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Figures and Movement:
Art, Dance, and Liberation Theory in the Late Work of Maurice Prendergast By Tony Gengarelly The late work of Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924), which dates from around the time he moved to New York City in 1914, features decorative oils and watercolors, often with symbolic motifs and abstract pastoral settings. An especially compelling theme involves dancing figures, usually nude females, who frolic in wooded groves and display the classically derived movements of early modern dance. Prendergast's use of these dancing figures is predicated on a compelling personal interest in dancers such as Isadora Duncan and in the liberation philosophy, or culte de la vie, espoused by Isadora and other avant-garde artists of his generation. His use of bucolic settings reflects a revival of the ancient pastoral landscape, a classicized primitivism featured in the work of Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Matisse, and Arthur Bowen Davies, modern masters who especially influenced Prendergast. These philosophical and aesthetic elements unite most successfully in a 1914-15 oil panel, Fantasy (Williams College Museum of Art, Fig. 1 on page opposite), which is the most significant expression |
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of Prendergast's treatment of dancing figures
in the context of an idealistic landscape setting.This idyllic scene, done
in the artist's decorative,Modernist style, contains a group of figures
peacefully peacefully cavorting around a central waterfall and stream.
The nymph-like figures, through their natural and unforced eroticism as
well as their freedom of gesture and movement, suggest a utopian vision.
Their innocence is underscored by the presence of angelic creatures who,
divested of any specific religious association, infuse the scene with a
symbolic holiness.
The dancing figures, however, are not just abstract forms, and in their simulation of contemporary dance clearly approximate the gestures of Isadora Duncan. In fact, the positions of Fantasy's central dancing figures can be recognized in a group of pastel drawings of Isadora by Maurice Denis. Denis's sketches appeared in L'Art Decoratif (August 1913), and a notation in Prendergast's "Paris Sketchbook" (1912-14) indicates that he was familiar with the magazine and may possibly have seen these drawings. This connection to Isadora, an advocate of uninhibited movement and a free expression of personal and sexual impulses, implies ideas then current on individual and social liberation. The picture's ideological associations become even more evident when one considers a number of developments in Prendergast's personal and artistic life which occurred in the years before the United States entered World War I: first, Prendergast's contact with radical social mores and intellectual discourse, facilitated by his move to |
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New York City in 1914; second, Prendergast's
interest in modern dance and his creation of sexually evocative figures
which appear in his oils, watercolors, and sketchbooks dating from 1910;
third, his preoccupation with abstract landscape, a modern variation of
the traditional pastoral, which dominates the late oils. These three
developments combine in Fantasy to reveal an artist who is more psychologically
complex and intellectually engaged than is ordinarily assumed, an artist
whose work expresses an important aspect of his period's radical social
ideology.
New York Radicals and the Philosophy of Liberation In November 1914 Maurice Prendergast moved from his native Boston to 50 Washington Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York City's Bohemian district, where the artist would remain, except for brief excursions to New England, for the rest of his life. Since 1900 Prendergast had developed an interest in New York, which was punctuated by his participation in the 1908 MacBeth Gallery exhibition of "The Eight" and by his contribution to the controversial 1913 Armory Show. Already a member of Robert Henri's circle of urban realists and thoroughly aware of the latest artistic currents at home and abroad, Prendergast now located his life and work in the center of the American avant-garde. During this time New York was alive with social and intellectual crosscurrents that challenged established attitudes toward art, economics, politics, social relations, and personal mores. Inspired |
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by European theorists Henri Bergson and H. G.
Wells, New York's "Young Intellectuals" embraced intuition and instinctive
behavior as spiritual antidotes to a rationally based social and political
outlook. This liberation theory perceived instinct as basically good
and primal human behavior as innocent and holy. Modern art expressed
these latent forces, and thus aesthetic perception became linked with political
and social ideology. Artists rubbed elbows with socialists and anarchists
at Mabel Dodge's Fifth Avenue salon. Noted feminist and anarchist
Emma Goldman espoused doctrines of sexual freedom practiced by many members
of the avant-garde. In an early work, Drift and Mastery, published in 1914,
even Walter Lippmann challenged current attitudes toward social engineering
with the idea that politics ought to be artistically shaped by intuition.
