Isadora: A Sensational Life

Isadora Duncan "arrived like a glorious bounding Minerva in the midst of a cautious corseted decade," said Janet Flanner in The New Yorker (1927), delivering an "electric shock" to Western culture. Finally, here is a biography that does justice to the life of this unforgettable woman, the greatest p [...]
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Isadora Duncan "arrived like a glorious bounding Minerva in the midst of a cautious corseted decade," said Janet Flanner in The New Yorker (1927), delivering an "electric shock" to Western culture. Finally, here is a biography that does justice to the life of this unforgettable woman, the greatest pioneer of modern dance. Always dazzling, always fabulous, Isadora was the personification of flair, and she was anything but ordinary. Her scandalous behavior, protofeminism, global celebrity, revolutionary politics, and artistic ground breaking all feel quite modern, yet her public life was played out between the Mauve Decade and the Roaring Twenties. From an unconventional childhood and throughout the years of her flurried life, she pursued a creative struggle between Apollo, symbolizing clarity, order, and form, and Dionysus, expressing all that is wild, yearning, and destructive in human nature. In her wake lay adoration, as well as controversy and outrage. "For her views," said a New York paper, "some will call her blessed. Many will call her names." Never before has Isadora Duncan's life been so engagingly explored. Acclaimed biographer Peter Kurth recounts this sensational life filled with lavish love affairs, artistic zeal, marvelous performances, and personal tragedies. Kurth allows the free spirit and idiosyncratic personality of this passionate artist to shine through, revealing her dramatic story set against the sweeping backdrop of Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century. Kurth tells of Isadora's longtime love affairs: with English designer Gordon Craig, father of her daughter, Deirdre; with sewing-machine heir Paris Singer, father of her son, Patrick; and with Russian poet Sergei Esenin. Also on this tumultuous stage are her many friends and family, including Auguste Rodin, Jean Cocteau, Edward Steichen, Preston Sturges, Mary Desti, Mercedes de Acosta, the six "Isadorables," and the colorful Duncan clan. Drawing from extensive research of major archival sources in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, including several private archives and unpublished manuscripts, Peter Kurth has created a compelling portrait of an intelligent, complicated, conflicted woman. As the New York Times said of her in 1928: "It is quite certain that no other American woman has so impressed the world outside of America -- made such a mighty stir, commanded such a following at home and abroad ... left behind her such a legend of personality and such a trail of effects."