Still Casting a Spell

She isn’t very pretty and she certainly isn’t unique.

Edgar Degas’ “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen” -- a 4-foot-tall statue of a ballerina, complete with a muslin tutu and satin hair ribbon -- exists in 31 guises. The only version made by the artist is the original wax figure. All the others, two in plaster and 28 in bronze, were cast after his death.

That ought to remove the “Little Dancer” from the ranks of the world’s most highly valued artworks -- art fans and the market usually put a premium on refined beauty, rarity and the artist’s personal touch.

But with chin held high, hands clasped behind her back and legs stretched in a relaxed fourth position, the “Little Dancer” has won the minds of scholars, the hearts of the public and the pocketbooks of wealthy collectors, who have paid up to $12.3 million for the honor of owning one of the bronzes. The same version that commanded that record price in 1999 will go on the auction block today at Christie’s New York in its spring sale of Impressionist and Modern art. Christie’s officials hope the sculpture will set another record but are hedging their bets with a pre-sale estimate of $8 million to $12 million.

“Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen,” or “La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans,” as she is known in France, is an art world phenomenon. The subject of dozens of scholarly articles and a children’s book, she is the poster child for new sculpture galleries at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the cover girl for the catalog of “Degas in Bronze: The Complete Sculptures,” a traveling exhibition from the collection of the Museum of Art in Sao Paulo, Brazil, which will appear at the San Diego Museum of Art from June 28 to Sept. 28.

Just last week the sculpture came to life in “La Petite Danseuse,” a new ballet at the Paris Opera. With a cast of 60, the ballet tells the story of Marie van Goetham, who modeled for the sculpture. One of three sisters recruited as petits rats, a term still used to describe child ballerinas in Paris, Goetham grew up in poverty and is thought to have been prostituted by her mother, a cabaret entertainer. In the ballet, Marie, her sister Antoinette and their mother all land in jail after Antoinette is convicted of robbing her lover, with the help of the other two women.

The sad tale only enhances the appeal of the sculpture, says Richard Kendall, a leading Degas authority. He and art historian Jill DeVonyar are guest curators of “Degas and the Dance,” an exhibition that opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts last fall and will wind up its final engagement at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sunday.

“The ‘Little Dancer’ remains persistently, stubbornly popular in the general imagination and in collectors’ minds,” Kendall says. “The fact that the little girl came from a colorful family does not seem to have impinged on this fame and may even have extended it. Collectors are still fascinated by the physical object, as they have reason to be. It’s a stupendous tour de force both technically and conceptually.”

Academics and the public respond to the sculpture because “it draws both the eye and the mind,” says Suzanne Langley, a specialist in 19th century French sculpture who teaches art history at the University of Pennsylvania.

And familiarity seems to breed love, not contempt, for the “Little Dancer.” In a league with such famous multiples as Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” and “The Kiss” and Constantin Brancusi’s “Bird in Space,” she is on view at 20 museums -- including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, the Ny Carls- berg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and the Tate Gallery in London.

At the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, which has an extensive Degas collection, a bronze “Little Dancer” attracts young and old, but particularly aspiring ballerinas, says chief curator Sara Campbell. “Little girls love to pose beside her and have their pictures taken. She’s an icon.”

That wasn’t always the case.

Degas, a leading French Impressionist who was born in 1834, was known as a painter of dancers and racehorses, but he modeled his favorite subjects in wax in his studio. “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen,” made in 1878-81, is his largest sculpture by far and the only one he exhibited. It made its debut -- as a wax figure with a cloth costume, real hair ribbon and ballet slippers and a wig thought to be made of horse hair -- at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in 1881. (The casts render the bodice, shoes and hair in metal or plaster.)

The highly unorthodox sculpture created a sensation “exceptional even in the turbulent history of Impressionist art” and remarkable in its “sheer range and diversity,” Kendall says.

“Ballet was part of the new world of Parisian high life and social life and cultural life,” says Earl A. Powell, director of the National Gallery, which has the world’s largest collection of Degas waxes, including the original “Little Dancer.” “Degas’ images were part of that,” he says, but most Parisian art lovers weren’t ready for his startlingly realistic wax statue.

