Engendering Abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky, Gret Palucca, and "Dance Curves"

Gret Palucca's dancing was recognized for its optimism and lightness; Palucca's signature movements—airborne springs, deep lunges, and high leg extensions—impressed audiences with their athletic energy. One of Mary Wigman's first students, Palucca performed in numerous group choreographies created by the modern dance pioneer in the early 1920s, but split from her mentor in 1924 to found her own rival studio in Dresden and competed with Wigman for students and fame. Unlike Wigman, who was described by the bourgeois women's magazine Die Dame (The Lady) as a tieftänzerin, or low dancer, for her deeply spiritual and symbolic work based on movements along the floor, Palucca was termed by Die Dame as a hochtänzerin, or high dancer for her airborne movements.¹ And in contrast to Wigman, whose choreographies created new directions in and considerations about modernist dance, Palucca did not speak of her own dances in theoretical terms. Rather, critics noted that Palucca's rhythmic, geometric, and exuberant dancing style suggested a balance of contrasts: strength and softness, pushing out and pulling in, innocence and seriousness.²

Indeed, the impressive heights of Palucca's springs, combined with her youthfully pretty appearance, extensive tour schedule, and savvy self-promotion, made Palucca one of the most recognized dancers of Germany's Weimar Republic (1918–1933). Regularly featured in mainstream women's style magazines such as Die Dame and Uhu (The Owl), Palucca served as a model of the New Woman, the media icon of the fashionably emancipated woman, whose liberation was signified, in large part, through modern movement. At the same time, Palucca cultivated connections with the avant-garde, especially with artists. Art and dance critic Will Grohmann introduced her to the cultural elite; a Piet Mondrian painting hung in her dance studio; Palucca purchased a Paul Klee painting as a birthday gift for her husband; and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner filled sketchbooks with drawings of her solo dance rehearsals.³ In other words, Palucca promoted herself as a mass-media star and an avant-garde performer.

Palucca brought her dancing style, popular culture fame, and art-world connections to her interactions with artists at the Bauhaus, an innovative school for art and design in Weimar Germany. A bastion of modernism, the Bauhaus endorsed artistic abstraction, in which identifiable, figurative subject matter was minimized or even obliterated. Instead, Bauhaus modernism favored an emphasis on pictorial compositions of pure lines, blocks of color, and geometric shapes. Numerous modernist critics also envisioned modernism as a closed system of influence in which "art begat art" and developed without regard to external cultural forms, social issues, or political events. While such insistence on the removal of art from external forces would be impossible at the tumultuous Bauhaus, officially at least the Bauhaus asserted the primacy of modernism. Wassily Kandinsky, widely recognized as one of the first abstract painters, taught abstract art and theory to students and wrote theoretical treatises about abstract art during his tenure at the Bauhaus. "Dance Curves," an essay Kandinsky published in 1926 in which the artist created four abstract drawings influenced by four photographs of Palucca by Charlotte Rudolph, embodies the very issues of modernism promoted by the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s.

Instead of sustaining this narrowly defined notion of modernism, however, I focus on the staunchly abstract artist Kandinsky, and in particular his essay "Dance Curves," in order to position a gender critique of modernism. The Kandinsky/Palucca drawings elucidate the fluidity of interchanges between the arts and modernism's openness to seeming antitheses in physical culture and women's culture, thereby contesting the binaries of high art/popular culture, masculine/feminine, and mind/body that have been asserted by numerous theorists and critics since the Enlightenment. I argue that "Dance Curves" reveals the diversity within modernism, of the interaction between these socially constructed binaries, and in particular of abstraction's relationship with gender, before the imposition of conventional hierarchies that have dominated art history since Clement Greenberg in the 1950s.

These binaries ran deep. Since the Enlightenment, Rene Descartes' formulation of a mind/body dichotomy has privileged...