“The Dancer and the Dance: Prints, Drawings and Photographs” Opens at the U.Va. Art Museum

CHARLOTTESVILLE.- In honor of the upcoming residency of renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones in November, theUniversity of Virginia Art Museum presents an exhibition of images of dance, drawn from its own and private collections.

“The Dancer and the Dance: Prints, Drawings and Photographs” opened July 29 and runs through Dec. 23.

“Dance may be the most ancient art form, because it turns the human body into a work of art,” museum director Bruce Boucher said. “Photography captures the most ephemeral and detailed of dance gestures, and artists have shown that the static and kinetic are ultimately one. Great art allows us to be aware of this fact, whether in classical dance or in the visual records of photographers, printmakers, sculptors and draftsmen.”

The artists represented in this exhibition, ranging through many centuries up to the present, include Giovanni Podesta, Jan Sadeler, Paul Gavarni, Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Käthe Kollwitz, Man Ray, Reginald Marsh, Barbara Morgan, Garry Winogrand and Dove Bradshaw.

Together, these prints, drawings, photographs and sculpture reflect the perennial fascination of artists in conveying bodily movement as a manifestation of the spirit, Boucher said. The exhibition’s title comes from the last line of William Butler Yeats’ poem “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Related posts:

1. Representations of Dance in the Art of Modernism at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover
2. Tel Aviv Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings Presents Cabinet Secrets: Prints by Jim Dine
3. Works from the Museum of Prints and Drawings Berlin, on Display at Kunstmuseum Bonn
4. Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, David Becker, Dies
5. The photographs of Brett Weston opens at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art