Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic by Susan Funkenstein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic by Susan Funkenstein Kate Kelley Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic. By Susan Funkenstein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Pp. 330. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-0-472-05461-9. Through a series of case studies on the visual imagery of social and professional dance, Susan Funkenstein's interdisciplinary monograph Marking Modern Movement tracks interactions and relationships between dancers and visual artists during the Weimar era. Drawing primarily on literature from gender studies, cultural history, art history, and dance history, Funkenstein fluently describes and analyzes dance and visual art. The dancing body, Funkenstein argues, was a site of cultural debate used by artists to explore, challenge, or reinforce gender norms as well as racial stereotypes. Constantly reevaluating the self-other binary in a selection of "high" and popular visual art, Funkenstein aims to show how these exchanges between dancers and visual artists, unique to the Weimar period, allowed artists to center the embodied experiences of women, shifting their status from object to subject. Through interpretations of dances and popular music associated with African American culture, this book also tracks the role of American cultural influence in Germany at this time as well as Germany's colonial imagination after losing its colonies at the end of WWI. Moreover, Funkenstein uses paintings, drawings, photographs, performances, and other art media to analyze the ways in which men and women crossed boundaries into opposite gendered spheres—just as many women entered the political sphere, so too did men find their ways into cultural realms of fashion and dance. The first chapter looks at two photomontages by artist Hannah Höch which make visible the contradictory place of women in 1919–1920. After having gained rights and workplace opportunities during the war, women were made to cede the realms of politics and the economy to men at the war's end. Combining, for example, images of early modern dancers dressed in loose-fitting white chitons with the heads of well-known suffragists, Höch's works couple women's emancipation with the celebration of their difference, especially their maternal nature, suggesting that a return to normative femininity and gender roles may have been welcome after the chaos and anxiety of wartime. In chapter 2, Funkenstein presents Mary Wigman as having more of a positive view on the role of women in politics and society than Höch, using, as she does in all the chapters, a significant amount of biographical detail. Funkenstein argues that Wigman's positioning herself as the subject through solo performances, costume choices, particular movements, and gestures, as well as her strong leadership, forced established male artists Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (both personal friends of Wigman) to rethink their portrayal of women as objects in their paintings. Funkenstein suggests that both artists, in repeatedly "marking" performances along with the dancers, were able to capture and, to some [End Page 181] degree, join their community, thus crossing the otherwise strictly gendered boundary of the all-female dance company. In a turn toward a more "low-brow" art form, the third chapter challenges dominant readings of the Weimar revue stage—specifically the kickline—as either representations of male sexual desire or as a reflection of growing capitalism and industrialization. Funkenstein looks at the revues as "women's culture filled with women's visual and performative pleasure" (93–94). Her case studies include the popular women's magazine Uhu's portrayals of women in revues as women experiencing pleasure and celebrating their physical beauty, while Hannah Höch's costume and set designs for her never-realized performance Anti-Revue used humor and androgynous characters to highlight the female performer's individuality and the possibilities for breaking down gender roles and crossing gendered boundaries. In her chapter on another well-known star, Funkenstein argues that Josephine Baker, ever aware of her public image, represented, on the one hand, the stereotypes and typology exemplified in the title of Paul Klee's portrait of Baker's Negride Schönheit and, on the other hand, the boundary-pushing notion that...