Moving Modernism : The Urge to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, Cinema

Moving Modernism reenacts the simultaneous eruption of three spectacular revolutions: the development of pictorial abstraction, the first modern dance, and the birth of cinema, which together changed the artistic landscape of early-twentieth-century Europe and the future of modern art. This study follows the chronology of the historical avant-garde to show how dance and pictures were engaged in a kindred exploration of the limits of art and perception that required the process of abstraction.

In early twentieth-century Europe, the watershed developments of pictorial abstraction, modern dance, and cinema coincided to shift the artistic landscape and the future of modern art. In Moving Modernism, Nell Andrew challenges assumptions about modernist abstraction and its appearance in the field of painting. By recovering performances, methods, and circles of aesthetic influence for avant-garde dance pioneers and filmmakers from the turn of the century to the interwar period — including dancer Loïe Fuller, who presented to symbolist artists the possibility of prolonged or suspended vision; Valentine de Saint-Point, whose radical dance paralleled the abstractions of cubo-futurist painting; Sophie Taeuber and her Dada dance; the Belgian "pure plastics" choreographer known as Akarova; and the dance-like cinema of Germaine Dulac — Andrew demonstrates that abstraction was deployed not only as modernist form but as an apparatus of creation, perception, and reception across artistic media.