The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Edgar Degas · Petite danseuse de quatorze ans · a standing figure of a girl in pigmented wax over an armature, under life size, about 98 to 99 cm high without its wooden base, dressed in a bodice of fabric coated in wax, a skirt of gauze, linen slippers coated in wax, a wig of human hair and a ribbon · modelled about 1878 to 1881 and shown in a glass case at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition, Paris, April 1881, the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime · National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon · scored as the wax figure Degas made and showed; the bronzes cast after his death count for presence only
Mode
A sculpture in tinted wax dressed in real materials and shown in a glass case; the fine art joined to the waxwork, the mannequin and the specimen
Mythos
The effigy that is almost a body, Pygmalion’s question made structure; around it the child at the threshold, the dressed devotional image emptied, the specimen in its cabinet
Phase
Modelled about 1878 to 1881; shown once, at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition, April 1881; kept from public view for some forty years; cast in bronze after Degas’s death in 1917; now in Washington
Presentation
One standing figure, under life size, about 98 to 99 cm high, on a wooden base; at its showing in 1881, in a glass case among paintings
Register
Cold and still: a lifted face with the eyes nearly closed, and the uncanny of real hair on wax skin, held at one pitch
Scale
One girl, one instant, one case
Governing Proposition
A girl of fourteen from the ballet school of the Paris Opéra stands at rest in fourth position, her hands clasped behind her back, her shoulders drawn back and her chin raised, with her eyes nearly shut. She is modelled in tinted wax and dressed in real cloth and real hair, and in 1881 she was shown in a glass case among paintings. The wager of the figure is that sculpture can take the materials the fine art had sent to the waxworks and the natural history cabinet, and with them show a working child as she is looked at: offered for inspection, and withdrawn while she stands for it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In April 1881, at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, Edgar Degas showed among his paintings and pastels a figure in a glass case: Petite danseuse de quatorze ans. It was the only sculpture he exhibited in his lifetime. The figure is a girl of the ballet school of the Paris Opéra, under life size, about 98 to 99 cm high, modelled in pigmented wax over an armature, about 1878 to 1881, and standing on a wooden base.
She is dressed, not carved or cast in her clothes. Her bodice is real fabric coated in wax, her skirt is gauze, her slippers are linen coated in wax, her hair is a wig of human hair, and a ribbon is tied at the back of it. Of the half dozen materials in the figure, four are real things rather than represented ones. The model is known: Marie van Goethem, a pupil of the Opéra school, of a Belgian family living in Paris. The work does not generalise her. It is a named girl in a named school.
The work scored here is the wax figure as Degas made it and showed it, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. The bronzes cast after his death, in which most of the world has known her, are context: they count for her presence, not as the work. Plasters that surfaced in the 2000s, whose status is disputed, are set aside. The preparatory nude in wax and the drawings of the model from several sides bear only on what the finished figure needed and what it knows.
Movement II
The pose is exact. She stands in fourth position, the right foot advanced and turned out, the weight on the left leg. Her hands are clasped behind her back, the arms drawn straight down and back, so that the shoulders are pulled back and the narrow chest is pushed forward. Her chin is raised. Her eyes are nearly closed. She is not dancing. She is at rest in the body her training has made, in practice dress, as a pupil stands in class or before the people who will look at her.
Every part bears load. The raised chin is the whole attitude, a child presenting herself and refusing at once, and with the nearly closed eyes it makes the face both offered and withdrawn. The clasped hands give the posture of the class and of inspection together. The turned-out feet are the labour of the school, standing still. The scale is compelled: under life size, she reads as a child and as a model at once. What gives a little is minor: the slippers and the base carry less, and the ribbon, as the bronzes show, can be changed without loss.
The making is a painter’s and bears the marks of learning a medium. The pose is balanced on one leg with the torso pulled back against it, a difficult torque held in a small figure; the arms and the clasped hands are thin and tense; the face is built with real particularity, the low brow, the forward jaw, the lifted nose, the lids almost shut. The armature is improvised, and the figure has needed repair. The legs and feet are worked rougher than the head. Command is high where it counts, and the realisation is uneven.
