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Art News   March 1936

The Dance in Art in Brooklyn

The Brooklyn Museum is performing a useful and timely service in its intelligent current exhibition of "The Dance in Art."  One can do no better at the onset than to quote from the excellent and scholarly preface of the catalogue written by Grant Hyde Code:
"The dance is an art peculiarly alive today, still contemporary, still modern....In its beginnings and among folk where the dance still exists in its most primitive form, the dance has deep social and religious significance.  It is symbolical of essential social efforts, a necessary magical means of achieving the most profound intentions of society.  this is true of America today....We are interested here primarily in the dance as a subject of painting, sculpture and drawing....
"The dance is the rhythmic and stylized movement of the human body, and people are the most frequent and perennially interesting subject of all representational art....From their different points of view, therefore, the painter and the sculptor when dealing with human form, and the dancer always, are explaining the same subject, namely, the rhythmic and stylized movement of the human form....There is another relation between life and the dance and other arts which it may be valuable to indicate.  Group movements of every kind - in sport, traffic, in every other contemporary social relation - assume necessarily something of pattern and style in the individual movements of which they are composed.... Such studies have certainly as much validity in the dance, in painting and in sculpture, as they have when literature, either critical or creative, is based on mass movements and social psychology."
The exhibition itself is a collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures and a fascinating group of surréliste dancers made from fabrics. Some of the exhibitors are practitioners of the dance theselves. Angna Enters is largely represented by both paintings and drawings of Mexican and Grecian dancers. She has also two imaginative and rather sinster compositions in gouache, Dance of Death, a grotesque of armatures, and Tragic Chorus, a line of dressmakers' forms entangled in a tape-measure.
Two Indians from New Mexico, Oqwa Pi and Tonita Pena, have large decorative panels depicting their ceremonial dances. Both are dancers as well as able painters. Betty Toiner has some absurd and amusing dancers made of cleverly chose and expressive fabrics, which she describes as cloth appliqué. She produces excellent drawings as well.
Everett Shinn's light and fragile dancers are in his usual style. Aline Frunhauf will be remembered from her exhibition last year. She has a fantastic and satiric touch. Donald Forbes has a most arresting head of Charles Weidman. Cornelia Chapin, the sculptress, has lent her beautiful drawing of the immortal Isadora by Ségonzac.
The sculptures form a very strong contribution to the exhibition, especially the ceramics. Norman Foster has conveyed the strain and intensity of savage invocation in his small plaster Prayer Dance. Isamu Noguchi shows a bronze of Doris Humphrey. Genevieve Karr Hamlin has a very well organized small bronze bar-relief in her Jazz Pursuit.