Denishawn Redivivus

Here’s a suggestion for the culture assessors who make it their business to attach epithets to epochs: the nearly ended Seventies should be called the Backward Look Decade. In architecture, historic preservation of nineteenth century buildings has replaced modernism as the cause to be fought for, and the Beaux-Arts has replaced the Bauhaus as a symbol of what is True and Good. In painting, hand-wrought realism has not just triumphed over Pop and Abstraction: it has overtaken the Photo-Realism of a few years back as the hottest new trend. The latest art sensation in Paris is not the newly opened Musée Pompidou, devoted to the twentieth century, but an exhibition of German Romanticism at the Orangerie. To cap all this, nineteenth century academics like Hans Makart and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema are now bringing higher prices at European auctions than Andy Warhol.

Now comes another manifestation of the Backward Look—in what has always been the farthest-out and most experimental of American art forms, namely dance. This season’s hit is not a new attempt by Merce Cunningham and his usual collaborators, the dissonant composer John Cage and Pop’s grandpa, Robert Rauschenberg, to mount a Gesamtkunstwerk that will relegate Richard Wagner to the dustheap; neither is it a new ballet by Balanchine, Eliot Feld, or last year’s wonder girl, Twyla Tharp (who is currently choreographing for an ice skater in an apparent attempt to hang on to her headline status) ; it’s not even a new defector from the Soviet Union. What has excited the critics is The Spirit of Denishawn, a pious recreation of long-forgotten dances composed by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in the Twenties and earlier, when they were pioneering a new art.

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Ruth Berenson

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Here’s a suggestion for the culture assessors who make it their business to attach epithets to epochs: the nearly ended Seventies should be called the Backward Look Decade. In architecture, historic preservation of nineteenth century buildings has replaced modernism as the cause to be fought for, and the Beaux-Arts has replaced the Bauhaus as a symbol of what is True and Good. In painting, hand-wrought realism has not just triumphed over Pop and Abstraction: it has overtaken the Photo-Realism of a few years back as the hottest new trend. The latest art sensation in Paris is not the newly opened Musée Pompidou, devoted to the twentieth century, but an exhibition of German Romanticism at the Orangerie. To cap all this, nineteenth century academics like Hans Makart and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema are now bringing higher prices at European auctions than Andy Warhol.

Now comes another manifestation of the Backward Look—in what has always been the farthest-out and most experimental of American art forms, namely dance. This season’s hit is not a new attempt by Merce Cunningham and his usual collaborators, the dissonant composer John Cage and Pop’s grandpa, Robert Rauschenberg, to mount a Gesamtkunstwerk that will relegate Richard Wagner to the dustheap; neither is it a new ballet by Balanchine, Eliot Feld, or last year’s wonder girl, Twyla Tharp (who is currently choreographing for an ice skater in an apparent attempt to hang on to her headline status) ; it’s not even a new defector from the Soviet Union. What has excited the critics is The Spirit of Denishawn, a pious recreation of long-forgotten dances composed by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in the Twenties and earlier, when they were pioneering a new art.