The goal of "The Rebellion," the term applied to this loosely fabricated
New York movement, was a combination of individual expression and collective
harmony, a spiritual awakening which embraced art, sexual freedom, and
brotherhood (May 219-139; Brown 3-38; Watson, 122-165).
Having been elected in 1914 president of the Association of Painters and Sculptors, the organization responsible for the 1913 Armory Show where abstract configurations had challenged established notions of form, Prendergast was familiar with those who advocated liberation philosophy and practiced an avant-garde life-style. Robert Henri and Arthur Bowen Davies, two New York-based colleagues who were especially close to Prendergast, were leading exponents of radical freedoms. Henri advocated |
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emancipation from the strictures of conventional
art and academic criticism. Davies, who flirted with a Bohemian life-style,
was committed as well to innovation in artistic expression. John
Sloan too was a member of this artist-intellectual circle. His socialist
sympathies were often expressed in graphic medium, and he contributed cartoons
to the Masses, Max Eastman's contentious radical publication.
Original members of "The Eight," Prendergast, Henri, Sloan, and Davies had defied the National Academy of Design in their 1908 show at the MacBeth Gallery. All had contributed to the 1913 Armory Show, and each had a demonstrated interest in contemporary dance. In fact, Isadora Duncan frequented their weekly gatherings, and Henri's students used members of Isadora's dance troop for models (Homer 151). Modern dance fit especially well into Henri's liberation ideology, where artistic gesture symbolized universal themes and art had the power to transform life. Of Isadora's dancing he remarked: [She] carries us through a universe in a single movement of her body. Her hand alone held aloof becomes a shape of infinite significance. Yet, her gesture in fact can only be the stretch of arm or the stride of a normal human body. (Henri 55) Through her unconstrained dance movements and unconventional life-style Duncan had become a symbol of liberation culture. Henri and Sloan did a number of drawings, prints, and paintings of the |
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dancer (Chapellier Galleries plate 29; Morse
195-99; National Gallery of Art 116, 136). In Fantasy Prendergast
records Isadora's liberated dancing and strongly suggests her inclinations
concerning individual freedom. Davies also knew Isadora Duncan, most
likely through the dancer Edna Potter, whom he met in 1902 and with whom
he lived for many years under an assumed name (Czestochowski 20).
Davies purportedly did a number of drawings of Isadora which were subsequently
lost in a fire (Magriel 61). The modern dance influence is unmistakable
in his renditions of classical figures in motion such as Maya, Mirror of
Illusions (1909, The Art Institute of Chicago) and in Dances (1914-15,
The Detroit Institute of Arts), a cubist variation done as a mural project
in the same studio with Prendergast who was then completing Picnic (1914-15,
The Carnegie Museum of Art) and Promenade (1914-15, The Detroit Institute
of Arts) (Bolger 55-59; Mathews, Maurice Prendergast 36).
Prendergast and Modern Dance A significant moment in the evolution of modern dance occurred in 1900 when Isadora Duncan visited Paris. The young dancer was already experimenting with a personal style of dance, an organic expression of movement in contrast to the prescribed formulas of traditional ballet. Now, at the Paris World's Fair, Isadora encountered Loie Fuller and most likely saw her perform the "Serpentine Dance." Whirling rhythmically in folds of glittering fabric, Fuller symbolized, according to one description, "a fire |
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above all dogmas." Her symbolic dance
conjured up instinctive and elemental forces, the "language of the heart,"
as Francois Delsarte had phrased it in his 1887 book on gesture (qtd in
Martin 14,17). During this same time Isadora visited the Louvre and
encountered archaic-style Greek dance on antique pottery and in fragments
of bas-relief sculpture. She was especially impressed by the natural
qualities of the moving figures where every position, "like the waves and
the wind . . . presupposes another"(Duncan 54-57). In the following years
Duncan developed an expressive style of dance based on symbolic gesture
and ancient forms of movement.
