Where is degas little dancer

Stupid question—as though the work counted for more than the life. It would have been no feather in her cap to know that, a century after her death, people would still be buzzing around her in the high-ceilinged halls of museums just as the fine gentlemen in the foyer of the Paris Opera did, that she would still be examined up and down and from all sides, just as she was in the seamy dives where she may have sold her body on orders from her mother—her frail body, now turned to bronze.

But maybe it did make a difference, maybe she did think about it sometimes. Who can say? Did she imagine such a future for herself—a fame that the ballet world would never grant her? After all, little girls do have their dreams. What I hope, as I look at her in triptych on a postcard—back, front, and profile—bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is that she was oblivious to all that was said about her during the first exhibition of the Little Dancer.

Does the work of art console us for what happens in life? Certainly, the little dancer was not expounding on the relation between actuality and representation. Nor was anyone else. And this year, Degas had brought it to the exhibition late, fourteen days after the opening.

An empty glass case, the subject of much speculation, stood in as a placeholder, while rumors circulated that the sculpture would not be in marble or bronze, nor even in plaster or wood, but in wax. Normally, wax is a stage in the process of making the final work, but the artist was choosing here to exhibit it as the end product. And it would be dressed in real clothes, like a doll.

Wearing actual ballet slippers. What an oddity! Finally, the public was getting a chance to see it! In the midst of canvases by Pissarro, Cassatt, Gauguin, the figure stood in a glass case, which further piqued curiosity. They pressed forward eagerly, approaching their faces, their monocles, to the transparent divider; they frowned, they backed away, what the devil, hesitated, and either fled or stood transfixed.

Almost all who saw it, sensitive and cultured as they were, reacted with horror to the Little Dancer. What a monster! Said others. An abortion!

An ape! She would look better in a zoological museum, opined a countess. She has the depraved look of a criminal, said another. Such depravity! Partially tinted bronze, cotton tarlatan, silk satin, and wood. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. Havemeyer, Degas's original sculpture above, left was made of unorthodox materials: tinted beeswax skin, a human-hair wig, a cotton bodice, linen ballet slippers, and tarlatan tutu. The only sculpture he exhibited during his lifetime, it was both hailed and criticized for its uncanny realism.

On a visit to the artist's studio with Mary Cassatt in , Louisine Havemeyer asked to purchase the figure.

Degas toyed with the idea of making a cleaner wax copy or casting it in bronze, but Havemeyer wished only to obtain the original, with which the artist was unwilling to part.

Upon his death in , Degas's heirs decided to reproduce his sculptures in bronze, stirring up debate about the artist's intentions.

In addition to Little Dancer , many of the artist's wax, clay, and plastilene sculptures were discovered in damaged or fragmentary condition in his studio. To stay true to the originals, the Paris foundry A.

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