DiotimosReading Desk
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Arts

Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.

2 itemsCategory: Arts · newest first
  1. PDF

    Freedom in Dance

    Simon Morrison reviews three studies of Russian dance through the recurring conflict between expressive meaning and abstract virtuosity. Daria Khitrova argues that Russian ballet repeatedly returned to Jean-Georges Noverre’s ideal of harmonizing gesture, thought, and emotion whenever pure form threatened intelligibility, though Morrison faults her for omitting Soviet ballet. Elena Yushkova reconstructs Isadora Duncan’s Russian career and Moscow school while challenging misogynistic and sensationalized accounts of her decline; Irina Sirotkina traces the women-led free-dance studios that extended Duncan’s bodily and spiritual ideals before Stalinist repression. Morrison judges the latter books especially valuable for showing that Duncan’s liberating “natural” movement was paradoxically based on an imagined past and became anti-modernist in its resistance to Soviet mechanization and abstraction.

    Arts#Hierarchy
  2. PDF

    Government Priorities

    This review of John P. Murphy’s New Deal Art examines how the U.S. government treated art as a necessity within Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal from 1933 to 1943, using evidence including Seymour Fogel’s mural “Wealth of the Nation,” the Works Progress Administration’s community art centers, Charles White’s “Five Great American Negroes,” and Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” It praises the book’s accessible presentation of this rich Depression-era aesthetic tradition while noting that its narrative sometimes becomes mired in bureaucratic detail, and concludes that Pearl Harbor and the shift to wartime priorities ended the government’s capacity and desire to support the arts at the same level.

    Arts#FiveGreatAmericanNegroes#publicart