Modelling
One old whore…One proud man…
One artist to bind them.
When the painter Edgar Degas died in 1917, a surprise broke upon the art world. Discovered in his Paris studio were nearly 150 sculptures: women posing, girls dancing, horses prancing, women bathing – his usual subjects, but in three rather than two dimensions. During his lifetime Degas had only exhibited one sculpture, the celebrated Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, and even she remained in wax, uncast in bronze at his death. Of the newly discovered pieces – created from wax or clay, stuffed with cork mats, pipe cleaners, wood-shavings and other bits of rubbish – some fell apart on handling. Of the least fragile pieces, just over 70 could be cast for posterity. Degas himself seems not to have intended his sculpture to be cast in bronze and exhibited. Yet, in a decision that is controversial to this day, his agent and heirs decided to commission Paris’s foremost bronze-founder to undertake the task. Degas’s legacy was to be doubled without his consent.
Each of the bronzes depended on two people who are lost to obscure corners of art history. These are the two protagonists of Modelling.
The first is the woman who modelled for it. One of Degas’s models actually wrote about her experiences (Alice Michel in Mercure de France, 1919) but I have invented a different character: Julie Ranvier, an uneducated, rumbustious woman with nothing to sell but her body.
The second is the man who worked on the fragile structures and cast them in bronze. The original craftsman is documented, so here too I have found a new character: Didier Chenal, artistically and technically gifted but now a servant of artists, and embittered by his failure.
After an introductory prologue set at the height of the Impressionist furore in 1881, the opening scene in 1920 brings these two characters head to head. Julie, now ancient, homeless, lice-ridden and hungry, shuffles herself down from the slums to the bright lights of Paris’s boulevards in search of food and shelter. There, framed in the window of an elegant apartment, she sees a bronze sculpture of… herself. ‘Bugger it,’ she thinks, ‘that’s me! I have rights here!’ – and installs herself on the step. But the apartment is Didier’s. Proud and embattled, sexually conflicted and needy, Didier has lost his only son to the battle of Verdun and his wife to the influenza epidemic. All he has left is his work, and nothing is going to disturb his concentration on that.
But Julie has arrived, precisely, it seems, to disturb his ease. His demure daughter-in-law (whose bedroom he has been invading), his deaf grandson, even his friend and colleague Aristide – all conspire against him. And in the wings lurks M’sieur Degas, the dead genius haunting each of them, challenging the very meaning of their lives.
