![]() Isadora did have a small pointed nose, she did have large breasts and a double chin, and she did have thick legs which held up a solid body, which she moved with such fluidity that the French artist Antoine Bourdelle regarded her as “une sculpture vivante,” a living sculpture. Like any good caricaturist, Bib captured more than a grain of truth in his unflattering portrait. Bib, a caricaturist for the Paris humour magazine Le Charivari, drew a sketch of Isadora following her 1923 performance of “La Mort d’Yseult” (the death of Isolde) at the Trocadéro in Paris, which depicted the dancer as a ludicrous figure with pendulous breasts, a piggy nose, and a fat neck, clad in an indecent tunic. Miss Isadora Duncan by Jacques Baugnies, 1911 a youthful Isadora Duncan in Iphégenie, 1903/1904 Berlinĭetractors inflated Isadora’s corpulence and absurdity, seeing Isadora’s appetites all too clearly, but perceiving nothing of her grace. In the portrait, the skin pulls tightly across the dancer’s chest, revealing shadows of ribs that never made their appearance on Isadora’s corporal form, even in her more slender youth. The French painter Jacques Baugnies, who first met Isadora in London at the turn of the century, presented a portrait of his friend at the 1911 Paris salon des beaux-arts that refashioned her according to the emerging modern aesthetic for scrawny women. Many who idolized Isadora closed their eyes to her earthy appetites, substituting a purified and – not coincidentally – slimmed-down image of the dancer. Of course, not everyone shared Duncan’s and Genthe’s vision. “I am glad,” she wrote, “that I was young in a day when people were not self-conscious as they are now when they were not such haters of Life and Pleasure.” She was grateful to have come of age during an époque when “thinness was not equivalent to spirituality.” Isadora’s favorite photographs of herself were those taken by New York photographer Arnold Genthe after World War I, when she was already in her late thirties and far from the height of her popularity as a dancer. His photographs, she believed, were not “ representations of my physical being but representations of conditions of my soul.” Isadora Duncan, by Arnold Genthe Isadora Duncan, by Arnold Genthe She danced from sylph-like adolescence into widening womanhood, through three pregnancies and into the heaviness of middle age. ![]() She wore the evidence of her appetites, in the form of plump arms and calves, round belly, and soft chin, with grace and pleasure. She regarded her body as a vehicle for beauty, famously discarding the corsets and stockings that bound nineteenth-century women (even dancers) in exchange for loose tunics, bare legs, and bare feet. “Some people may be scandalized,” she conceded, “but I don’t understand why.” As far as Isadora was concerned, she never felt herself to be guilty of any sin or impropriety. She was unafraid to appear ridiculous for her appetites, and she disdained “the conclusion formed by so many women that, after the age of forty, a dignified life should exclude all love-making.” Imprinted in the womb by her mother’s taste for the food of Aphrodite, Isadora kept drinking at the fountain of love until the moment in her fiftieth year when, driving to an afternoon’s assignation, her colorful shawl caught in the axel of her car and strangled the life from her. At twelve years old she read George Eliot’s Adam Bede and decided that she would “live to fight against marriage and for the emancipation of women.” She practiced what she preached, throwing herself ecstatically into affairs, whether for a night or for a year. She would buy buckets of champagne to drink with friends even when she was too broke to rent a room where she could spend the night. Better just to stay up till dawn drinking.Ī self-described bacchante, Isadora gave herself to the pleasures of the body with the same abandon as those erstwhile priestesses of Bacchus. “I have never ceased to be madly in love,” Isadora wrote in her memoir My Life, a chronicle of her countless erotic encounters, as much as a narrative of her evolution as a dancer. And she kept right on drinking champagne and dining on luxuries until her dying day. Isadora danced her first dances in the womb, she claimed, under the influence of those effervescent bubbles and slippery molluscs. When Isadora Duncan’s mother was pregnant with the dancer, she could eat only iced oysters and iced champagne.
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