Afternoon of a Faun
Afternoon of a Faun
Pictorialism, Dance, and the American Arcady
This chapter focuses on a singular American fixation on mythical Arcadia that swept the nation in the fin de siècle and persisted even after the Great War. Extending from poetry to the barefoot dancing of Isadora Duncan and the costume dances of the Denishawn school, the American Arcady was marked by Panhellenic fantasies that inspired the widespread civic pageantry movement as an exercise in nationalist community building. Another key vehicle of Arcadian reverie was the pictorialist movement in photography, concentrated in the journal Camera Work, where it became somewhat indiscriminately affiliated with ultramodernism in art and literature generally. The chapter concludes with a look at Camera Work’s disavowal of pictorialist standards of beauty, presaging an incentive to reclaim the artistic potency of ugliness.
Keywords: Arcadia, civic pageantry, dance, Camera Work, pictorialism, photography
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