Framed by the lifting of bans on social dance in Germany at the end of World War I and their subsequent reinstatement as German soldiers left for the front in World War II, Marking Modern Movement explores visual art that engages the spectatorship of dance to ask how gender roles evolved in the cultural renaissance of Weimar Germany. Susan Funkenstein argues that in this atmosphere of modernist experimentation, dancers and artists became “kindred spirits” (8) in the art movements of Berlin Dada, Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Bauhaus. While this kinship can be traced back to the turn of the century, when Munich's Secessionist artists were irresistibly drawn to early pioneers of modern dance—Isadora Duncan, Madeleine, Saharet, Cléo de Mérode, Clotilde von Derp, to name just a few—Funkenstein finds in dance images of the 1920s a portal to changing attitudes about gender in the dance-rich new republic.
Funkenstein draws on an impressive collection of beautifully reproduced paintings, drawings, montage, magazine illustrations, and costume and design sketches (49 B&W, 28 color). With a refreshingly wide lens, she tackles both concert and social dance to focus on women as leaders of a new age in dance. She supports her analyses of these images with carefully measured and richly woven historical, political, and biographical context. Although Funkenstein makes clear her debts to dance historians Kate Elswitt and Susan Manning, she carves a clear path of her own, with richly nuanced interpretation of dance imagery as a window on Weimar culture's perceptions of the gendered body. As strict binaries of Self and Other broke down, dancers, artists, and magazine editors shared aesthetic and social concerns that brought them into a web of mutual interest in the New Woman and her challenge to historical structures of power and meaning.
Each of the six chronologically ordered chapters forms a case study of dance manifested in visual culture. Chapter one, focused on Hannah Höch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife, explores continuities with Wilhelmine-era social conventions in order to tease out a current of pessimism over the limits of women's political gains after 1919. Juxtapositions of ballet dancers’ bodies and male politicians’ heads (cut from the pages of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung) recall social critiques from previous decades of Witzblatt satire found in Simplicissimus and Jugend, here employed in a subversion of traditional gender roles. Chapter two explores depictions of Mary Wigman's dances in terms of the power dynamics of a repositioned spectatorial gaze. By obscuring her face and body to resist objectification, Wigman made the essential qualities of gender into “tools for play and experimentation” (51). Funkenstein singles out the work of two artists who painted Wigman—Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—to lay open the power structures of gender-inflected spectatorship. This chapter best illustrates the “marking” of Funkenstein's title, fusing the gestural action of Kirchner's rehearsal sketching with Wigman's “marked” movements in the tentative phases of her creative process. In coverage of Wigman by women's magazines, Funkenstein reads the subtle clues to a female homoerotic subtext that she interprets as a liberated “structuring of desire” (88). Uhu and Elegante Welt helped to guide Weimar women's active spectatorship of dance from a variety of perspectives, with imagery of group dances in revues and kicklines. Chapter three examines this arena where women could observe the revue dancer apart from a male critical lens, focusing instead on what was at stake in their own enjoyment of stage revues.
Race enters the book's complex of critical stances in chapter four with imagery of Josephine Baker, who entertained German audiences in 1925 and 1928. Here, Funkenstein considers the German experience of colonialism to explain Baker's reception. This chapter considers a tangled web of primitivist, modernist, surrealist, and consumerist forces surrounding Baker's subtle evocations of African-American minstrelsy. Funkenstein sidesteps the pseudo-science of race at work in the development of Aryan physical ideals, addressing this issue more fully in her concluding chapter. Media advertisement, women's magazines, and Paul Klee's Neue Sachlichkeit portraiture give Funkenstein a broad brush with which to paint Baker's self-constructed “slippery hybridity” (156) and the cross-viewing of dance across social identities that is central to Funkenstein's project. Of all the deeply researched and aptly interpreted case studies in this book, chapter five most successfully captures its overarching claim with a counterexample of the subject-object gender relationships under study. Otto Dix's fascination with popular social dance rooted in American jazz anchors two of his paintings: An die Schönheit and Großstadt. In her analysis of An die Schönheit, Funkenstein masterfully weaves stereotypes from minstrelsy and Native American dress, Fordist industrial modernity, and the Americanized fashion and comportment of the New Man to illuminate the possibilities for men in female-dominated realms of dance. Großstadt, on the other hand, examines the New Woman's relationship with popular culture in the context of Weimar “forgetfulness” about the disaster of World War I. Popular dance, gender, Americanness, and German identity emerge from Dix's Renaissance-style triptych in a fascinating assessment of the multiple meanings radiating from jazz-dancing Weimar women. Chapter six engages the Bauhaus festivals and Oskar Schlemmer's Das triadische Ballett to explore the notion of Gesamttanzwerk, where dancing centered the entirety of Schlemmer's output and its engagement with gender-coded experiences of the psychiatric fallout of war.
The conclusion considers the demise of Weimar dance-art culture, diagnosing the mid-thirties separation of visual art and dance as a symptom of the Nazi regime's scattershot animosity to modernist art. With helpful translation of German terms and titles, this volume addresses a wide scholarly audience from specialist to advanced undergraduate. Aside from its obvious appeal to readers of German culture, Marking Modern Movement deserves the full attention of scholars and students in art, dance, gender, media, and popular culture studies.