While some critics proclaimed it a modern masterpiece, others deemed it “repulsive,” “a flower of the gutter” and a personification of “horror and bestiality.” “Never has the misfortune of adolescence been more sadly represented,” wrote one critic who judged the figure “simply frightful.”

Apparently stung by the criticism, Degas kept the wax sculpture in his studio until his death in 1917. The following year his heirs contracted with the A.A. Hebrard foundry in Paris to produce 22 bronze sets of his entire body of sculpture -- the “Little Dancer” and 72 relatively small pieces -- including one set for the foundry and another for the artists’ heirs.

Records of the castings are fragmentary, but it appears that some sets were never completed, probably because there was no market for some of the small pieces, Campbell says. The plaster “Little Dancers” were used to create the molds for the bronzes. When the metal casts were displayed in promotional exhibitions -- 40 years after Degas’ inglorious experience -- the sculpture was a critical and popular hit. The foundry made more than the 22 bronze dancers originally contracted. Some may have been lost and others are missing wood pedestals that may have indicated when they were made, but Campbell has tracked the 28 versions known to exist.

Their quality varies, depending on the patina and detail, and the earliest casts are generally thought to be the best, says Guy Bennett, a senior specialist in Impressionist art at Christie’s. These physical attributes, along with ownership and exhibition histories, make some “Little Dancer” sculptures more desirable than others.

The tutus are also an issue. Ballet skirts fell below the knee in Degas’ day, and scholars say he would have put a lengthy tutu on the wax. But the fragile fabric ravels and disintegrates over time. Inevitably, the tutus have grown shorter. Meanwhile, styles have changed and art audiences have became accustomed to seeing the “Little Dancer” in a tutu that would have been unseemly in the 1880s.

Most of the tutus -- which are tied on and tucked under the sculptures’ bodices -- have had to be replaced, presenting curators and conservators with a dilemma about how long they should be. “The Baltimore Museum of Art took the lead in 1980 with a daring replacement of a knee-length tutu,” Campbell says. Since then, several other museums have put new, somewhat longer tutus on their dancers. Other collectors are “reevaluating hemlines,” she says, in an attempt to reconcile the familiar length with what the artist would have done.

Meanwhile, the market value of Degas has risen dramatically. His paintings and pastels are more valuable than his bronzes; his “Danseuse au Repos,” in gouache and pastel, brought $28 million at auction in 1999. Still, the auction price of the “Little Dancer” bronzes skyrocketed: In 1955 one sold for $30,000; in 1971, another one fetched $380,000; in 1988, $10.2 million; and the price has crept up slowly since then.

The “Little Dancer” in the Los Angeles-based Smooke collection failed to sell in 2001 when it went on the block in an estate sale at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg in New York. But the example consigned to Christie’s sale, one of only 10 still in private hands, is an earlier cast with a special history, and experts speculate that it is more likely to find a buyer, even in a down economy.

Part of the second set of bronzes made at Hebrard, it was cast around 1921 or 1922 and purchased by Paul Durand-Ruel, the leading Impressionist dealer in Paris and New York, who played a major role in developing the American taste for Impressionism. The bronze went to another New York gallery and may have changed hands again, but by 1951 it was in the collection of Hollywood film producer William Goetz and his wife, Edith, the daughter of film executive Louis B. Mayer.

Their collection was auctioned by Christie’s New York in 1988, when the “Little Dancer” was sold to the prince of Brunei for $10.2 million. French collector Francois Pinault, the owner of Christie’s, bought it for $12.3 million at Sotheby’s London in 1999.

Whether this particular cast finds a new home -- and at what price -- remains to be seen. But whatever the result of the auction, the popularity and marketability of the “Little Dancer” will probably endure.

Langley, the University of Pennsylvania art historian, chalks it up to visual impact. “The figure has extraordinary presence, she stimulates the imagination, and she mesmerizes with her elusive blend of realism and aesthetic qualities.”

Powell, the National Gallery director, puts it even more succinctly: “She’s a great image.”