Little Dancer Aged Fourteen illuminates a slice of art history with ravishing acuity ... a tribute that melds research with quotations, intelligent inquiry, and the underside of the Paris Opera in the nineteenth century. In rhythmic translation, the face behind the sculpture puzzles and beguiles ... the author candidly admits her tendency to imagine. In a distinctly literary third act, the author weighs her own choices in the text, as well as the ineffable Marie who inspires obsession.
... fascinating ... Laurens resourcefully weaves in further details drawn from the writings of historians, art critics, scholars, and authors and artists including Balzac, Zola, Théophile Gautier, Paul Valéry and Vincent van Gogh. This material illuminates Degas’s lifestyle and creative vision and contextualizes 'Little Dancer' within the artistic and intellectual movements of its time. But Laurens goes further, adding her personal observations and associative, almost poetic interpretations of the material ... Readers who prefer straightforward historical and biographical writing may sigh with exasperation when Laurens turns particularly philosophical, imagining, for example, an inner life for Degas’s Little Dancer ... Still, the book is full of thought-provoking insights and revelations ... Laurens herself arguably displays similar ambition in this book, which acknowledges cruel truths, displays critical virtuosity and stimulates thought with observations that can be both intriguing and unsettling.
Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is a strange hybrid of art history and art appreciation, a personal narrative that reads like a novel ... the author’s obsession is, if not contagious, at least fascinating ... While Laurens is captivated by Marie [the dancer], there’s simply more known about Degas. It’s only a biography in the most roundabout way ... Laurens wants to treat Marie, transformed by Degas into an object, as this book’s subject. It’s quixotic, but also magical. I thought of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel Laureate whose novels often use the conventions of crime stories but offer little resolution or satisfaction. In Laurens’s work, as in so many of Modiano’s stories, the thread unravels into maddening loose ends ... She has not solved a mystery (even if she turns up some interesting tidbits from various archives), but Laurens has done something more challenging: she’s captured what it feels like to think. Her enthusiasm, the million little connections that she makes between the dancer, the artist, and her own life, subsume the reader ... Unanswered are the questions of what art is for, who Marie was, and even whether or not Laurens likes Degas. I take this as a measure of her success as a critic. Some questions can’t be answered, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be asked.
Lacking hard facts, much of Laurens's book is conjecture ... Little Dancer takes an interesting personal, meta-turn in the last chapter, in which the author considers her dissatisfaction with the paucity of documentation, and her connection to Marie's story. She digs deeper, searching online records to try to find out what became of Marie after her dismissal from the ballet — without much luck ... [Laurens's] sympathetic connection becomes so strong that she addresses the Little Dancer directly in Little Dancer's final, moving pages ... Laurens's artful achievement is to make us see the person behind Degas's famous sculpture.
In 1881, Edgar Degas revealed his wax sculpture of an odd-looking young dancer at a Paris exhibition, a piece that caused controversy, revulsion and disgust among viewers. Today, Degas’ dancer is on display in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and it is regarded as a treasure and a breakthrough work of realistic, multidimensional art. In Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, author Camille Laurens attempts to place both the artist and the child who served as Degas’ model, Marie van Goethem, in context, yet much of the mystery surrounding them remains, haunting writer and reader alike.
... Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas's Masterpiece deserves all the attention it has been getting in more ways than one ... Laurens, long fascinated by this piece and preoccupied by the meaningful questions it raised for her, has dug into this context in a thought provoking, if sadly realistic, story ... The surprise in the project is how well Laurens’ intoxicating and contagious point of view comes across even through translation, for which Wood deserves a standing ovation ... an exquisite book about a poignantly wretched little girl and everything she represented.
The essence of late 19th century art: Famous man paints nameless woman, her body and image becoming a mantle upon which his notoriety hangs. Who were these women? Typically, no one cares. So it’s refreshing to see an author like Camille Laurens who does.
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.
