Dance and American art : a long embrace / Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Udall, Sharyn Rohlfsen.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dance in art.

Art, American--Themes, motives.

Art, American.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (379 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

List of Illustrations

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

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.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283692083

1283692082

9780299288037

029928803X

OCLC:

815380382