Dance

This quiet image of a dancing geisha, drawn in the artist's signature thick outlines, shows a single instant of a specific pose. The cool palette gives an eerie feeling to the composition, while the gold on obi and fan, and the rhythmic composition of line and color plane, convey a sense of both tension and the decorative to the composition as a whole. Meiji's dancing geisha were a "honed, refined complete beauty, an anti-individualistic beauty," backed by a "fierce feeling of contemporary woman," and from that conflicted beauty a certain eroticism emerged. The artist created numerous works of dancers and geisha over the course of his life, and all of the works, as here, added elements of costume, form and colorful beauty to an evocation of the eternally erotic and female beauty of their models.