Brooklyn Museum: American Art: Untitled

11:33 06/02/2009

Hi Nina, we managed to get the label from the gallery scanned and online, so that should give you some more information about the Egyptian theme.

posted by

shelley

14:45 05/27/2009

IIRC, It's actually a painting of the a French ballet inspired by Ancient Egyptian culture. But I'd have to find time to look up the source again to confirm that.

posted by

erin_trying

14:10 05/12/2009

I wonder if there is an Egyptian theme in this piece.

posted by

ninakuriloff

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Anne Estelle Rice was a young modernist at work in Paris when she created The Egyptian Dancers, inspired by the 1909 Paris debut of the Ballets Russes with an avant-garde production of Cleopatra. Determined to evoke the ballet’s angular choreography and sensual costumes (by Leon Bakst), Rice employed decoratively simplified forms and unnatural colors inspired by a French modernist aesthetic called Fauvism (fauve means “wild beast”). Several years after its acclaimed European debut in 1910, the painting was among numerous works that Rice left in the care of the American writer Theodore Dreiser when an exhibition planned for New York was subverted by wartime concerns. Untraced for the past sixty years, this recently recovered canvas will stand among the most significant achievements by an American modernist, or by an American woman, at work among the turn-of-the-century Parisian avant-garde.

Artist: Anne Estelle Rice, 1877-1959
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dates: 1910
Dimensions: 57 x 73 in. (144.8 x 185.4 cm)
Collections: American Art
Museum Location: This item is on view in American Identities: A New Look, Modern Life, 5th Floor
Accession Number: 2007.51
Credit Line: Dick S. Ramsay Fund
Image: Overall, 2007.51_PS1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2008

Collections: American Art: Untitled — Anne Estelle Rice