Isadora's Greek-style dancing, replete with authentic costumes of loose-fitting fabric, was well received by an audience of artists and critics already sensitized to the potential for ancient styles of movement popularized in Maurice Emmanuel's 1896 book, The Greek Dance. When she made a New York appearance in 1909, one commentator recognized the classically-derived choreography: "She wore, as she always does, some drapery of diaphanous material . . . she flitted about the stage in her early Greek way and gave vivid imitations of what one might see on the spherical body of Greek vases" (qtd in Magriel 23). Isadora, however, had a message to communicate as well. Through her own statements--often delivered to a stunned audience--writings, and dance gestures, Isadora proclaimed what was natural and liberated. For her, the expression of freedom |
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was tied to nudity and especially to the naked
female body. Accordingly, she argued that "only movements of the
naked body can be perfectly natural"(Duncan 55), and could express what
one her artist admirers described as that "primitive purity" which would
restore to humankind its "holy animality" once more (Magriel 53).
Speaking very much in the tone of liberation theory, Isadora incorporated
the nude female, the "dancer of the future," into a concept of spiritual
renewal:
She will realize the mission of woman's body and the holiness of all its parts . . . She will dance the body emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not in the nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war with spirituality and intelligence, but joining with them in glorious harmony. (Duncan 63) This description relates very well to the nude dancing figures in Fantasy. Prendergast may well have seen an actual performance by Isadora, but even if he did not, he would certainly have been aware of her dance movements through exposure to the work of contemporary visual artists. Auguste Rodin, whose electrifying sculptural groups also inspired Isadora Duncan at the 1900 Paris World's Fair, did a series of drawings of Isadora while she moved for him in his studio (Magriel 43). Later, Rodin's dance figures were incorporated into an exhibition of his drawings. In 1908 and again in 1910, they were shown at Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Gallery, "291," |
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in New York. The drawings were also featured
at a Boston gallery in 1909 and appeared as well in a 1911 edition of the
Stieglitz publication Camera Work. Both "291" and Camera Work were
familiar to Prendergast, as was the work of Photo-Secession artist Abraham
Walkowitz. Walkowitz, who began depicting Isadora Duncan around 1909,
eventually completed hundreds of drawings of the dancer's gestures and
movements (Magriel 52; Bluemner 6).
More significantly, Prendergast was familiar with the dance pictures of Henri Matisse, whose stylistic influence is apparent in the work of the American artist after 1912 (Mathews, "Prendergast and Modernism," 41-42). In 1905-06 Matisse created The Joy of Life (Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., Fig. 2 and Detail, page 43), a pastoral landscape with nude figures doing a circle dance in the background. Then, from 1909-11, Matisse produced a series of dance paintings based on the earlier fragment's circular movement. Despite the classical antecedents of The Dance sequence, the gestures of Matisse's figures are clearly modern, most likely after the style of Isadora Duncan (Cuno 503-04; Martin 24). Prendergast certainly knew of Matisse's dance images, even though his exposure may have been indirect: through the background detail in The Joy of Life, which was published in a 1912 edition of Camera Work (page 43); or through the Armory Show, where Prendergast evidently saw Matisse's Nasturtiums and the Dance, I, a still-life that includes a variation of The Dance in the background. Along with several |
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other works by the French master featured at
the 1913 show, Prendergast copied Nasturtiums and the Dance,I into a sketchbook
("Armory Show Sketchbook," 1913). Prendergast's sketchbooks also
confirm a more direct link with Isadora Duncan. Along with his aforementioned
1913 notation related to the drawings of Maurice Denis, Prendergast made
his own drawing of Isadora around the same time ("Japanese Sketchbook,"
Fig. 3, page 44); the sketch is evidently based on a popular image
of the dancer by Fritz Von Kaulbach which appeared on the cover of Die
Jugend magazine in 1904 (Fig. 4, page 45).
Prendergast's artistic expression of modern dance is further demonstrated in a series of large, single-sheet drawings of dancing figures, which he did between 1912 and 1915; for these, Prendergast probably worked from a model moving for him in his studio. Not really concerned with dance as performance, these drawings focus on gestures and specific movements representative of contemporary archaic-style dancing. Two drawings in the collection of the Williams College Museum of Art, Dancer #1 and Three Figures suggest Isadora Duncan's liberated movements and archaic-style dancing. Another drawing, Dancer #2 (1912-15, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Collection of John J. Brady, Jr. Fig. 5, page 47) also recalls Isadora's style of dance. Abraham Walkowitz captures a similar movement in his 1909 depiction of the dancer (Magriel 49). Most importantly, the gestures and especially the nudity of Dancer #2 connect to the symbolically charged principal dancing figures in the 1914 panel Fantasy |
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(especially the second figure from the left).
