Black Couple Dancing in Their Apartment Painting

At first glance, Eastman Johnson's large-scale painting "Negro Life at the South" (1859) looks like a sentimental genre picture of a large group of slaves enjoying themselves outdoors at their urban quarters in Washington D.C., during the antebellum period.

A close reading of the painting, a key work in the Detroit Institute of Arts' exhibition "Dance! American Art 1830-1960," reveals a complex symphony of subtext and symbols. In the center, a dancing boy holds the hands of his mother while a banjo player nearby provides the soundtrack: markers of the centrality of music and dance within African-American culture. Up above a woman and child peer out the window of the dilapidated shack, while back on the ground, a young man makes time with a light-skinned girl who coyly keeps her eyes down on her domestic work. Way off to the side, a privileged white woman in a pretty dress enters the frame, eavesdropping.

These and others in the painting connect to each other through fleeting looks and enigmatic stares. Myriad  subtle skin tones among the slaves allude to the reality of forced miscegenation — rape. A ladder from the master's house to the roof of the slave dwelling suggests a passageway; a rooster and hen add other symbolic clues. Southerners seized on the pleasantries in the painting, rendered in soft-focused brushwork, as confirmation of their view that the impact of slavery was benign. Abolitionists, however, interpreted a very different meaning, one affirming their belief that slavery was evil. While Johnson's own attitudes about slavery have long been a topic of scholarly debate, "Negro Life at the South" manages to gently encapsulate the tensions seething through the American republic on the eve of the Civil War.

There's a lot more going on here than just a boy dancing.

"Dance! American Art 1830–1960," which opens Sunday, is a smart, rewarding and often surprising show that explores the role and meaning of dance in American culture. Organized by Jane Dini, the DIA's former assistant curator of American art (and currently associate curator of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the exhibition gathers  90 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, costumes and eight videos, most of contemporary dancers demonstrating and talking about their work. There are plenty of joyous paintings, lots of sexy bodies to admire and a gaggle of knockout works, including landmarks by George Caleb Bingham, Winslow Homer, Aaron Douglas and others that sweep through a dizzying array of artistic styles and mediums.

American artists have always loved to paint, sculpt, draw and photograph dancers. And Americans have always loved to cut a rug, even outside, spontaneously, on a flatboat floating down the Missouri or Mississippi river like the men Bingham memorably portrays in his iconic "The Jolly Flatboatmen" (1846). But at the core of the exhibition is the idea that dance provided a visual language that opens a window into the American soul — the long arc of cultural history, the shifting politics of race and class, ethnic identity, sexual mores and familial bonds.

As Martha Graham once put it, "The dance reveals the spirit of the country in which it takes root."

Dance fever

The exhibition  — which travels to the Denver Art Museum this summer and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., in the fall  — is divided into three major areas: dance as a visual symbol (the most potent), dancers onstage (the most fun) and new meanings in American dance (the least cohesive). What's especially exciting about the opening galleries is tracking the way dance on the one hand remained a signifier of cultural identity and pride among European immigrants,  American Indians and African Americans but also became an arena for cultural exchange and assimilation. Put another way: One of the most important melting pots in America has been the dance floor.

Dance scholar Constance Valis Hill's trenchant delineation of the black presence in the art of American dance, one of a number of strong essays that appears in the show's meaty catalog, traces Afro-Irish fusions in American dance. The percussive hybrid that came to be called "jigging" around 1800 was recognized as a "black" style. It was one of many that fell under the umbrella name of "a breakdown." William Sidney Mount's "The Breakdown, Bar-Room Scene" (1835) depicts a white man unselfconsciously dancing "black" to the delight of his peers.

Even more evocative is Mount's animated "Dance of the Haymakers" (1845) that shows two men jigging with arms raised above their head (a Scots-Irish maneuver) inside a barn with a fiddle player and onlookers enjoying the show. An African-American boy joins the music making by rapping drumsticks against the barn door. He's still literally on the outside looking in, but at least he's in the band.

By the time the Harlem Renaissance flowered between roughly 1920 and 1940, black artists were taking control of their own cultural narrative, replacing racist stereotypes withimages that captured the full humanity of African-American life. Again, the dance floor was a place of magic, now with Ellington and Basie swinging and shouting the blues on the  bandstand. Paintings by Ellis Wilson and William H. Johnson and a sculpture by Raymond Barthe capture the exuberance of jitterbuggers in action.

One of the most profoundly expressive works in the exhibition, Aaron Douglas' small-scale gouache, "Dance" (1930), illustrates a nightclub scene with a silhouetted couple dancing center stage and wailing saxophonists egging them on; the picture marries a modernist visual language with allegory and mystery. It connects the dots between African ancestors and after-hours revelry north of 110th Street.

Lots of familiar dancers, celebrities and archetypes parade through the show — twirling, tapping, strutting, shimmying, stripping. Some are still famous to us: Fred Astaire, elegance personified, in top hat and tails (Edward Steichen's 1927 photograph); the seminal modernist dancer Isadora Duncan (John Sloan's 1911 oil). Some are little-known today except to aficionados: Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who created a sensation when she toured America in the early  20th Century; her magnetic presence is captured in a few expressionist dabs by George Luks (1910). The Spanish heroine Carmencita, another starry import, is represented here in contrasting poses by John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase (both 1890) and a short Edison film from 1894.

Artists also were not shy about addressing the purely sexual desire of dance. The zaftig butt-shaker and her lecherous male audience in Thomas Hart Benton's "Burlesque" (1930) are having the time of their lives. Personally, I'd take Robert Henri's luscious and statuesque Salome, her veils cut daringly low below her midriff, and call it a night. Others might prefer the well-toned backsides of the male dancers in Paul Cadmus' homoerotic paintings of the early '40s.

The exhibition loses focus late in the game, and the final thematic chapter devoted to the variety of meanings in dance and collaborations of dancers and artists is a random jumble of art and ideas. Regrettably, the show  also refuses to use relevant developments in art history as even an occasional interpretive frame, particularly the relationship between modernism and dance — though at least the catalog includes a thoughtful take on the subject by Bruce Robertson.

The caveats aside, the show makes a real contribution, finding fresh scholarship in a  topic that no one seems to have previously looked at in depth. We should have been paying closer attention: Artists have known for a long time that if you want to get to know Americans better, watch us dance.

Contact Mark Stryker: 313-222-6459. mstryker@freepress.com

'Dance! American Art 1830–1960'

Sun.-June 12

Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward, Detroit

Special exhibition tickets: $10 for residents of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties ($5 for county residents age 6-17). $14 non-resident adult, $7 non-resident ages 6-17. Free for DIA members. Admission is free on Fridays. Timed reservations: 313-833-4005. www.dia.org

Hours: 9a.m.-4 p.m. Tue.-Thu., 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sat.-Sun.

Black Couple Dancing in Their Apartment Painting

Source: https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/2016/03/16/dia-dance-american-art/81771056/

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