Duncan constructed her dances around a series of very large, sweeping, natural gestures which seemed to grow out of the music of Chopin, Beethoven, and Wagner to which she danced. Duncan did not endow her gestures with specific meanings; she used gesture to express the rhythmical and emotional qualities of the music.86 The artists who portrayed her were inspired by how much the dancer could convey through relatively simple steps. Robert Henri explained, “Isadora Duncan … carries us through a universe in a single movement of her body. Her hand alone held aloft becomes a shape of infinite significance. Yet her gesture, in fact, can only be the stretch of an arm or the stride of a normal human body.”87
Isadora Duncan influenced Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928) in the creation of his modernist masterwork, Dancers (1914-1915) [Fig. 2.33]. Davies’s mistress, Edna Potter, was a dancer, and The dancer’s rejection of traditional ballet in favor of a dance inspired by natural gestures paralleled the rejection of mimetic representation by many of the visual artists in the early years of the twentieth century. Duncan’s dancing helped inspire American artists Arthur B. Davies, John Sloan, Robert Henri, and Abraham Walkowitz to strip their work of nonessentials and embrace modernist forms of expression.