The body in motion – JF Willumsen's dance images
Movement in all its forms is a recurring theme in JF Willumsen's art, and it is experienced not least in his dance motifs. During his career, Willumsen painted a number of paintings, all of which have the dancing woman as their motif.
In the dance images, one experiences movement as free and uninhibited, but also as the opposite – as subject to control, control and training. Willumsen's dance images are a tribute to dance in all its forms and times. They are an investigation of social conventions and aesthetic ideals.
In his early years, Willumsen was inspired by, among others, the American dancer Isadora Duncan, who has since been called the mother of modern dance, and the American dancer Lola Hawthorn, whom Willumsen saw perform in Copenhagen in 1896.
Later in Willumsen's life, it is the French dancer Michelle Bourret, with whom the artist began a relationship in the early 1930s, who becomes the model and source of inspiration for the many dance images. With her by his side, dance becomes a central theme, taking on different forms and meanings between realism and allegory, between portrait and myth.
With her different costumes and body language and in the adapted scenery, Michelle Bourret appears in changing roles for the viewer. She is presented as the modern and independent woman who challenges the body through play and dance.
