Gouache originale signée "Composition - Ground design of dance, fool's dance"

Signed original gouache “Composition – Ground design of dance, fool's dance”
One of Loïs Hutton's rare abstract works, a horizontal and graphic exploration (entitled “Ground design”) of her Fool's Dance choreography. A hypnotic solo dance that she performed for the first time in January 1920 to music by Edvard Grieg.

In this interesting and innovative vision of dance, Loïs Hutton lays down the products of the force of her choreographic
movements on paper: a ballet of lines and curves filled with vivid colours. This fluid and dynamic composition is marked out by a square with asserted outlines, acting as both a physical support for the painting and a material surface for the scene where its movements unfold – an essential space of creation to be compared with the “original plan” theorised several years later by Kandinsky in Point et ligne sur plan (1926).
Presented at the Margaret Morris Club in Chelsea where her very first creations were born, Fool's Dance will be performed again at the Château des Deux Rives in Dinard in July of the same year. It earned Hutton one of her first mentions as a performer and choreographer in the French press, in the newspaper Comoedia on 20 July 1920, and marks the beginning of her notoriety in France.




It is in 1923, that the Margaret Morris School is established on the Côte d'Azur and opens an "école d'été” “summer school” at Cap d'Antibes where Hutton begins a new creative and sensual adventure with the French dancer Hélène Vanel. They undertake rehearsals by the sea, outings alongside Hemmingway and performances as far away as Brussels or Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, even eclipsing the latest production of the Ballets Russes in the heart of critic Harold Levinson. Vanel and Hutton, untameable lovers, soon separate from Margaret Morris and the following year publish their manifesto of the Rhythm and Colour movement, claiming their definition of total and rhythmic art inspired by Rudolf Steiner's theosophy: “nous cherchons le rythme : rythme dans l'espace, rythme des lignes qui bondissent et se brisent, s'entrelacent, tournoient, fuient, rythme des volumes qui surgissent s'illuminent dans les profondeurs, se retirent, s'effacent, ayant chacun sa place et sa valeur inévitable, et partout et dans tout, l'équilibre” “we look for rhythm: rhyme in space, rhythm of lines that leap and break, intertwine, swirl, flee, rhythm of volumes that arise and light up in the depths, recede, fade away, each having its place and inevitable value, and everywhere and in everything, balance” they declare in this manifesto. The radiant dancer devotes all of her creations to the visual rhythm of images, from which she draws the name of her all new Rhythm and Colour movement on the musical model of the Montparnasse Groupe des six. Founded in 1924, Loïs' original movement is embodied in her troupe of dancers always celebrating the liberation of the female body and inspired by Dalcrozian dance.

On the idylic heights of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, “les danseuses de Saint-Paul” “the Saint-Paul dancers” open their own studio in a house in the village as well as a theatre. Joined by Lucia Joyce, the writer's daughter, as well as a handful of young girls, the troupe rehearses in the middle of nature, at the place now occupied by the Maeght foundation where modernity still reigns supreme. In the middle of the 1930s, the names Loïs and Hélène were on the lips of the most influential characters of the artistic and political elite, from Dali to the Duke of Windsor and Picasso. They live their homosexuality without constraints and share their bohemian life with artists, writers and poets who visit them and come to admire their performances illuminated by torchlight.
"The Grecian Isle of Lesbos has its votaries at Saint Paul
Like nuns they live secluded lives with scarce a man at all
A quite distinct phenomenon associate with Loïs
With shortened hair she seems to care for girls far more than boys"

Waldo Peirce (quoted in Emerson, Rythm & Colour, p. 236).

After the Art Nouveau embodied by Loïe Fuller, the return to the old with Isadora Duncan, it was Loïs Hutton's turn to give a new face to the avantgarde during the interwar period by thinking about painting like dancing and dancing like painting. She gave her choreographic and pictorial works the sharp angles of Cubism and the Vorticist dynamism, unifying the beauty of body movement and line.