Niddy Impekoven, ca. 1928
Category: role portrait, Rollenporträt, characterization
Schalk ~ Scoundrel, 1920s
Sherman as Cahun (1975)
“This photograph from early in Cindy Sherman’s artistic career indicates a burgeoning interest in what has become a lifelong investigation into using herself as subject. Produced in 1975, during her time as an art student at the State University of New York, Buffalo, the work prefigures her famous Untitled Film Stills series by two years. In it, the artist references Claude Cahun, an early Surrealist photographer whose androgynous self-portraits inspired a later generation of feminist theorists to think about gender as a social role that is performed rather than innate—ideas that would become central to Sherman’s oeuvre from the mid-1970s onward.” (quoted from source)
Chaja Goldstein by Merkelbach
Chaja Goldstein was born in a Polish ghetto, in the town of Rypin in 1908. […] When she was ten years old, Chaja moved to Berlin with her Orthodox parents, brother Eli and baby sister Sally, fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe.
She made her debut in Berlin in 1931 as Hanna Goldstein with dances such as Der reiche und der arme Jude and the Hebräische Lied. The Berliner Tageblatt praised her performances. Shortly afterwards she also performed in the Kaftan, a small Jewish theater on Kurfürstendamm, where she sang Yiddish songs. Over the next few years Goldstein grew into a famous dancer and singer, connecting the Yiddish folk culture of her childhood with modern Western culture. She soon led a lavish life in Berlin’s artistic avant-garde circles. She lived with the Hungarian painter György Kepes (1906-2001) and had a love affair with the Dutch artist Wijnand Grays (1906-1995).
In 1933, Chaja Goldstein fled to the Netherlands as a result of the rise of the Nazi party. In April 1933 she appeared for the first time under the name ‘Chaja Goldstein’ on the stage of the Amsterdam Conservatory and the Rotterdam Studio 32, with her Yiddish dances and songs. [quoted from Huygens Instituut]
G. Hoffmann by Frank C. Bangs
Agniel seated in Buddha position
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
Dorothy Lee (1920) by Goldberg
Jeanne Moreau as Le Sphinx, 1954
Nyota Inyoka, 1920s
un regard oblique 