Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing

This beautifully illustrated book showcases the work of two great American modernists, painter Abraham Walkowitz and dancer Isadora Duncan. Born in the same year (1878), both artists influenced the development of modern art in the early twentieth century by blending figurative gesture with abstraction. Duncan grew up in a free-spirited and artistic household in California and then moved to Europe. Walkowitz immigrated to the United States from Russia when he was a child and lived most of his life in New York City, where he studied at Cooper Union School and the National Academy of Design.

Walkowitz and Duncan met in 1906 in Paris at the studio of sculptor Auguste Rodin. Deeply impressed by Duncan's musicality and expressivity, Walkowitz would go on to draw thousands of images of Duncan dancing throughout his life. Because his renderings of Duncan were produced quickly, they carry an element of improvisational vitality that matches the dynamic energy of her presence onstage. Duncan herself remarked, "Walkowitz, you have written my biography in lines without words." Author Ann Cooper Albright weaves in the connections with Gertrude Stein and her prose portrait of Duncan, Alfred Steiglitz and his gallery that displayed Walkowitz's drawings, and Wassily Kandinsky, whose experiments with color and line influenced Walkowitz. Modern Gestures reproduces over fifty watercolors of this unique oeuvre, many of which have never before been published. In a sequence of featured illustrations at the end of the book, Albright recreates a wavelike dance that she imagines Isadora Duncan might have performed. This sumptuous little volume will provide hours of enjoyment to anyone interested in the vibrant interchange between dance and modern art.

A performer, choreographer, and feminist scholar, Ann Cooper Albright is a professor of dance and theater at Oberlin College. Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, she is involved in teaching a variety of dance, performance studies, and gender studies courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. She is the author of Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loie Fuller (2007) and Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (1997), and the co-editor of Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001) and Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (2003), all from Wesleyan University Press. Her work has been funded by, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Camargo Foundation, and the Ohio Council for the Arts.