Satiric Dancer, Paris (variant)

In 1915 André Kertész began submitting pictures to newspaper and exhibition competitions in his native Hungary. He arrived in Paris one decade later greatly attuned to the possibilities of photographs as both unique display objects and mass-media images. This gorgeously printed view of the dancer Magda Förstner posing in the Montparnasse studio of sculptor Etienne (István) Beöthy (who, like the photographer and dancer, was also a Hungarian émigré) is a variant of one published by the Berlin leisure magazine Die Dame in 1927 to illustrate a parable of marital infidelity. Clad in a short halter dress with a ruff around her neck, Förstner perches alluringly on a couch, her lower legs swiveled outward as if in imitation of a Charleston step. Beöthy was pursuing an abstracted figural language in sculpture, just as Kertész was in photography, and his statue Direct Action, which appears in a corner next to the sofa, serves as a foil for the latter’s camera work. Interestingly, the published photograph became an icon, and possibly gained its current title only in the 1960s, when Kertész recovered the negative and reprinted it multiple times. The Art Institute’s version, meanwhile, is believed to be unique.