Robin Veder

Embodied Modernism investigates the contributions of exercise and dance to the aesthetics of modern art. This book project takes the philosophy, imagery, and influence of Arthur B. Davies—American artist, curator of the 1913 Armory Show, collector, and collections advisor—as the locus for exploring how body cultures shaped artistic modernism in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I argue that Davies’ engagement with contemporary exercise and dance shows that his classicized figures expressed modern sensibilities of body consciousness. In this period, the American and European body cultures of Delsarte expressive gymnastics, modern dance, and Mensendieck exercise looked to art history for models of the body beautiful. Their sensibilities interlaced philhellenic aesthetics with modern ideals and practices for achieving physical health, efficiency, and self-expression. Similarly, in his own artistic production, Davies channeled his appreciation of Greco-Roman art into modernist visual experiments. He did so by translating these conjoined art-historical and modern body culture sensibilities into the trans-historical “lift of inhalation” theory of art, through which he explored an embodied visual modernism.