Modern Muse
'Isadora: A Sensational Life' by Peter Kurth

Reviewed by Tim Page

Sunday, January 6, 2002; Page BW03

ISADORA
A Sensational Life
By Peter Kurth
Little, Brown. 652 pp. $29.95

The lives of certain artists inspire popular legends that have little or no relation to any concomitant general understanding of their work. How many of Arthur Rimbaud's admirers never crack A Season in Hell yet are drawn to the tale of the rude, brilliant boy who lived on absinthe and opium, scandalized Paris with his amours and -- oh, by the way -- revolutionized French poetry, all before disappearing into a mysterious Abyssinian limbo? How many people watch the films of Alla Nazimova, read the novels of Gertrude Stein or listen to the music of John Cage nowadays? And yet these figures continue to fascinate, for their personal mystique is very much alive.

Isadora Duncan is an ideal example of the Artist as Legend, for she can be almost anything we want her to be. Very little of her work has actually survived -- only some striking photographic images, a snippet of silent film, a distracted, unreliable autobiography, and sheaves of self-infatuated pronouncements about Art, Life, the Soul and other intangibles. And yet when I was going to college a quarter century ago, all the smart young dance students -- the ones who read Proust and smoked Gauloises and loved to talk aesthetics and politics until the bars shut down -- wanted to be Isadora. Not Martha Graham (who was, incredibly, still alive and teaching at the time). Not Margot Fonteyn. Isadora.

Now Peter Kurth has done a heroic job recreating this charismatic, complicated and ultimately deeply tragic figure, born in the heyday of the railroads and dead before the Great Depression. Isadora: A Sensational Life -- all 652 evocative, authoritative, sumptuously detailed pages of it -- will likely become the standard biography. Kurth seems to have read everything that has been written about her; and while he lets critics, scholars and (most valuably) those who saw her dance sum up the evanescent Duncan artistry, he gives us the woman herself.

If you know only one thing about Isadora, it is probably that she met a ghastly but appropriately theatrical end when her long red scarf caught in the wheel of her latest lover's racing car and pulled her to her death. ("Goodbye, my friends, I go to glory," she had just called out to those seeing the couple off -- who would have dared invent such a scene?). In fact, the automobile was already her mortal enemy: Her two children had been killed in a freak accident years earlier when an inattentive chauffeur sent her Renault hurtling into the Seine.

Hers was a sloppy life. She drank; she took drugs; she was prone to tantrums; according to the man she finally married, the manic, suicidal Russian poet Serge Esenin, she had more than a thousand lovers of both sexes, including the theatrical visionary Gordon Craig, the sewing-machine heir Paris Singer and the ubiquitous Mercedes de Acosta (who also numbered Dietrich and Garbo among her intimates).

But she was more than just another rowdy, interesting footnote in the history of bohemia; rather, Duncan was one of the true visionaries of modern dance -- and, by extension, of modernism in all its guises. It was a role she felt destined to fulfill. "The character of a child is already plain, even in its mother's womb," she wrote in My Life. "Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and iced champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne -- the food of Aphrodite.' "

She launched her career in Chicago while still a teenager, moved on to New York and then to London, Paris and Berlin. By 1903, she was a world sensation, earning up to $750 a night, inspiring pans and panegyrics by turn but leaving no spectator unmoved. Kurth likens Duncan's approach to the "method acting" of Konstantin Stanislavsky. "All art begins, in this view, not with technique but with truth -- indeed, with personal truth -- which can be nourished and, with practice, summoned at will. Any dance technique, properly learned, would respond to this imperative, Isadora believed, but not the other way around. Truth must come first, and technique after; as Isadora said, 'Life is the root, and art is the flower' -- the definition of modern art."

Although she founded a short-lived dance school in Grunewald, Germany (whence a group of disciples, the so-called Isadorables, emerged), Duncan exerted her strongest influence through her own example. She always danced barefoot, usually in loose veils as the least onerous substitute for nudity ("I cover my body because the law demands it," she once said) and stressed a sort of spiritual awakening to dance rather than traditional balletic technique. "Listen to the music with your soul," she advised. "Now, while listening, do you not feel an inner self awakening deep within you -- that it is by its strength that your head is lifted, that your arms are raised, that you are walking slowly toward the light?"

Duncan was always controversial. George Balanchine, who saw her toward the end of her career, thought she was "awful . . . a drunken, fat woman who for hours was rolling around like a pig." Sir Frederick Ashton, on the other hand, was "completely captivated" by Duncan's work. "The way she used her hands and arms, the way she ran across a stage -- these I have adapted in my own ballets." She seems to have had a profound effect on visual artists: Jean Cocteau and Auguste Rodin were two of many who immortalized her in sketches, while Edward Steichen took a memorable series of photographs of her at the Parthenon.

"She was speaking in her own language," Craig wrote after his first encounter with Duncan's dancing, "and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before. No one would ever be able to report truly, yet no one present had a moment's doubt. Only this can we say -- that she was telling to the air the very things we longed to hear, and till she came we had never dreamed we should hear, and now we heard them, and this sent us all into an unusual state of joy and I . . . I sat still and speechless." •

Tim Page is the music critic of The Post.