The 20th century has been a period of revolution for virtually all of the arts. The classical standards of artistic expression have been studied, deconstructed and ultimately reinvented through the paintings of Pablo Picasso, Salvadore Dali, and Max Ernst, the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, the literature of James Joyce and the music of Igor Stravinski, to name a few. With creative insight, passion and sheer artistic potency, Martha Graham earned a place among this pantheon of luminaries through her singular creation of the modern dance. In 1937, Merle Armitage compiled some of the articles written by her friends, colleagues and critics into a single volume titled Martha Graham, The Early Years. The articles, written over the first decade of her career, provide valuable insight into the contemporary perception of the importance and impact of her work.
Like many of her contemporaries throughout the art world, she was subject to a wide range of both criticism and praise for her innovative approach to what was then a rigidly defined, classical art form. She was criticized by those who could only interpret the dance through the classical vocabulary of expressive motion for being pretentious, and therefore difficult to understand, and for creating works that were monotonous due to their lack of appreciable motifs. She was accused of abandoning the dance for the theater. She was hailed as a great artistic genius, however, by those who could appreciate her contribution to the dance. The fact that the significance of her work was immediately recognized was a credit both to the strength of her work and to the perceptiveness of her critics.
Merle Armitage writes of the limitations of the dance as a means of preserving artistic statements, and of GrahamÆs accomplishments within those limitations. Compared to painting, sculpture, literature and film, the dance is an ephemeral form of art. It uses movement and gesture to con...