Though “Dance: Movement, Rhythm, Spectacle” occupies just one large room (arranged to feel like three) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it seems to open windows in many directions. Its exhibits range from the 1890s to the 1980s, vividly demonstrating how radically that century brought change to social dance, dance theater and ideas of dance in art. Diversely diverse, the show, which opened this month, offers a panoply of artistic media (photographs, paintings, watercolors, prints, woodcuts, etchings, graphite drawings, lithographs and film), dancers of various races and a huge assortment of dance costumes. Its binding thread? The depiction of movement.
Several items here are startling and singular. In Pablo Picasso’s 1939 “Woman With Tambourine” (aquatint and etching), Picasso’s mistress Dora Maar, naked breasts in the air, is shown as a follower of Bacchus, her face and limbs viewed from several angles. She’s multidimensional, and so is her dance. This is a complex piece, a powerful cartoon that’s halfway to sculpture. Alexander Calder’s 1942 “Score for Ballet” is a two-dimensional notation for a three-dimensional dance that was probably never performed. Calder’s mobiles have always had dance qualities and have often impressed dancers; this evidence of his own idea of dance theater is intriguing.
A number of pieces are abstract (Charles Searles’s 1982 “Dance in the Blue Sky III,” for example, beautiful in its play of color) or close to abstraction (in Joan Miró’s 1963 “Danse Nuptiale,” the two figures and their bridal dance are dramatic and suggestive while completely devoid of human detail). And there are other riches to be found in the earliest pictures, which just show couples waltzing.
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Here is Pierre-August Renoir’s etching of “La Danse à la Campagne” (around 1890) — an endearing and classic image of a couple dancing in the open air. (The artist’s more celebrated painting of the same dance is on the poster for the Philadelphia Museum’s big forthcoming exhibition of Paul Durand-Ruel’s work as an art dealer, “Discovering the Impressionists,” but here it’s good to see Renoir’s skill in line without color.)
Now turn from that to three other images of the waltz. In Anders Leonard Zorn’s 1891 etching “The Waltz,” a dense array of hatched lines potently evoke a high-society ball (men in white tie, women with long skirts flowing like trains).
An 1893 Eadweard Muybridge zoopraxiscope, “A Couple Waltzing,” works like film to give you the impression of a slightly less refined pair stepping as they rotate. The title figures in John Sloan’s 1905 etching “Man, Wife and Child” are all in a small room in a New York apartment; the husband, his suspenders dangling behind him, grips his wife close in a dance, and their child observes. (The picture, considered risqué, was rejected from one exhibition on grounds of vulgarity.)
We’re given depictions of the jitterbug, Lindy Hop, other dances of the early 20th century — with several views of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. The series brilliantly documents how body language has changed from the waltz, and indeed how it kept changing. (The violent physical extremes shown in Miguel Covarrubias’s lithograph “The Lindy Hop” are amazing, with the women throwing their weight every which way.) In the same group, Charles Demuth’s 1916 watercolor “The Green Dancer” proves one of the most exciting items in this whole collection, with three vaudeville dancers rising into the air, arms outstretched, toes pointed; the sense of energy, light, exuberance is terrific.
Here’s Loie Fuller on film (her “Serpentine Dance,” from the late 1890s) and in 1904 gypsographs (embossed prints) by Pierre Roche; here’s Isadora Duncan, caught in three 1920s watercolors by Abraham Walkowitz, and as reconstructed in dance by Lori Belilove in a 1987 film; and here’s Martha Graham both in silent film (a minute of the 1940 “Letter to the World,” with Erick Hawkins and Merce Cunningham making brief appearances) and in a Barbara Morgan photograph. These three women — Fuller, Duncan, Graham, each from a different generation — did much to create American modern dance and to become breakthrough emblems of American womanhood.
One of the supreme dance masterpieces of the last century is Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Noces” (1923), still danced by the Royal Ballet and other companies in the somber colors that Natalia Goncharova provided for the original Diaghilev production. But Goncharova originally planned bright colors; it was Nijinska who insisted on a darker and far more subdued scheme. The impresario Diaghilev approved — a rare example of his allowing a choreographer to change an element he had already endorsed. And here (one of several décors from the Ballets Russes) is the Goncharova’s original curtain design, with flamelike yellows, oranges and reds in an exhilarating display of folk culture.
Every item is of interest. Daringly, this exhibition omits Degas, whose depictions of ballet form the most celebrated dance imagery in all of art. That’s fine; there’s more than enough here.
The film clips are too few and too short, but I was delighted to make the acquaintance of Rubberneck Holmes in the 1940 film “The Notorious Elinor Lee”; the plasticity with which he moves is laden with rhythm and glee. (The museum has upstairs a bronze of the Degas “Little Dancer,” by the way, and several other pieces of dance note, including a 1973 film of Lucinda Childs choreography in a room on minimalist art.) Anyone can imagine a Philadelphia Museum exhibition of dance imagery that occupied several more rooms and contained many more pieces; this one more than whets the appetite.
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