9/26/2023 0 Comments Isadora duncan nude![]() But Isadora, originally from California and by then from Berlin, Paris and other points, arrived bearing her gifts as a Greek. Despite its longings, for a moment America hesitated, Puritanism rather than poetry coupling lewd with nude in rhyme. The clergy, hearing of (though supposedly without ever seeing) her bare calf, denounced it as violently as if it had been golden. She arrived like a glorious bounding Minerva in the midst of a cautious corseted decade. She was the first artist to appear uncinctured, barefooted and free. A Paris couturier recently said woman’s modern freedom in dress is largely due to Isadora. ![]() Isadora appeared as a half-clothed Greek. . . . Repressed by generations of Puritanism, it longed for bright, visible and blatant beauty presented in a public form the simple citizenry could understand. What America now has, and gorges on in the way of sophistication, it then hungered for. Isadora arrived in our plain and tasteless Republic before the era of the half-nude revue, before the discovery of what is now called our Native Literary School, even before the era of the celluloid sophistication of the cinema, which by its ubiquity does so much to unite the cosmopolisms of Terre Haute and New York. Only she with her heroic sculptural movements has dropped by the wayside where she lies inert like one of those beautiful battered pagan tombs that still line the Sacred Road between Eleusis and the city of the Parthenon. Only Isadora, animator of all these forces, has become obscure. Most grandiose of all her influences, Diaghileff’s Russian Ballet-which ironically owed its national rebirth to the inspiration of Isadora, then dancing with new terpsichorean ideals in Moscow-still seasons as an exotic spectacle in London and Monte Carlo. Isadora alone has neither sandals nor school. Her brother Raymond, who operates a modern craft-school in Paris, wears sandals and Socratic robes as if they were a family coat-of-arms. Isadora’s sister Elizabeth, to whom Greek might still be Greek if it had not been for Isadora, has a toga school in Berlin. ![]() Lisa, one of her first pupils, teaches in the studio of the Champs-Elysées. As a cross between gymnasia and God, Greek dance camps flourish in the Catskills, where under the summer spruce, metaphysics and muscles are welded in an Ilissan hocus-pocus for the female young. ![]() Marks-in-the-Bouwerie on Sabbath afternoons. Vestal virgins frieze about the altar fire of St. Eurythmic movements now appear in the curricula of girls’ schools. Of that fervor for the classic dance which she was the first to bring to a land bred on “Turkey in the Straw,” beneficial signs remain from which she alone has not benefited. No one has taken Isadora’s place in her own country and she is not missed. Only Isadora Duncan, the youngest, the American, remains wandering the European earth. Two of them, Duse and Bernhardt, have gone to their elaborate national tombs. She is the last of the trilogy of great female personalities our century produced. Her spirit is still green as a bay tree, but her flesh is worn, perhaps by the weight of laurels. Today her body, whose Attic splendor once brought Greece to Kansas and Kalamazoo, is approaching its half-century mark. A decade ago her art, animated by her extraordinary public personality, came as close to founding an esthetic renaissance as American morality would allow, and the provinces especially had a narrow escape. Like a ghost from the grave Isadora Duncan is dancing again at Nice. Isadora Duncan Illustration by Hugo Gellert
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