Movement III
What the figure knows, it knows only as this mixture. Wax is the material nearest to skin, and the hair and the cloth are not represented but present, so that the eye cannot hold the line between the girl and her effigy. The bodice is coated so that real fabric and wax become one surface; the passage from wax skin to cloth is controlled. Set the human hair on the head beside the wax of the face and one law governs both: every element is a real thing or a thing made to be taken for real, and every element is set out for inspection.
Change the form and the knowledge goes. In marble she would be a statue of a dancer; in a drawing, a study. The bronzes keep the skirt and the ribbon and lose the skin, and in them the uncanny falls by half and the figure turns dark and monumental. The preparatory nude in wax shows the anatomy without the knowledge. The real materials are not ornament on a statuette; without them she is a figurine, with them she is a specimen of a girl.
Here the oldest question of sculpture, Pygmalion’s, is not alluded to but built: the effigy that is almost a body. Around it other patterns are summoned more than carried. There is the child at the threshold of womanhood, chin up at the edge of a life the critics of 1881 already wrote as a fall; there is the dressed devotional image, whose real hair and garments the work takes over and empties of the sacred; there is the specimen in its cabinet. The particulars stay particular, and the threshold myth belongs more to the critics than to the work.
Movement IV
Sculpture as the Salon knew it in 1881 was marble and bronze, idealised, mythological or commemorative, and finished, with colour shut out since the neoclassical decades. Tinted wax, real hair and dressed figures belonged below the fine art, to the waxworks, the anatomical model, the shop mannequin and the dressed devotional images of Spain. Degas joined them to it. The figure had been announced for the exhibition of 1880 and not shown; a year later she stood in her case, a modern working child, not a nymph, among the paintings of painters.
The case is part of what the work says. A pupil of the Opéra’s school, paid, drilled and looked at, is set out as a specimen is set out, and the viewer’s look becomes the look of the subscriber and of the naturalist together. That is the disclosure, and it is a social condition, not a mood: a working child is the raw material of a spectacle. In the same exhibition Degas showed pastels of criminal defendants, and the press read her face by criminal physiognomy, calling the figure ugly and bestial. Whether the figure shows that gaze or shares it, the work does not settle.
Her elevation is of one cold kind. The lifted face with the eyes almost shut gives a stillness close to trance or to defiance, a child withdrawn into herself while she stands for inspection. The second height is the uncanny of real hair on wax skin, a frisson rather than transport, and the revulsion of 1881 records it. The work refuses grandeur, received beauty and scale. The stake was paid in full: Degas never exhibited sculpture again.
Movement V
After its weeks in 1881 the wax went back to the studio. After Degas’s death in 1917 it stayed out of public view, with the family of the founder who cast the bronzes, until it came to Paul Mellon in the 1950s and then to the National Gallery, where it is shown. The bronzes, cast after his death and set in many museums, made her one of the best known sculptures of the modern era, and that presence is credited to the figure only in part. The form is whole and legible after 145 years. The fabric is the most perishable on the visual desk at its age: the wax has darkened and cracked, the ribbon has faded, and how much of the gauze is original cannot be stated. The surface the uncanny depends on has changed.
The reach of the work was delayed and came mostly as bronze, which undoes the mixture. French sculpture of the 1880s took Rodin’s path, not this one, and the line from this figure to later mixed-media sculpture, the real object in the work and the hyperreal figure, runs through many works. The questions have not closed: portrait or physiognomic type; child or commodity in the Opéra’s economy of pupils and subscribers; sculpture or waxwork with ambitions; the wax, the bronzes or the idea. Much of that yield concerns the context, and return to the object gives less than the argument around it.
