Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace

by Sharyn R. Udall

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299288037
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	06/19/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	456
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Sharyn R. Udall is an art historian, author, and independent curator who has written, taught and lectured widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European art. She is the author of six previous books, as well as the editor of many catalogs and scholarly articles. Her scholarly interests include women in the visual arts, American modernism, and the creative connections among visual artists, performing artists, and writers. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

Part One. Art, Dance, and American Consciousness

1 Expressing the Real or Imagined Heritage of a Nation

2 African American Dance and Art: A Confluence of Traditions from Minstrelsy to the Harlem Renaissance

Part Two. Dance and the Legacies of Romanticism in American Art

3 Revisiting Arcadia: America's Longing for the Natural, the Pagan, and the Passionate

4 Romantic Imports: American Art's Love Affair with European Dance

5 The Ballets Russes and the "Exotic" East: Folklore and Modernist Primitivism Invade American Art

Part Three. "The Complete Actual Present": Dancers and Visual Artists Explore the Immediate Cultural Moment (Expressions of Modernity)

6 Loïe Fuller, Art Nouveau, and the Technological Present

7 Social Dance: Visual Artists Take the Pulse of Twentieth-Century America

8 American Vernacular: Visual Art and the Dancing Mechanized Body

Part Four. Terpsichore Transformed: Dance, the Liberated Body, and America's Artistic Revolutions

9 Class, Vice, and the Revolt against Puritanism

10 Dance, Visual Art, and America's Countercultures

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

This examination of the affinity between visual art and dance traces from the 19th into the 20th centuries how American visual artists have grappled in their paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs with dance and the essence of movement. American art's love affair with dance reaches across boundaries: "high" and "low" art, theatrical and social dance, elite and popular audiences. We see an 1825 Currier & Ives lithograph of Shakers dancing; a Lewis Hine photograph of immigrants dancing while waiting at Ellis Island. Martha Graham's expansive stage presence captured artists' imagination (as did Vaslav Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan): a 1931 photo of Martha Graham captures the ritualistic spirit of her Primitive Mysteries, and metal sculptor David Smith's 1935 modernist "Dancer" suggests the power and expansiveness of Graham in performance. Images of African-Americans abound: a lively Winslow Homer employs minstrel stereotyping in an engraving of Union soldiers around a campfire watching a black dancer, and Alexander Calder's wire sculpture of the celebrated Josephine Baker captures her indelible stage persona. Despite the inclusion of some alluring artwork, art historian Udall's opaque, often stilted prose will turn off a nonacademic audience, and her exclusion of contemporary art is disappointing. 143 color illus. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

By exploring the continual dialogue between art and dance, Udall not only probes dance’s own cultural meanings, she also casts new light on visual artists’ persistent reliance on dance to invent new forms, revitalize technique and style, and better understand the human body and movement.”—Andrea Harris, editor of Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing

“Dance and American Art is a visual and intellectual delight: a lavishly illustrated and eloquently written overview that traces the longstanding fascination America’s artists have had with dance from the nation’s beginnings to the present day. From pictures of Shaker religious practices, minstrelsy, and folk dancing, to paintings, sculptures, and photographs of modern performance arts, this far-reaching study admirably positions dance in America’s visual landscape and simultaneously accounts for its meaning on social, cultural, and political terms. Highly recommended.”—Erika Doss, author of Twentieth-Century American Art

From the Publisher