“Isadora Duncan dancing in flowing gown”
An homage to the fabulous Isadora Duncan…
This lively ink on paper illustration, titled “Isadora Duncan dancing in flowing gown”, is by the French illustrator, George Barbier, from 1917. In this piece, Barbier depicts the well-known American dancer, Isadora Duncan. Duncan was a favorite subject for Barbier. Here he depicts her as a maenad, one of the women followers of the Greek god, Dionysus, the god of wine, ecstasy, and theater.
In this drawing, Duncan is wearing a Grecian-inspired pleated silk dress, known as the Fortuny Delphos gown. Duncan often wore the Delphos gown while she danced her inspired pieces modeled after the Classical Greek art she saw depicted on ancient vases. The dress helped give her freedom of movement and added to her overall ambiance.
The Delphos gown was created by the famous Spanish designer, Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, around 1907. This style of dress was inspired and styled after the clothes worn by the goddesses on classical Greek statues. This style of dress remained in production until 1950. Today, they are collector’s pieces.
Isadora Duncan, known as the “Mother of Modern Dance”, was an American dancer who lived from 1877 to 1927. As a young child, her father, who was a banker, lost his bank and the family became very poor. Her mother left her father and moved the children to Oakland, California. Duncan dropped out of school and taught dance classes with her sister to make some extra money. Her lack of formal training caused her to develop her own unique style.
Duncan was hired by Augustin Daly’s theater company in New York City but found that her style of dance did not really fit with the company. She moved to London, England. Her dance techniques developed after were directly influenced by the Grecian vases and bas-relief artifacts that Duncan saw at the British Museum in London.
Critics were not overly fond of Duncan’s unique style, but the visual artists were. Many artists created pieces depicting her dancing, including Auguste Rodin, Abraham Walkowitz, and of course George Barbier. Duncan’s aim in her dance was to have a less formal, more natural way of movement. She wanted to make dance more of an art form and less of a strictly entertainment form. Duncan set up art studios in France, the United States, Germany, and in Moscow, in the USSR. Her Soviet sympathies resulted in her being exiled from the United States.
In her personal life, Duncan had two children out of wedlock. An unfortunate car accident caused both her children and their nanny to drown in the River Seine. Though Duncan desperately wanted more children, she only had one more child who died just hours after his birth. Duncan married Sergei Yesenin, a Russian poet, who was 18 years younger than her. The year after their marriage, Yesenin left Duncan, and committed suicide back home in Moscow.
In 1927, at the young age of 50, Duncan suffered a terrible accident that claimed her life. She had a penchant for long flowing scarves. While driving as a passenger in a car in Nice, France, she was wearing a long scarf that was hand-painted by the artist, Roman Chatov. As they were driving, the scarf got caught in the spokes of one of the tires and flung her from the car, killing her instantly.
“Isadora Duncan dancing in flowing gown” is currently in a private collection, having last sold in 1991.
For more on George Barbier, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
