Exhibitions: Recalling Isadora

She was the model of every artist’s dream. “Imagine,” wrote French Dramatist Henri Lavedan, “a woman with a body that suggests the perfection of Greek sculpture.” “An antique marble,” marveled Sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. “The Parthenon itself!” exclaimed Critic Carl van Vechten. She was America’s first great dancer, Isadora Duncan.

Unfortunately, no movie camera recorded Isadora’s magnificent improvisations. But as the toast of tout Paris during the Belle Epoque, Isadora was the most portrayed woman in the world. Thanks to the sketches and plaster models by such artists as Auguste Rodin, Bourdelle and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, her magnificent gestures and magnetic personality were captured, and last week Isadora was “on” again —this time in the Bourdelle Museum in Paris’ Montparnasse, where over a hundred drawings, sketches and figure studies of her were on display.

It was the arts that first instructed Isadora in the dance. Fresh off a cattle boat from New York in 1899, she and her brother haunted the Louvre, particularly its Greek sculpture collection, where Isadora sought models for her movements. Once they were found, she cast off the traditional ballet corset and slippers, danced barefoot in a transparent Greek tunic to a storm of mixed scandal and approval. By the time she died at the age of 49 in 1927, when her long red shawl caught in the wheel of a sports car and strangled her, she had ushered in the whole modern movement of interpretive dancing.

Of all the artists who sought to enshrine her, none had such means to match her genius as Rodin. Even their first meeting was Olympian. “My pilgrimage to Rodin,” she recalled, “resembled that of Psyche seeking the God Pan in his grotto, only I was not asking the way to Eros, but to Apollo. He showed his works with the simplicity of the very great.” The aging sculptor returned her admiration with a passion, sketched Isadora and her pupils countless times, once sighed: “If only I could have had models like this when I was younger.” Isadora responded in kind: “What a pity! Surely Art and all life would have been richer thereby!”