Sloan’s “Isadora Duncan, 1911″

In his 1911 painting of the dancer in action, John Sloan rendered an Isadora Duncan as fleshy and sensual as a Rubens goddess. A translucent white gown dances about her on its own breeze, exposing her substantial legs and barely covering her breasts. This unfettered body presents sex as natural and primal. Three roses tossed to the stage attest to the ardor of unseen men in the audience.

Duncan grew up amid a California bohemianism that imagined a New Athens as a sort of Maxfield Parrish fantasy, and her costumes and intuitive, innocent approach to dance reflected that.

Duncan, one of the founding mothers of American modern dance, was a radical and controversial figure. She shed the restrictive Victorian clothing of the day on stage and off and argued for a more open sexual environment. She insisted on her right to bear children out of wedlock if she wished. She declared that women should not have to depend on men or answer to them — in an age that took seriously the obey part of “love, honor and obey.” She danced — and bared much — while pregnant. Duncan shocked the world.

Sloan captured that aspect of Duncan in the blunt allure of that earth-mother body. Deborah Jowitt, in her book Time and the Dancing Image, writes of “the artless vigor of a fine animal.” Sloan gets that. Jowitt writes of Duncan’s “wild maenad skippings with head thrown back and strong throat exposed” — exactly the moment in Sloan’s painting. Her wild rapture stands out all the more against the austere geometry of Sloan’s backdrop.

Duncan was a pleasure-loving revolutionary, but she was also high-minded. She modeled her costumes on ancient Greek garb she’d seen on vases in museums and on allegorical figures in Renaissance paintings. She thought of herself as reviving Classical culture and leading the world into a purer place, into something like Eden. She danced to Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner. She was no libertine in the way of jazz-age flappers of the ensuing decade. She bought into Delsartian ideas of moral uplift rising from vigorous, rhythmic physicality. Duncan, in her unconventional way, was noble.

Sloan (1871-1951) gets at this paradox with a breathtaking balancing act in Isadora Duncan, 1911 (which, like all the art works in this series, resides in the permanent collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum). First, that weighty flesh — bathed in the glow of newly-invented electric stage lighting — is ever so delicately airborne. Upward turning thrust from the right hip, thigh and leading knee have lifted her; the toes of her left foot just leave the stage. She’s suspended in front of a rich, subtle darkness, an indefinite depth that can seem so mysterious in stage light.

Sloan did not center his figure in the frame; he enhances the sense of motion by placing her in the left half. He left the right side of the painting vacant, to give the dancer someplace to go and to allow viewer to complete the jump, the landing and the completion in their minds’ eyes.

The general rosy glow of the figure intensifies curiously into a fiery, perhaps hellish red in her exquisitely held left hand. Why did Sloan paint that hand, which is nearly at the center of the painting and emerges as an important focal point, so far outside the natural color scheme? Maybe he meant it to contrast its devilish shade with its delicacy and with the heavenward indication of the index finger. Flesh and spirit met in Duncan, whose gaze is heavenward, away from the pathetic roses pitched by would-be stage-door Johnnies.

Sloan’s painting is first about Isadora, her charisma and the rapture of a moment. But it is also a canny composition, a deft play of curves and right angles and light and dark, and subtle gradations of color. Remove the woman and the roses, and this passionate, smart painting would still merit attention.

Sloan’s Isadora is the tenth and last essay in my summer series on pieces from MAM’s permanent collection. I’m pleased to report that other ThirdCoast writers, notably Kat Murrell and Angela Damiani, are keen to take up the task on an ongoing, intermittent basis. And next summer, I intend to do another 10 works myself.

Most of us think of a visit to an art museum as a major field trip. You go to Chicago and spend an entire day at the Art Institute. You go to New York and budget full days for MOMA and the Met. After all, it’s $20 to get into MOMA, so you want to try to see everything. Even at MAM, you want to get your $12 worth.

So most people hurry through, speed-viewing. Thirty seconds in front of one work is a long time. That’s one way to see art, but maybe not the best way.

My oldest son, Nick, is a photographer and videographer in New York. He has memberships at MOMA, the Met and other museums in the city. A couple of years ago, he spoke to me enthusiastically about the memberships, as they allowed him to drop in whenever he had a few spare minutes or happened to pass by. He liked to go in and spend, say, 20 minutes each with two or three works.

Nick’s practice partly inspired One Piece at a Time. I’ve found  frequent, short visits, rather than an annual pilgrimage, to be the best way to experience MAM and the work in it. As a museum member, I can bike to the lakefront and drop in as often as I please.

What a luxury, for a mere $75 a year — and that’s for a family membership. I recommend it highly. And note that Milwaukee Art Museum membership involves no bizarre initiation ritual.

Print out this or any story from my One Piece at a Time Series and present it at the Milwaukee Art Museum admissions desk for $2 off your visit.