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| Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Dancing Figure ca. 1910-15 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Dancing Figure ca. 1910-15 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Dancing Figure ca. 1910-15 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
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| Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Acrobatic Dance 1911 woodcut National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Arthur Helwig Dancer ca. 1950-60 lithograph Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio |
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| John Doyle Lord Grey and the Duke of Wellington satirized as Ballet Dancers 1832 drawing (print study) British Museum |
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| Valentine Gross Sketch of Vaslav Nijinsky in L'Après-midi d'un Faune (Ballets Russes) ca. 1912 drawing Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Theo van Doesburg Two Dancing Figures ca. 1916 drawing, with watercolor Centraal Museum, Utrecht |
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| Elie Nadelman Dancer before 1946 drawing Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri |
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| Abraham Walkowitz The Ballet 1938 drawing, with watercolor Yale University Art Gallery |
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| Baron Adolf De Meyer Maenad in L'Après-midi d'un Faune (Ballets Russes) 1912 palladium print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Baron Adolf De Meyer Maenad with Faun (Nijinsky) in L'Après-midi-d'un-Faune (Ballets Russes) 1912 palladium print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Edgar Degas Dancer ca. 1882-95 wax statuette (left in the artist's studio at his death) Yale University Art Gallery |
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| Hellenistic Greek Culture in Asia Minor Dancing Eros 3rd century BC terracotta statuette Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Ilse Bing Dancer Willem Van Loon, Paris 1932 gelatin silver print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Barbara Morgan Bea Sickler in Lynchtown by Charles Weidman 1938 gelatin silver print Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
The Paris Mouse
hunched over the greasy
burner on the stove
was noir, as in
film noir, as in
cauchemar,
as in le nuit
not blanche but
noir, the dream you can't
wake up from, meaning she
was a mouse fatale,
licking the old oil
glued to the old
cooktop, feasting
in her tiny hunched-up
sewer life
on fats & proteins for her
bébés all atremble in their
rotting poubel nest,
so when I screamed my piercing
Anglo-Imperial scream of
horror & betrayal –
not my stove, not my traces of
pot au feu –
she leaped, balletic, over
the sink, the fridge, the lave-vaisselle,
& back to the cave & the trash she
scuttled, grim as a witch
in La Fontaine
who has to learn
the lesson we
all must learn:
Reality is always sterner
than pleasures of the nighttime burner.
– Sandra M. Gilbert (2006)