Margareta Paluka, 1922-23
Category: dancer, Tänzerin, danseuse, danzatrice, bailarina
Gret Palucca jumping 1920s-1930s
Dämmerung (Twilight), 1925
This image is taken from the film ‘Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit’ (‘The Way to Strength and Health: a film of modern body culture’, 1925). Along with Helmy Hurt, Gerhard Riebicke was the set photographer for the UFA film directed by Wilhelm Prager and Nicolaus Kaufmann.
Loie Fuller ca 1900 by Beckett
The American dancer Loie Fuller (1862-1928) conquered Paris on her opening night at the Folies-Bergère on November 5, 1892. Manipulating with bamboo sticks an immense skirt made of over a hundred yards of translucent, iridescent silk, the dancer evoked organic forms –butterflies, flowers, and flames–in perpetual metamorphosis through a play of colored lights. Loie Fuller’s innovative lighting effects, some of which she patented, transformed her dances into enthralling syntheses of movement, color, and music, in which the dancer herself all but vanished. Artists and writers of the 1890s praised her art as an aesthetic breakthrough, and the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who saw her perform in 1893, wrote in his essay on her that her dance was “the theatrical form of poetry par excellence.” Immensely popular, she had her own theater at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, promoted other women dancers including Isadora Duncan, directed experimental movies, and stopped performing only in 1925.
Loie Fuller’s whirling, undulating silhouette, which embodied the fluid lines of Art Nouveau, inspired many images, from the portraits of Toulouse-Lautrec and the posters of Jules Chéret and Alphonse Mucha to the sculptures of Pierre Roche and Théodore Rivière, as well as the photographs of Harry C. Ellis and Eugène Druet.
The pictures shown here depict movements from such dances as “Dance of the Lily” and “Dance of Flame.” These images do not pretend to evoke the otherworldly effect of the performance, which took place on a darkened stage in front of a complex set of mirrors and whose magic was entirely dependent on lighting. Here, the strange shapes, reminiscent of chalices and butterflies, take form, incongruously, in the middle of an urban park, through the efforts of a short, stout figure. Arrested in crude natural light, they still retain, however, their spellbinding energy. Part of a group of thirteen photographs complemented by six others in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, these images belonged to the sculptor Théodore Rivière (1857-1912), and were previously thought to have been made by him. They have now been reattributed to Samuel Joshua Beckett, a photographer working in London. / quoted from the Met
Riebicke · Rhythmic gymnastics
Nackte Tänzerinnen, 1920s
Dancer, 1920
Ruth Page by Maurice Seymour
Maurice (1900-1993) and Seymour Zeldman (1902-1995), Russian expatriate photographers, formed the “Maurice Seymour” studio in 1929. Inspired by the example of Maurice Goldberg, the foremost photographer of classical dancers and concert musicians of the 1920s and regular contributor to the New York Times, the brothers chose to make a particular forte of ballet dancers. From 1929 to 1950 they plied their trade in a studio at the St. Clair Hotel in Chicago. In 1950 Seymour Zeldman moved to New York City; both men at this juncture legally changed their names to Maurice Seymour.
The New York brother expanded his clientele from dancers and actors to singers, jazz musicians, and burlesque stars in the 1950s. He for a period partnered with James Kriegsmann, successor to Herbert Mitchell, and a practitioner of in situ photography of singers and musicians in their performance venues. The Chicago Maurice Seymour continued specializing in dance and theatrical photography, although he had, for a period of time in the 1930s, a healthy business from radio personalities as well. Both shuttered their studios in the 1970s.
When in Chicago, they collaborated completely when creating images, sharing the posing and developing work. The images tended to be brightly illuminated, posed against neutral featureless backgrounds, and developed on glossy paper. The studio’s skill at retouching was particularly well known. All of the Chicago portraits were taken with a large accordion portrait camera using 8×10 negatives. From 1935 onward, the brothers were the prefered portraitists of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In 1947 the studio published Seymour on Ballet, a set of photographic studies, with a foreward by Leonid Massine (Chicago: Pelligrini & Cudahy), and in 1952, an expanded portfolio, Ballet Portraits, featuring Margot Fonteyn (Chicago: Pelligrini & Cudahy). / src broadway library
Dorothea Albu, 1922
Solarizations · Jeanne Mandello
»Destiny Emigration« reconstructs the stories of two Jewish photographers, Gerti Deutsch and Jeanne Mandello. Each left her country when the Nazis took power.
Jeanne Mandello (Frankfurt/Main 1907 – 2001 Barcelona) fled Frankfurt in 1934, heading first for Paris and then for Montevideo in Uruguay.
She had not yet turned 19 when she left home for Berlin in 1926 to train for two years at the Photographische Lehranstalt/Lette-Verein. She obtained her Chamber of Trade certificate with a mark of “very good”. Work experience with Dr Paul Wolff, the Leica pioneer, brought a practical initiation into photojournalism. In 1929 she opened her first studio in Frankfurt, acquired portrait commissions, took pictures for the press, and met the young Arno Grünebaum, who had taken an interest in photography. They married, but aware of the threat posed by Nazi attacks on Jewish institutions, they fled to Paris in January 1934. Here Mandello enjoyed a career she could scarcely have imagined as a fashion photographer, with commissions from companies like Balanciaga, Mainbocher, Maggy Rouff and Chanel, to name but a few.
Her career ended overnight when the Nazis invaded France. Like all German women, she was temporarily interned at the camp in Gurs after the National Socialists occupied Paris in 1940, after which she and her husband managed to escape via Spain and emigrate to Uruguay. Yet again she found the energy for a new beginning: she borrowed a Rolleiflex, and was soon successful with her portraits of artists and pictures for tourist guides. In 1953 Jeanne Mandello separated from Arno Grünebaum, settling in Barcelona in 1959.
The lives of both women photographers were coloured by their fate as refugees and emigrées, while Jeanne Mandello suffered the additional blow of losing almost all her work.
source of text and picture on bottom : Das Verborgene Museum
Sunny Lorinczi was born in Uruguay in 1930 to a family of Hungarian origin. A ballet dancer from her early teenage years, she goes on to interpret the starring roles of classical ballet’s repertoire, such as “Giselle”, throughout South America. She becomes the Montevideo’s Sodre’s prima ballerina in 1951, under the direction of Vaclav Veltchek. In 1961, she moves to France with her French husband and son and sets up her own ballet school. | src Jeanne Mandello
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