Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
smaller-scale, nude version of the famous statue Edgar Degas exhibited in Paris in 1881.
The original was made of wax and plaster over a wire frame. (The Courtauld's version is
a bronze cast of a wax statue, done after Degas' death.) Degas dressed his original wax
statue in a cloth tutu and ballet slippers and attached real human hair to the wax head, cre-
ating a modern collage of materials that shocked and intrigued the Parisians. Critics of the
day both praised its modernism and lambasted the angular, adolescent body and “ugly”
face.
The model for the statue was an aspiring dancer who, like so many adolescent girls
then and now, dreamed of finding a career on stage. Degas sketched and painted her many
times. But this well-known painter was also a closet sculptor, fashioning dozens of small-
scale statues in the privacy of his studio, especially in his later years as his eyesight failed
and painting became more difficult. Only
The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer
was ex-
hibited.
• Proceed from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, and over by the window, find...
Paul Gauguin—
Nevermore
(1897)
A nude Tahitian woman lies daydreaming. The curves of her body and of the headboard
soften the horizontal lines of the bed and the verticals of the wall.
Gauguin—who quit his stockbroker job, abandoned his wife and family, and moved to
Tahiti—paints in the “primitive” style he found there. With complete simplicity, he draws
the girl with a thick outline (so different from Impressionists who “built” a figure with a
mosaic of brushstrokes) and then fills it in with solid Crayola colors. Gauguin emphas-
izes only the two dimensions of height and width, so that the women and clouds in the
