I.L. (ISAAC) ISRAELS 1865 Amsterdam - 1934 The Hague Spanish Dancer, La Feria, Paris

Details

A Spanish dancer stands directly before us, one hand on her hip, her body slightly turned. Her gaze is dark and challenging. As we expect from Isaac Israels, she is not worked out in detail but established with a few swift, assured touches. The reddish-brown Spanish dress, black hair and dark eyes are rendered just enough. The paint is loosely and rapidly applied, yet always unerring: the posture, the hand, the gaze, the spreading folds of the dress. The painting lives. Isaac Israels needed very little to bring a figure to life.

During his years in Paris, Israels was constantly in search of movement, life and light in the modern city. He found his subjects in the streets, parks, cafés, theatres, fashion houses and dance halls. From 1904, he lived on the Boulevard de Clichy, on the edge of Montmartre. At that time, the neighbourhood was full of cabarets, cafés-chantants and dance venues: a lively nightlife that suited his temperament perfectly. Israels was drawn to the fleeting moment, to what was briefly visible before vanishing again. In 1913 he became captivated by Spanish flamenco. A Spanish dance venue had opened in Montmartre: La Feria, a replica of an Andalusian café with a tablao, a small stage for dancing and music. In a letter to his friend Frans Erens, Israels wrote: “There is a ‘cabaret de danse’ here now, very authentically Spanish, with no lack of local colour.” He made several paintings and pastels of what he saw there. In some versions, the dancer appears on the stage in a crowded café, accompanied by guitarists and palmas (hand-clapping). The present painting is neither a folkloric scene nor a record of a performance. Here, Isaac Israels has concentrated the entire spectacle into a single figure: the dancer herself. He most likely invited her to pose in his studio.

The background is kept almost empty, in light grey-blue and cream tones. All emphasis thus falls on the woman in her dark, reddish-brown dress. She is not caught mid-dance, yet she conveys a tense, alert, and self-aware impression. Her posture still carries the energy of the dance, together with the bearing of someone accustomed to being watched.

The fascination with Spain ran as a constant thread through Israel’s life. As early as 1889, at the World Exhibition in Paris, he saw, together with Frans Erens, a performance by Juana Vargas, “La Macarrona”, one of the greatest flamenco dancers of all time, on the occasion of her international debut. Erens later described the experience in his prose poem Gitanas: Red-glowing the rose on the black-glowing hair, La Macarrona comes forward; sharp her face, pointed and reddish-brown with fierce black eyes. She stamps the ground and laughs in a bright, dark flash. And she stamps and stamps and laughs mischievously, and the others cry out, urging forward the stamping desire, the sharp pleasure. Spain was a beloved theme among many Dutch artists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Colleagues of Israels, such as Jacobus van Looy, Piet van der Hem, Kees Maks and Jan Sluijters, also travelled to Spain and returned with paintings of flamenco dancers, colourfully dressed Gitanas and bullfighters. To come to terms with his mother’s death in 1894, Israels travelled through Spain with his father and Frans Erens. Only a small sketchbook from this trip survives. His father made many sketches and even published a book with his travel account, in which he writes about the beautiful women with flowers in their black hair. After this journey, Israels worked increasingly outdoors, and his palette became lighter and more colourful. Israels would return to this subject many times. Among the countless drawings, watercolours, pastels and oil paintings he made of Montmartre's lively nightlife, the works from La Feria stand out as a particular high point. In them, he rediscovered his love of Spanish culture.