Actors’ Effigies and Photo-Portraits

Abstract

Disguise and Masquerade in Chapter Five features body forms and constructions during the interwar years in Weimar, Paris, Moscow and Brussels. Instances of the human body as scenographic material increase in number and intensity as modern dance and theatre diminish the differences between and actor and the object. Experimentation at the Bauhaus, particularly by Oskar Schlemmer, is detailed in ‘Ballerina Objects and Mechanical Pierrots’. Further adaptations of figures from the commedia dell’arte push the concept of ‘kinetic painting’ and choreographic text to new levels (as with dancer-artist Akarova). Advances in self-portrait photography as identity study, particularly by women artists like Arndt, Cahun and Krull, engage masking in new interpretations of the être-objet (Dalí). Additional modernist photographs of Dora Maar, Man Ray and others are analysed. Elements of Dada, Expressionism and Futurism appear in this collection of masquerades. Magritte’s provocative images of woman and man with fabric-covered bodies and faces tilts modernist disguising to the heart of Surrealism.