Comment:
This is one of several drawings leading up to the lithograph "Tingle Tangle". The many alternative positions for the dancer’s raised foot is not a sign of uncertainty as to where the leg should be positioned, but an attempt to portray movement. This may seem quite obvious and natural to a modern audience, but this drawing dates from some twenty years before Giacomo Balla's running dog ("Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash") and Marcel Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase, no. 2 and from long before cartoons made this a convention we now read as ‘rapid movement’. However, rapid movement is not something the eye perceives as a series of still pictures in sequence. For the origins of this we must turn to photography; in about 1880, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge combined twelve cameras and made still photographs of animals and people in movement. These were presented as various series of individual pictures. Etienne-Jules Marey took this idea further, constructing a "chronophotographe", around 1890, in which the various exposures were shown on the same picture. So this was the latest thing in visual technology and certainly interested and inspired other artists besides Munch to experiment with it in their art. In any case, we know of many examples in Munch’s drawings at this time showing such ‘multiple exposures’. (MB)