In addition to the classically derived gestures of Isadora Duncan and her school of modern dance, the inspiration for Prendergast's nude females in motion whose images appear in Fantasy and in other works dating from this period is partially explained by his exposure to the sexual emancipation then current in New York's Bohemian circles. Isadora Duncan espoused it; feminist Emma Goldman proclaimed it; Prendergast's close friend Arthur Davies lived it; and social scientists such as Elsie Clews Parsons (Social Freedom, 1915) advocated it in their attacks on marriage and social taboos. Moreover, Prendergast had a personal interest in the subject of sex and sexual relations which can be gleaned from some very provocative fragments in his art. A careful look at some of Prendergast's oils discloses a variety of
instances where the artist employs erotic imagery. For instance,
the 1910-13 Bathers by the Sea (Williams College Museum of Art) contains
a nude couple embracing under the trees behind the principal foreground
figures. Promenade (1914-15) features the typical Prendergast park
scene except for two young women, located near and on a centrally positioned
bench, who seductively reveal their legs. This alluring pose, often
associated with tarts, seems to have fascinated the artist, for it appears
several times in his sketchbooks of the same period ("Sketchbook #19").
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The sketchbooks especially reveal the full spectrum
of Prendergast's sexual imagination. Interspersed with the typical
beach scenes and coastal landscapes, Prendergast's erotic drawings appear
to be independent musing, recorded at odd times on a random empty page
of an already completed sketchbook. From the extant images--some
apparently have been defaced or ripped out--Prendergast demonstrates an
interest in the strip-tease ("Paris Sketchbook," Fig. 6, page 48) and in
figures whose positions imply sexual activity ("Sketchbook #5"; "Sketchbook
#24"; "Paris Sketchbook"). Several depictions of sexual intercourse
appear on these pages, their focus on genitalia reminiscent of Japanese
shunga prints or German expressionist drawings ("Armory Show Sketchbook";
"Sketchbook #29"; "Sketchbook #40").
As private journals, the sketchbooks reveal a more active sexual imagination, portray a more sensuous female than ever emerges in Prendergast's oils or watercolors. Nevertheless, rather than engaging in a kind of artistic voyeurism, Prendergast in the erotic sketchbook drawings appears to be groping for an aesthetic resolution of very powerful personal feelings. Many of the erotically charged scenes appear to be derived from images on Greek pottery no doubt inspired by cultural explorations in New York, Paris, and Venice ("Classic Subjects Sketchbook"; "Paris Sketchbook"). Perhaps, along with Isadora Duncan, Prendergast saw in his interpretation of ancient images the way to a freer sexuality unencumbered by shame or guilt (Mazo 44). |
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The modern dance motif, however, proved to be one of the more successful vehicles through which Prendergast could express his sexual imagination. For instance, the sketchbook "stripper" (fig. 6, page 48), converted to a prancing nymph, appears in a 1912-15 watercolor, The Bathers (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. C. V. Nalley, III). The play of her gown and body faintly echoes in Dancer #2 while it resounds more emphatically in the dancing figures of the 1914 Fantasy (note particularly the second figure from the right). Through his powerfully invested symbols of women in motion, Prendergast fashioned his own response to the artistic and intellectual community's call for sexual emancipation. Prendergast and the Modern Pastoral In Fantasy Prendergast uses a modern variation of the pastoral landscape as the setting for his symbolically charged dancing figures. The traditional pastoral, which traces its origin to the work of Renaissance Venetian masters Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian, is a settled landscape located between wilderness and urban civilization, and inhabited by amorous figures who celebrate their love for nature through poetry, song, and dance. The natural setting elevates the common elements in the scene transforming them into an expression of spiritual harmony. In Giorgione's Concert Champtre (c. 1510, Musie du Louvre), for instance, nudity is natural and thereby accords the foreground nymphs a "higher spiritual status." Inspired by the Eclogues of Virgil, the pastoral's |
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message of aesthetic delight and spiritual harmony
is symbolically communicated through figures and setting, tone and gesture
(Rosand 21-81; Cafritz 83-111).
