Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace
Language: English
Pages: 456
ISBN: 0299288005
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From ballet to burlesque, from the frontier jig to the jitterbug, Americans have always loved watching dance, whether in grand ballrooms, on Mississippi riverboats, or in the streets. Dance and American Art is an innovative look at the elusive, evocative nature of dance and the American visual artists who captured it through their paintings, sculpture, photography, and prints from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The scores of artists discussed include many icons of American art: Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Edward Steichen, David Smith, and others.
As a subject for visual artists, dance has given new meaning to America’s perennial myths, cherished identities, and most powerful dreams. Their portrayals of dance and dancers, from the anonymous to the famous—Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Josephine Baker, Martha Graham—have testified to the enduring importance of spatial organization, physical pattern, and rhythmic motion in creating aesthetic form.
Through extensive research, sparkling prose, and beautiful color reproductions, art historian Sharyn R. Udall draws attention to the ways that artists’ portrayals of dance have defined the visual character of the modern world and have embodied culturally specific ideas about order and meaning, about the human body, and about the diverse fusions that comprise American culture.
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when such traveling troupes, featuring black (or blackface) dancers and musicians, often performed before audiences made up of rural whites. Here, against the simplest of 57 A rt, Dance , and A merican C onsciousness Figure 34 Thomas Hart Benton, Minstrel Show 1934, tempera with oil on Masonite, 28 3⁄8 × 35 7⁄8 inches. (The Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, Bequest of the artist, F75-21/13; photo: Jamison Miller; art © T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank
all its sensual aspects. In the late nineteenth century such desires erupted anew in all the arts, proving that pagan themes, besides being remarkably durable, were also wonderfully adaptable. Americans were keenly aware that European writers, artists, and dancers regularly fused pagan abandon with the energies of dance, sometimes to evoke an imagined state of preliterate innocence, sometimes en route to the invention of calculated personal mythologies. Before she achieved fame as one of her
introducing the female nude, either as bather or dancer, into his oeuvre. His first forays into this new subject were conventional—reclining bathers by the seashore—but they soon overcame inertia to rise and dance on the waves or even in the sky. By 1936 Marin’s seaside nudes were disporting themselves on the sand. Donna Cassidy writes that, like Matisse’s, “Marin’s nudes similarly express the emotional freedom of an arcadian, primitive world. . . . His choice of this pagan, mythological subject
American painting that “celebrates the Dionysiac urge, a visceral joy in movement and music. . . . For once, Puritan decorum is overcome.”19 Sargent’s El Jaleo was the foreign sensation of the Paris Salon of 1882 and is widely regarded now as the first masterpiece of Sargent’s early career. But it was not received with universal enthusiasm at its Salon debut. Sargent’s friend Henry James remarked that “El Jaleo sins, in my opinion, in the direction of ugliness, and, independently of the fact that
Connecticut, Gift of Miriam Orr in memory of her late husband, Israel David Orr, and through the courtesy of her daughter, Sulamith L. Orr, 2001.24; image © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York) Figure 97 Franz Kline, Nijinsky, 1950, enamel on canvas, 46 × 35 1⁄4 inches. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman, 2006.32.28) Dance and the L egacies of Romanticism in A merican A rt of the