The desk sets the figure level with Rodin’s The Thinker at 8.3, the contemporary French figure also known chiefly through casts, stranger and more necessary than it where the Thinker is more elevated and more durable; a tenth above Johns’s Target with Four Faces at 8.2, which puts cast and real material into a fine-art object with its reach at once; under Brâncuși’s Bird in Space at 8.4 and Giacometti’s Walking Man I at 8.5; and above Fountain at 8.0, the desk’s other chief case of a fine-art object made of what the fine art excluded. She stands in Washington in fourth position, chin raised, eyes nearly shut, a girl made of wax and of her own clothes and hair, looked at as she was made to be looked at.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test on a figure with few parts and none idle. The raised chin cannot go: it is the whole attitude, a child presenting herself and refusing at once, and with the nearly closed eyes it makes the face offered and withdrawn together. The clasped hands cannot go: they draw the shoulders back and push the narrow chest forward, the posture of the class and of inspection in one. The turned-out fourth position cannot go: it is her labour, standing at rest. The real hair and cloth cannot go: without them she is a statuette of a dancer, with them a specimen of a girl. What gives a little: the slippers and the base carry less, and the ribbon is an accent the bronzes show can be changed without loss.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What can be stated is a social condition, not a mood. A working child is the raw material of a spectacle: a pupil of the Opéra’s school, paid, drilled and looked at, is shown not dancing but standing at rest, in practice dress, in the body her labour has made, with the face of her class. The glass case states a second truth: she is set out as a specimen is, and the viewer’s look becomes the subscriber’s and the naturalist’s together. Held just below the gate by a doubt the work does not settle. Degas showed pastels of criminal defendants in the same exhibition, and the critics read her face by criminal physiognomy. Whether the figure discloses that gaze or shares it stays open, and part of its meaning is brought by reception.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation of one cold, uncanny kind. The face lifted with the eyes almost shut gives a stillness close to trance or to defiance, a child withdrawn into herself while she stands for inspection, and it is the one place the figure rises; it rises again from each side the face is seen. The second height is the uncanny itself, real hair on wax skin, a frisson rather than transport, and the revulsion of the critics in 1881 records it as such. What holds the axis low is what the work refuses: grandeur, beauty in the received sense, scale. It is under life size, in practice clothes, with no terror, no awe and no second register. Strangeness and quiet at a high pitch, narrow in range.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Mostly evoked, built in one place. The built place is the effigy that is almost a body: wax, real hair and real cloth make the oldest question of sculpture, Pygmalion’s, a matter of structure rather than allusion, and the case completes it by making her a thing kept. Around that, patterns are summoned rather than carried: the child at the threshold of womanhood, chin up at the edge of a life the critics of 1881 already wrote as a fall; the dressed devotional image, whose real hair and garments the work takes over and empties of the sacred; the specimen in its cabinet. The particulars stay wholly particular, a named girl in a named school. The threshold myth is more the critics’ than the work’s, and the archetype bears load only in the effigy.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance: sculpture as the Salon knew it in 1881, marble and bronze, idealised, mythological or commemorative, finished, with colour shut out since the neoclassical decades; and below the fine art, the waxworks, the anatomical model, the shop mannequin and the dressed devotional image. The departure: a modern working child, not a nymph, in tinted wax, dressed in real fabric and real hair, shown in a glass case among paintings at an exhibition of painters. The stake was real and was paid: a painter’s first public sculpture, met by a press that called it ugly and bestial, and Degas never exhibited sculpture again. Held below the top because the materials had precedents in the dressed images of Spain and in the wax cabinet; the swerve is a transfer as much as an invention.
Score: 9.0 / 10
What the figure knows, it knows only as this mixture. It knows that a girl and her image can be confused: wax is the material nearest to skin, and the hair and cloth are not represented but present, so that the eye cannot hold the boundary. It knows that she is looked at as a thing is looked at: the case and the under life size scale make her an exhibit. Change the form and the knowledge goes. In marble she would be a statue of a dancer, in a drawing a study; the bronzes keep the skirt and the ribbon and lose the skin, so that the uncanny falls by half and the figure turns dark and monumental. Held below the top because part of the knowledge depends on a case and on a surface whose colour has changed.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over promise: 145 years, the first forty near silence and the later decades a growing literature, and the questions have not closed. Sympathy or contempt: whether the face is a portrait or a physiognomic type, and how it stands to the criminal pastels shown beside it. Child or commodity: the Opéra’s economy of pupils and subscribers, which the social history of the ballet has worked out at length. Sculpture or object: the first mixed-media sculpture, or a waxwork with ambitions. Which work: the wax, the bronzes or the idea of the figure. Technical study of the waxes has added a physical layer. Held below the top because much of the yield concerns the context, and return to the object gives less than the argument around it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is French sculpture of the 1880s; the work was shown in 1881, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force is high: a real reorganisation of what a sculpture may be made of and whom it may show, the modern subject and the working body, colour and found material in the fine art, the display apparatus as part of the work. Reach was delayed and diffuse. The wax was seen for one exhibition and then kept from public view for almost forty years, and French sculpture took Rodin’s path, not this one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the posthumous bronzes, which made the figure one of the best known sculptures of the modern era while undoing its mixture; and a line to later mixed-media sculpture and the hyperreal figure that runs through many works, not this one alone.