Beginning with the symbolist paintings of Puvis de Chavannes in the late nineteenth century, modern artists such as Matisse appropriated the idealized pastoral landscape and its classically derived imagery to communicate feelings of tranquility and aesthetic delight; to manifest freedom from social, political, and industrial constraints (Elderfield 97-102; Gowing 231-44). Prendergast's connection to this tradition is directly documented in "Sketchbook #13" where he executed a drawing after Puvis's Pleasant Land (1882, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Ct.). Since gestures and movement can express inner states of mind, the pastoral's modern variation often uses dance to communicate a symbolic message. Arthur Davies conveys the transience of existence in Without Pause, Enters, Touches, Passes (1927, Worcester Art Museum) where monumental female nudes move in synchronized rhythm across the frieze of life. In The Joy of Life, where Matisse implies a retreat from the contemporary urban-industrial world, the background dancing figures project a liberated spirit into an otherwise contemplative picture (Elderfield 99; Benjamin 312-15). This anarchistic undercurrent so often symbolized by the dance motif, is explained by social critic Margaret Anderson in a 1916 article for the Little Review: art |
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and anarchism are synonymous, because they "are
in the world for the same . . . reason," to free the mind through intuitive
insight from the bonds of established thought and, hence, to help liberate
the individual from dependence on social and political institutions (May
306).Prendergast adopted a number of approaches to the modern pastoral,
combining the allegorical with the exotic in a series of decorative tapestry
paintings. Overall, these idealistic landscapes suggest a world apart,
one where love and art purify and liberate all which has been sullied and
constrained by human institutions. In the late pastoral landscapes Prendergast
conveys a decidedly anti-industrial message (Durkin). He also uses
the pastoral symbolically to represent ideas of social liberation which
matched his own inclinations toward a freer personal expression.
Where he employs the dance motif as a central image, his figures' movements
clearly derive from the ancient sources reflected in modern dance.
Two watercolors, Dancing Figures No. 1 (1910-13, private collection) and
Bathers (1912-15, collection of Mrs. Charles Prendergast) feature the energetic,
even frenzied movements of a Dionysian revel; whereas, the cadenced Sea
Maidens (1910-13, Private Collection) and Five Figures (1910-13, The Brooklyn
Museum) simulate a ritualistic offering.
As we have indicated, however, the best example of Prendergast's incorporation of modern dance gestures with the pastoral theme is the 1914-15 Fantasy. The symbolic power of the central moving figures draws on their association with the erotic imagery of early modern dance, especially the choreography of Isadora Duncan. |
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While expressing ideas of social
and sexual freedom associated with Isadora, Prendergast relates his personal
concerns as well; projects them onto the nude dancing figures whose erotic
overtones are purified in typical pastoral fashion as they cavort through
a harmonious setting of innocent delight. This elevation of earthly
impulses through a celebration of art and beauty can be glimpsed too in
the philosophical statements of Robert Henri and in this 1906 tribute to
Isadora by Gordon Craig:
This is what she dances--
Celebratory in tone and harmoniously balanced with activity and calm, with warm reds and cool blue colors, Prendergast's Fantasy is a beautiful dream, one which reverberates contemporary ideological concerns familiar to the artist, and, through the use of the modern dance motif, is an expression of the artist's erotic imagination, complex personal feelings resolved in the context of aesthetic delight. |
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WORKS CITED
Benjamin, Roger. "The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism, and the Arabesque of Observation," The Art Bulletin 75:2 (June 1993). Bluemner, Oscar, et al. A Demonstration of Objective, Abstract, and Non- Objective Art by Abraham Walkowitz. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1945. Bolger, Doreen. "Modern Mural Decoration: Prendergast and His Circle." In Gengarelly, Anthony and Carol Derby. The Prendergasts and the Arts and Crafts Movement: The Art of American Decoration and Design, 1890-1920. Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1989. Brown, Milton W. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Cafritz, Robert C. "Classical Revisions of the Pastoral Landscape." In Cafritz, Robert C., et al. Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1988. Chapellier Galleries, Inc. Robert Henri, 1865-1929. New York, 1926. Cuno, James B. "Matisse and Agostino Carracci: A Source for the "Bonheur de Vivre"." The Burlington Magazine. (July 1980). |
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Czestochowski, Joseph S. Arthur B. Davies: A
Catalogue Raisonn? of the Prints. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware
Press, 1987.
