A massive, wall-spanning poster in vibrant blue sets a celestial tone, with Matisse-like figures floating, perhaps dancing, across the space. Superimposed over the scene is the title: The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876-1914, the newest exhibit of the Yale University Art Gallery, showing from Sept. 6, 2024 through Jan. 5, 2025. The Hours, a ceiling mural by Edwin Austin Abbey, depicts the passage of time through personified figures, is the focal study of The Dance of Life exhibition, which aims to portray the artistic landscape of post-Civil War America. By exhibiting the preliminary stages and preparatory materials for large-scale paintings of other American masters—including Edwin Blashfield, Daniel Chester French, Violet Oakley, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent—The Dance of Life grants renewed agency to artistic practices. According to the exhibition’s organizer, Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture Mark D. Mitchell, The Dance of Life offers a fresh central subject: life itself. However, this curation of an American Renaissance doesn’t always reflect the uplifting, modern vitality suggested by its official cover.
Upon reaching the fourth floor, a golden sculpture of a flying female figure appears in front of another vibrant blue wall. Though a striking setting, the sculpture, depicting the allegorical figure of Victory is too small for the grandeur it aims to convey. It’s an adaptation of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s General William Tecumseh Sherman Monument in New York.
The Dance of Life isn’t about pedestaling early modern American masterpieces; instead, it offers a behind-the-scenes visit to the interactive studios of post-Civil War American artists. The finished pieces are already revered public treasures, decorating prestigious institutions like Pennsylvania’s State Capitol, the Library of Congress, or the Boston Public Library, however, the exhibit’s interactive studios reveal the process beyond the display. The Dance of Life is the visual expression of a choreographic process, a more honest and faithful reflection of the intentions of artists.
As America attempted to reinvent itself, artists were reinventing their practice, returning to the fundamental question: how does one capture life in its most truthful form? Classicists would reply, through a deeper study of the human body. But this sensual subject was hardly something Puritanical America was eager to embrace, so artists like Kenyon Cox, Frederick Williams Macmonnies, and their peers took inspiration to Paris, embracing instead the Italian Renaissance’s legacy. I gazed at meticulous sketches of female nudes, standing male figures, contorted silhouettes, and floating limbs.
An elongated and contemplative male silhouette surges from different sketches, landscapes, and sculptural studies across the room. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Violet Oakley, and William Morris Hunt took their hand at depicting Abraham Lincoln, his commanding presence and the weight of his legacy essentialized to represent “America’s idea of a modern figure.”
The study panels of Violet Oakley, the first American woman artist to receive a public mural commission, especially clarified this concept of an American Renaissance: establishing moral values to a nation both rebuilding identity and struggling to reconcile its own history. Lincoln at Gettysburg was created for the Senate Chamber of Pennsylvania State Capital and awkwardly inserts the 16th president in a historical scene with religious undertones. Depicting the moment of Lincoln’s oration at this pivotal moment of the war, the painting portrays the former president over a crowd of supplicants, giving him a priestly allure. The image is framed by a churchlike Roman arcade on which the words “it is for us the living rather to be dedicated to the unfinished work,” a line from Lincoln’s address, are inscribed.
Oakley’s other study, for her 1917, 44-foot-wide mural International Unity and Understanding features a central female figure with open arms. It is a rumination of the artist’s creative and intellectual processes, as she merges them with ideals and values America aspired to during this period. Formally, it reflects her intensive engagement with its subject, complete with an individual study of the figure’s face and movement. Conceptually, she seeks to represent a unified nation through the image of a female figure standing with open maternal arms, protecting, reuniting, and maybe dancing all at the same time.
Should we read all these figures belonging to a new collective imaginary as dancing through time? In an elevated spirit, the personified figures in Abbey’s Hours are defining a new rhythm, yet Abraham Lincoln’s solid stature conveys a sense of profound prudence.
The real choreographers of life, nonetheless are these artists who, characterized by a great awareness of their time, were not afraid to start from scratch, crafting new anachronic conversations using myths, religion and modernity under one unifying spirit: life.