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 145 years. Form: whole and legible. The figure stands; the pose, the face, the dress and the idea of the case are all present, and nothing that carried meaning is lost. Presence: interrupted for the unit. The wax was in view for weeks in 1881, then in the studio and, after Degas’s death, out of public view until it came to Paul Mellon in the 1950s and then to the National Gallery, where it is shown. The image was present far more widely through the bronzes, and presence earns a tenth at most. Fabric: the most perishable on the visual desk at its age. The wax has darkened and cracked, the ribbon has faded, and how much of the gauze is original cannot be stated. These change the surface the uncanny depends on.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of modelled wax and assembled materials, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The pose is balanced on one leg with the torso pulled back against it, a difficult torque held in a small figure; the arms and clasped hands are modelled thin and tense; the face is built with real particularity, the low brow, the forward jaw, the lifted nose, the lids nearly closed, so that the critics could hate a person, not a type. The bodice is coated so that real fabric and wax become one surface, and the passage from wax skin to cloth is controlled. The costs are charged: the armature is improvised and the figure has needed repair; the legs and feet are worked rougher than the head; a painter learning a medium left the learning in the work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the human hair on the head and the wax skin of the face, the real thing and its representation, side by side. They obey one law, the law of the specimen: every element is either a real thing or a thing made to be taken for real, and every element is set out for inspection. The bodice is real cloth made wax, and the slippers likewise; the skirt is real cloth left as cloth; the hair is real; the skin is wax made to be skin; and the case puts the whole under one glass. Even the pose, the trained body at rest, belongs to the regime of inspection. Held because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one instant, one register, and the range between the farthest elements, sharp in kind, is small in territory.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the trained and labouring body of a child; labour, in the Opéra’s school as an economy; class, the girl of a poor family and the subscribers who watch; the institution, present in the practice dress and the position; science, in the physiognomic and natural-history gaze the case invokes; childhood at its end; and art, in a sculpture that asks what sculpture is made of. One figure carries them all in its pose and its materials. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no history, no nature, no sacred order, no second person, and consciousness only as the closed eyes withhold it. The mark describes the form: one figure under glass, holding more than a single figure usually holds.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.9, then The Imperishable at 8.7. Tinted wax, real hair and real cloth brought into the fine art and shown in a glass case, at the cost of ridicule and of a sculpture never shown again; a knowledge, that a girl and her image can be confused and that she is looked at as a thing is, which exists only in this mixture of skin made of wax and things that are real; and a form whole and legible after 145 years in the most perishable fabric on the visual desk.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: labour, class, the institution, the gaze of science, childhood and art held in one figure under glass, with no family, history, nature, sacred order or second person. Below the rest of the twelve, The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6: a cold, uncanny elevation at one pitch, and an archetype built only in the effigy, the rest summoned around it. Then Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Unconcealment at 8.4: reach delayed forty years and carried by bronze, and a disclosure of the gaze that the work does not settle whether it shares.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Swerve at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 99.6, an average of 8.30 that displays 8.3, in Tier IV, three tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the wax figure, its pose, materials, scale and showing, and of its main documented history: the exhibition of 1881 and its glass case, the hostility of the critics, the model, the years out of view and the casting after Degas’s death; known well as an object and thinly on its conservation. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the wax figure as Degas made it and showed it in April 1881: pigmented wax over an armature, dressed in a bodice of fabric coated in wax, a skirt of gauze, linen slippers coated in wax, a wig of human hair and a ribbon, on a wooden base, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. The figure stands whole. Its wax has darkened and cracked and its ribbon has faded; how much of the present gauze of the skirt is original, and what colour the wax and the ribbon were in 1881, cannot be stated, and these are weighed on The Imperishable alone. The bronzes cast after Degas’s death are context and count only for presence; plasters that surfaced in the 2000s, whose status is disputed, are not scored; the preparatory nude in wax and the drawings of the model are context. Only the title as exhibited in 1881 is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the exact height of the figure, the materials inside it as a technical record lists them, the name of the foundry and the number of the bronzes and the places that hold them, the model’s year of birth, her leaving the Opéra and what became of her afterwards, and the dates and extent of any repairs by Degas himself.