The Dancer’s Revenge

German writers became intensely interested in pantomime during the decade before World War I. While scholars have addressed the impact of pantomime upon dance and theater of the period, little discussion has focused on how it affected painting. I consider how Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s response to pantomime’s silent movement and metaphysical content influenced his depictions of dancers between 1912 and 1915. He had previously simply recorded various dance movements, but now pantomime encouraged him to use the theme of dance to symbolically represent the relationship between man and woman in his so-called “fantasy pictures.”

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Dance · Fantasy · German · Literature · Theme (computing) · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Diversity and Impact of Dance · History · Spatial and Cultural Studies