Born in 1877 in San Francisco, Isadora Duncan was one of California's original free spirits whose liberated approach towards dance broke away from traditional ballet to allow for fluidity of movement and interpretive expression. Rigid toe shoes, repetitive drills and stiff costumes were replaced by bare feet, flowing garments and intuitive grace. Duncan inspired many of her own Terpsichorean peers, and she also fascinated numerous other creative souls in the arts who found her rhythmic swaying to be visually and emotionally stunning.
The School of Life
Before her untimely death from strangulation in 1927—due to the fateful meeting of a long silk scarf and the wheel of a speeding car—Isadora had danced her way across much of the world, enjoyed plenty of love affairs and refused to follow anyone else's rules. “To dance is to live," she insisted. "What I want is a school of life.” Isadora's own life involved passion, triumph and a dark measure of tragedy, with the title of her memoirs aptly being To Live.
Author Floyd Dell declared Duncan's dancing to be "the full glory of the human body," while poet Carl Sandburg described her as the wind, "[s]in, prayer, flight" and "the light that was never on land or sea." Among the sculptors who worked to capture the likeness of Isadora were France's Antoine Bourdelle and the Chicago-based Lorado Taft, with photographers Arnold Genthe and Edward Steichen also turning cameras toward her unique presence.
Abraham Walkowitz and Isadora
In the world of painting and drawing, one of the best-known chroniclers of Duncan was Modernist Abraham Walkowitz, who produced some 5,000 Isadora portraits. Walkowitz immigrated to America from Siberia in 1889, and while studying art in Paris he saw Duncan dance at sculptor Auguste Rodin's studio.
Captivated by her presence, Walkowitz went to work on his vast Duncan series, using a minimum of detail and pulses of vivid color to suggest Isadora's flow of motion. Duncan never formally posed for Walkowitz, who preferred to watch Duncan perform or observe her in person; he would later recall how she was a goddess with a body like music, and how he had "done more Isadora Duncans" than he had hairs on his head.
John Sloan and Isadora
Ashcan School artist John Sloan painted his interpretations of Isadora Duncan as well, focusing on her healthy physique and how her dancing conveyed a spirit of "human animal happiness." The strongly-built Isadora was no ethereal ballerina and her movements were full of power. Sloan's 1911 Isadora Duncan was one of his personal favorites, while his more colorful Isadora in Revolt paralleled his own liberation from conformity and restrictive academic standards. For Sloan, Duncan was able to dance away the "tainted brain vapors" of modern society and suggest the true essence of physical being and creative joy.
Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe and Isadora
Though Isadora was said to have shied away from what was then known as moving picture cameras, she did consent to be memorialized by still photographers. The fine eye of American Photo-Secessionist Edward Steichen caught Isadora in 1921, appropriately posing the woman who had reunited dance with its classical Greek origins amid the stark and striking backdrop of the Parthenon.
Self-taught photographer Arnold Genthe was friends with Duncan for years and captured her likeness often, with a particularly dramatic stance showing Isadora barefoot and in a long tunic, her facial expression intense and her arms reaching upward out of the darkness. This photo perhaps more than any other brings to life Genthe's description of Duncan as not just a "mere talent finding an outlet through accepted technique," but rather a "flame of genius driving its way through the narrow conventions of the classical ballet." Indeed, Isadora's flame was snuffed out at the age of fifty—but the light she left behind was truly eternal.
Sources
- Oral History Interview with Abraham Walkowitz (1958) -- Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Isadora Duncan -- The Isadora Duncan Dance Company
- As I Remember -- Arnold Genthe (Ayer Publishing, 1979)
- Homecoming -- Floyd Dell (Kennikat Press, 1961)
