Superior Portrait Studio

Superior Portrait Studio

Superior Portrait Studio

Born in 1877 in San Francisco, Isadora Duncan was one of California's original free spirits whose liberated approach towards dance broke away from traditional ballet to allow for fluidity of movement and interpretive expression. Rigid toe shoes, repetitive drills and stiff costumes were replaced by bare feet, flowing garments and intuitive grace. Duncan inspired many of her own Terpsichorean peers, and she also fascinated numerous other creative souls in the arts who found her rhythmic swaying to be visually and emotionally stunning.

The School of Life

Before her untimely death from strangulation in 1927—due to the fateful meeting of a long silk scarf and the wheel of a speeding car—Isadora had danced her way across much of the world, enjoyed plenty of love affairs and refused to follow anyone else's rules. “To dance is to live," she insisted. "What I want is a school of life.” Isadora's own life involved passion, triumph and a dark measure of tragedy, with the title of her memoirs aptly being To Live.

Author Floyd Dell declared Duncan's dancing to be "the full glory of the human body," while poet Carl Sandburg described her as the wind, "[s]in, prayer, flight" and "the light that was never on land or sea." Among the sculptors who worked to capture the likeness of Isadora were France's Antoine Bourdelle and the Chicago-based Lorado Taft, with photographers Arnold Genthe and Edward Steichen also turning cameras toward her unique presence.


  • Superior Portrait Studio

    Superior Portrait Studio

    Superior Portrait Studio

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