The Cultural Arts Council is pleased to present this exhibit organized by the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, GA, from works in its permanent collection. The thirty-five works on loan to the CAC depict dancer Isadora Duncan in photographs, collotypes, drawings and prints. The exhibit also includes a few pieces of memorabilia.
Isadora Duncan, born in San Francisco in 1877, began teaching dance at the age of five when she gathered all the little girls in the neighborhood and taught them to sway their arms to express the movement of the ocean waves. From this childhood experience, Isadora went on to direct several dance schools throughout her career.
Isadora's dreams took her to Chicago and New York, but with limited success; she and her family traveled to Europe in a cattle-boat. Money was scarce and they faced starvation, but Isadora faced any hardship for the sake of her dance, which she characterized as "Life itself."
Scantily dressed in a Grecian-inspired tunic, Isadora danced barefoot at garden parties and other small social gatherings. Isadora changed more than the art of dance, she made a lasting impression on her society. Her popularity grew and soon she was touring throughout Europe and America.
Isadora was an emancipated woman, ahead of her time. Her first long-term lover was the famous set designer Edward Gordon Craig. He was her lifelong friend, and the father of her daughter, Deirdre. The father of her second child, Patrick, was the millionaire Paris Singer. For a while, he financed the school she had always dreamed of.
The government of Russia also gave Isadora Duncan a school. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution Isadora created one of her most famous dances, The Marche Slav, for the Russian people. In Russia Isadora met the poet Sergei Esenin and married him, despite her vow to remain unwed and despite the fact that he was fifteen years younger than she. Their marriage ended tragically two years later when Esenin left Isadora and soon after committed suicide. It was not the first tragedy in Isadora's life. Many years earlier, her two children and their nurse drowned when their car went into the Seine.Isadora Duncan's genius inspired other modern dancers of her time to create their own individual styles; the far-reaching influence of Isadora's dance, however, was not limited to the stage. All of the arts were reaching out in new directions, searching for new and exciting forms of expression and inspiration; they found Isadora Duncan.
While painters and draughtsmen worked with furious strokes to catch Isadora's essence through the movement of her dance, photographers sought to capture her image on film. Max Eastman said, "It was never easy to coax Isadora Duncan into a photographer's studio. Like a wild and wise animal, she fled from those who sought to capture the essence of her - which was motion - by making her stand still."
Isadora died as dramatically as she had lived. Riding joyfully in a new Bugatti sports car, her long trailing scarf became entangled in the spokes of a wheel. In an instant, she was strangled.
Despite her untimely death, her legacy continues to inspire new dancers. The drawings, paintings, and photographs in this exhibit attest to her influence on modern art. She inspired Emile-Antoine Bourdelle's design of the bas-relief, The Dance, on the façade of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. "All my muses in the theater are movements seized during Isadora's flight; she was my principal source," Bourdelle said.
It is fitting that Bourdelle saw Isadora as the model for a muse. Since the time of the Greeks, whom Isadora emulated, the nine muses have symbolized artistic expression. Very early in Isadora's career, sculptor Laredo Taft, one of Isadora's earliest admirers, described her as, "Poetry personified. She is not the Tenth Muse but all nine Muses in one - and painting and sculpture as well."
-- Biographical information provided by the Georgia Museum of Art