Duncan, Isadora. The Art of the Dance. Ed. Sheldon Cheney. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1928. Durkin, Elizabeth. Kindred Spirits: Maurice and Charles Prendergast. Brochure. Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1989. Elderfield, John. The "Wild Beasts": Fauvism and Its Affinities. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976. Gowing, Lawrence. "The Modern Vision." In Cafritz, Robert C., et al. Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1988. Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Homer, William Innes. Robert Henri and His Circle. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1988. Magriel, Paul. Nijinsky, Pavlova, Duncan: Three Lives in Dance. Section
on Isadora Duncan. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977.
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Martin, Marianne. "Modern Art and Dance:
An Introduction." In Art and Dance: Images of the Modern Dialogue, 1890-1980.
Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1982.
Mathews, Nancy Mowll. Maurice Prendergast. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1990. --. "Maurice Prendergast and the Influence of European Modernism." In Clark, Carol, et al. Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonn?. Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1990. May, Henry F. The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964. Mazo, Joseph H. Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Book Company, 1977. Morse, Peter. John Sloan's Prints: A Catalogue Raisonn? of the Etchings, Lithographs, and Posters. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969. National Gallery of Art. John Sloan, 1871-1951. Washington, D.C., 1971.
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Prendergast, Maurice. "Paris Sketchbook,"
1912-1914. Located in Williams College Museum of Art.
--. "Armory Show Sketchbook," 1913. "Classic Subjects Sketchbook," 1912-1914. "Sketchbook #19," 1914-1915. "Sketchbook #5," 1915-1916. "Sketchbook #24," 1910-1913. "Sketchbook #29," 1915-1916. "Sketchbook #40," 1914. "Japanese Sketchbook," 1913-1914. "Sketchbook #46," 1912-913. "Sketchbook #13," 1907. Located in Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Rosand, David. "Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision," In Cafritz, Robert C., et al. Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1988. Watson, Steven. Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde.
New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.
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Figures and Movement:
Art, Dance, and Liberation Theory in the Late Work of Maurice Prendergast Figure 5. Maurice Prendergast. Dancer #2, ca.1912Ð15, pencil on paper. The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Gift of John J. Brady, Jr. Figure 4. Fritz von Kaulbach. Isadora Duncan, 1902, pastel drawing reproduced as the cover for Die Jugend, 1904. Figure 3. Maurice Prendergast. Isadora Duncan from "Sketchbook #17" (Japanese Sketchbook), ca. 1913-15, pencil on paper. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast in honor of Perry T. Rathbone. Microfilm Roll no. 3584, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 2. Henri Matisse. The Joy of Life, 1905-06, oil on canvas. Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., reproduced in Camera Work, 1912. Photograph courtesy of the Library of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Figure 1. Maurice Prendergast. Fantasy, ca. 1914-15, oil on panel.
Williams College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast.
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Figure 6. Maurice Prendergast.
Page from the "Paris Sketchbook," ca. 1911-14, pencil, pen and ink wash
on paper. Williams College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Williams College Museum of Art and its Eugenie Prendergast Curator, Nancy Mowll Mathews, for the original opportunity to pursue this project through the exhibition Maurice Prendergast: Figures and Movement, March-August 1990, which I helped to organize. Many thanks as well to J. Dustin Wees, Photograph and Slide Librarian at the Clark Art Institute, and to Carol Clark, Professor of Art History at Amherst College, for taking the time to read and advise me about the essay. A special mention for Karen DeOrdio, Ann Gengarelly, Ann Greenwood, Diane Agee, Anne Havinga, Jimena Lasansky, Elizabeth Manns, Deborah Rothschild, and Peter Stevenson, who helped with research and manuscript preparation. |