Art critic James D. Balestrieri writes, “You don’t see the dancer in Dancer at first. Howe hides the dancer behind the dance. With an assemblage of triangles and trapezoids – and what is a trapezoid, after all, but a triangle with a corner cut off? – Howe paints the energy of the dance. Energy. Not merely vitality – that is, simple ‘aliveness’ – but energy as we say it when we mean electricity, a force outside us, all around us, a force we harness when we can, if we can, to generate light, motion, action.

“Dancer belongs with Oscar Howe’s suite of paintings of single dancers, works done primarily in the 1960s, yet the evolution of the painting towards pure abstraction and away from similar works that emphasize the figure sets it apart.

“We eventually perceive the dancer in Dancer. We make out the arms, torso, and legs that are only a shade darker than the background against which he dances. He attempts to channel this energy, acting as literal conduit between earth and spirit. Howe is deliberate in the choice of colors of this casein; he wants us to struggle with the dancer, to see him as a puzzle behind the foreground puzzle of the dancer’s costume, which is abstract, looking as if it might fly off, centrifugally, into space. As ever in Howe’s work, hair – human and horse – is always charged with static, composed of triangles narrowed to sharp points, blades that fill with energy to pierce our daily reality. Even the floor, if it is a floor, vibrates with concentric geometric shapes, as if the dancer is a stone thrown into a pool of water, a pool that is, in fact, the ground, earth, firmament we only imagine as stable. In the dancer’s costume, we see both balance and imbalance. The firmer blue wings at the dancer’s shoulders, for example, almost seem to be falling apart, to be about to become like the random grouping of blue triangles at the dancer’s ankles. This is the world as Howe seems to see it, falling into entropy only to soar once again in creation. The cycle repeats. The dancer and the dance hold it together.”

PROVENANCE
Frank and Jan Gibbs Collection, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Reynolds Family Collection, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ca. 1980s

Additional Resources

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Condition ReportAs viewed through glass. Painting appears to be in excellent condition.

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