Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
1827–1875 · France · Romanticism
The story
One night in August 1869, someone walked up to the new Paris Opera and threw black ink across a sculpture bolted to its façade. The target was 'La Danse' by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, a swirl of laughing nude figures spinning around a winged spirit of the dance. Critics had called it an offense to public decency, and the vandal seemed to agree. Plans were underway to take it down when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and the whole quarrel was forgotten.
Carpeaux had won the Prix de Rome, the state scholarship that sent promising artists to Italy, and there he modeled 'Ugolino', a knot of starving figures drawn from Dante that announced his gift for bodies caught mid-emotion. Back in France he became a favorite of the imperial court and made a well-known bust of the young prince.
He died in 1875 at 48, worn down by illness. The original 'La Danse', too fragile for the open air, now stands indoors at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, with a copy left in its old place on the opera front.
