Re-membering : the aesthetics of disarticulation in André Kertész’s Satiric dancer

In the wake of World War I, amputees filled the streets, and prostheses were a familiar sight as Europe worked to rebuild not only its infrastructure but its people. The war wounded were a constant reminder of the fragility of the pre-war norms, and traditional forms of gendered corporeality were questioned as many men struggled to reintegrate into their former lives. It was against this backdrop that Hungarian photographer André Kertész, a wounded soldier himself, took his seminal photograph Satiric Dancer (1926). The photograph of dancer Magda Forstner posing on a settee next to Etienne Beothy’s sculpture, Action Directe, has traditionally been interpreted as comically flirtatious; however, I want to consider the Dancer not as an image exclusively of coquettish amusement, but as a site where we can explore a confluence of simultaneous beauty and decay, form and malformation. Set against the dark couch, Forstner’s pale limbs seem almost amputated from the rest of her body, and the sculpture next to her is missing his forelimbs entirely. In exploring the relationship between these two dismembered bodies in light of the physical traumas of WWI, I argue that we can view this photograph as part of a growing body of work among the avant-garde and the Surrealists in particular, that worked to sublimate brokenness and the distorted female form. Using Satiric Dancer as a focal point, my thesis seeks to explore how the trauma of war was made visible and the impact it had on paradigms of corporal agency and sexuality.Art Histor