artistic endeavor with more agony than ecstasy--an insightful but uneven long-form scholarly essay.

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October 15, 2018

With this well-researched rumination, novelist and essayist Laurens contemplates the backstory of the Edgar Degas sculpture Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. The original statue that debuted in 1881 was made of wax, with real hair and clothes, much like a doll. Marie Genevieve Van Goethem, the subject of the work, was an impoverished young dancer for the Paris Opera who modeled for Degas. Enlisting the help of a librarian at the Paris Archives, Laurens delved deep into the record to reconstruct Van Goethem's life, weaving art history and French culture into the narrative. Not all of the author's theories are verifiable, but her ideas are intriguing--she explores how we regard the sculpture, how Van Goethem may have felt, and her expression. VERDICT Laurens's fascination with her subject brings this universally recognized piece of art to life. Recommended for all libraries, particularly those with art history and dance collections.--Barbara Kundanis, Longmont P.L., CO

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Starred review from October 15, 2018
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. 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. 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. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)