Lot 63: Joyce and Duncan, 2006

Joyce and Duncan, 2006
Pigment print. 146.1 x 177.8 cm. (57 1/2 x 70 in).  Signed, dated and numbered 1/2 in ink on the reverse of the flush-mount.

 Paul Hodgson: Sovereign Rights, Marlborough Fine Arts, 10 January - 9 Febuary 2007 (another example exhibited)

 Marlborough Fine Art, London

Joyce and Duncan depicts a dancer playing the role of Lucia Joyce, as she mimics a pose from an ancient Greek vase painting. In 1920s Paris, Lucia attended dance and movement classes taught by Raymond Duncan, who encouraged his students to use their bodies in the worship of Dionysus, and cited ancient Greek culture as a blue print for contemporary living. It has been suggested that, while Lucia was attempting to ‘escape’ the modern age through Duncan’s tutorage, she was also becoming increasingly aware of her role as muse for her father’s writing. Joyce and Duncan is concerned with the wish to be free from the gaze of another (in the age of the flapper or ‘it girl’), while simultaneously desiring the effect, and the creative freedom, that being the subject of this gaze seems to offer. In the image that I have constructed, the foreground is occupied by a sculptor’s tripod, on the top of which, covered by a course hessian drape, is a small sculpture of Lucia, engaged in the same static pose that we see her performing in Duncan’s presence.
Paul Hodgson