This studies Edgar Degas (1834-1917)'s statue <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen>(1881). The work, first displayed at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, was the only one of Degas's statues that he revealed to the public during his lifet... This studies Edgar Degas (1834-1917)'s statue <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen>(1881). The work, first displayed at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, was the only one of Degas's statues that he revealed to the public during his lifetime. <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> is therefore an important work when it comes to assessing Degas's work as a sculptor. 19th-century Paris, where Degas lived and worked, was the scene of post-revolutionary modernization, which unfolded against a background of Enlightenment thought. Artists at this time were moving beyond subjects based on traditional themes, turning their aesthetic attention to contemporary life and producing works depicting modern figures. Degas, in particular, devoted himself to portraying figures from everyday life such as women bathing, shop assistants and dancers.<Little Dancer Aged Fourteen>, which took Marie van Goethem(1865-?), a young dancer at Paris Opera Ballet as its model, was also a faithful representation of a figure from modern life in the form of a sculpture. Degas began producing sculptures in 1860 in order to experiment more accurately with the forms and movements of his subjects. In 1878, before beginning production of <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen>, he closely analyzed Marie van Goethem's posture and form, making nine drawings from a variety of angles. He began modeling <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> based on these images. After perfecting the form of the sculpture, he adorned it with a ballet costume, slippers, a wig and a ribbon, then colored the wax surface, thus completing a highly realistic work. The formal characteristics of <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen>, primarily its decoration and coloring, manifested ideas inspired by Egyptian and classical sculptural styles, which were fashionable in Paris at the time. The realistic <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> revealed the identity of its subject as a prostitute, thus simultaneously attracting both strong praise and harsh criticism at the time of its appearance at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition. Degas used theories of ballet-pantomime, a popular genre at the time, and physiognomy to show the dancer as a prostitute. He applied these two theories because they both focus on determining the essence of human nature. The arrogant posture borrowed from ballet-pantomime in <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> implied a negative image of young dancers and their clandestine relationships with bourgeois male opera-goers. And by engraving facial features defined in physiognomy as immoral and associated with criminals and prostitutes into the face of the young dancer, Degas allowed viewers to imagine the prostitution on the hidden side of the dancing profession. Degas's revelation of <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> as a prostitute caused such controversy because it provoked an argument over the inherent criminality of secret prostitution, a key social issue at the time. This trade was rampant in 19th-century Paris; Degas's work was exhibited at a time of change when the officially sanctioned sex industry was moving underground. Bourgeois men confronted with <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> in the public setting of a gallery felt a sense of shame, as if their furtive backstage sexual transactions with young dancers at the opera had been exposed. Moreover, as the increase in crime at the time fueled interest in determining its causes, criminal anthropology, a discipline closely linked to physiognomy, put forward a theory attributing crime to atavism. This theory provoked a passionate argument from 1879 to 1882; <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen>, with its immoral facial features, stoked the controversy over whether the lives of young opera dancers as prostitutes was the result of inherently immoral genes or of deprived circumstances. Dancers have been depicted in various forms since antiquity, but Degas's <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> was the first highly realistic sculptural representation of a Paris dancer, a symbol of the working lower classes. This work also challenged traditional artistic standards by laying bare the issue of prostitution through socio-cultural discourse. Ultimately, Degas's <Little Dancer Aged Fourteen> is a manifestation of modern life and of the issues of its time. This is why is can be used to assess the artist's achievements as a modern sculptor. ，韩语论文，韩语论文题目 |
