La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans

highlight her exploitability. This vulnerability of the working class in a bourgeois society is further represented through the small scaled sculpture, connoting the powerlessness of the poor during this time. This disconcerting portrayal of the dancer not only emerged from the romantic period where the human figure was idealised, but was in spite of Degas’ classical training, rebelling against the Royal Academy of Art’s hierarchy which placed immense value on historical works where the human figure was triumphant and only small value on ‘genre art’ which depicted every day movement. The impressionist sculpture consequently provoked both public outrage and thoughtful appreciation. While some described the “vicious, repulsive…opera rat” (Elie de Mont, 1881, p.1), “as a flower of precocious depravity, marked by the hateful promise of every vice," (Mantz, 1881, p.1), critics such as Joris-Karl Huysmans referred to the work as "the first truly modern attempt at sculpture”. Unlike the angelic and emotional depiction of the human figure that preceded Degas’ artwork, the dancer’s unconventional beauty portrayed truth through modernist ideals, using the human figure as a signifier to reflect surrounding cultural forces and issues. The publics abhorrence of the sculpture, eventually leading to its removal from the National Gallery was further indicative of his cultures ignorance to the dark themes of prostitution and exploitation that were present in his society. Though aesthetic…