The Idea in Motion

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller made her debut in Paris just as painters of the symbolist movement began to make first steps toward abstraction. In this chapter, works of art and decoration by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis painters are linked to Fuller’s dance. With its repetitive, continuous motions and shifting perceptual cues, the serpentine dance allowed viewers a prolonged grasp of the sensation of watching Fuller’s transitory movement. In a similar effort, symbolist artists wove flat and patterned surfaces and serpentine lines, hindering visual rest and creating a springboard for abstract sensations of movement. Innovations in both media offered a formal and material web through which motion was sensed and caught by perception. This prolongment of form and feeling expresses the heart of the dialectics of the modern experience, balancing in a single sensation Baudelaire’s fleeting and eternal.

Living Art

In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Belgian dancer Akarova created performances that contemporary artists alternately termed “music architecture,” “living geometry,” and “pure plastics.” This chapter follows Akarova’s production during the years of the Belgian avant-garde movement “plastique pure” and its champion journal, 7 Arts (1922–1929), when Akarova’s dance helped to expand the scope of an isolated Belgian avant-garde by offering the country’s first abstract artists a glimpse of a utilitarian, applied art that could be embodied and felt, offering a model of kinesthetic activation and self-projection into the spaces of art.

The Dance of Abstract Cinema

As a moving art, cinema was linked to dance from its earliest moments and, like dance, held an idealized position for artists of the avant-garde, from the serpentine dance films of Edison and the Lumière brothers to the abstract cinema of the interwar avant-garde. At either end, whether filming a dancing body or creating abstract montages, cinema strove to express, not a new formal image on the flat screen but the dancing effects (and affects) of motion itself. This chapter follows a series of early twentieth-century artistic engagements with cinematic abstraction. Despite varying levels of formal abstraction and representational imagery, these films are no longer concerned with reproducing a world to look upon but now an environment to look through with kinesthetic sensation and desire. In a particularly rich case, Germaine Dulac, outwardly indebted to the dance of Loïe Fuller, became her successor in choreographic cinema, engaging the multisensory body through the medium of abstraction.

Dada Dance

Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance performances, but she is predominantly discussed as a designer and applied artist without political motivations. Using a photo of Taeuber in a dancer’s pose and costumed in a Dada body mask, this chapter registers her dance training and performances as a potent hybrid of art and movement that bridged the polarized concerns about art making during wartime. Taeuber’s danced intervention amid her artist colleagues puts Dada’s self-estrangement and alienation into contact with visceral self-recognition and agency. By working across a diversity of media, Taeuber’s process harnesses adaptive, circulating, collaborative, unauthored, and private modes of making, which highlight and bridge the gulf between the aesthetic and the political, or in avant-garde terms, between art and life.

Futurist Momentum

At the height of the “futurist moment,” just as painters across Europe were creating the first works of pure abstraction, in Paris the dramatist Valentine de Saint-Point announced a radical dance theory and performance. While Saint-Point is regularly aligned with the futurist movement, she was admired by a large roster of avant-garde artists and writers who were simultaneously theorizing and producing abstraction along the parallel paths of neosymbolism, futurism, cubism, and the philosophies of theosophy and Bergsonism. Saint-Point’s dance theory sought to create an abstract experience of vision by merging optical sensation with totalizing synesthetic and kinesthetic prompts. This chapter draws together this synesthetic vision and the similar perceptual estrangement of the painterly tactics of all-overness, musical rhythm, and collage in pioneering works of abstract painting by artists such as František Kupka, Gino Severini, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky.