12 Akt-Entwurte aus der Tanzkunst by NEELSEN, Lotte - 1924

Hamburg: Waldemar Heldt n.d. [1924], 1924. Twelve photographs printed from copper plates on cream card. The cards measure 226x180mm (photographs measure 155x107mm). They are held, loose, in a leaf folded in two. The front page contains a brief descriptive preface by Sedan Minde on the dance art of Lotte Neelsens. The leaf has been torn and repaired but there is a piece (about one inch square) missing at the foot of the back page at the hinge. The leaf and photographs are contained in a card folder which has been repaired, the spine and part of the back consisting of new card on which the old card of the covers have been laid down. The upper cover, which has a photograph inside a decorative border, has some creases and repaired tears. The whole is housed in a custom made blue box lettered in gilt on the spine. The photographs, taken in the studio of W. Paulsen in Hamburg, are in excellent condition, very clean and fresh. Neelsen's twelve images of nude dancers is a rare collection which presents the dancer is a studio setting against the prevailing tendency at the time in Germany to see naked dancing as an open air activity. As Neelsen herself wrote in 1928 in Der Freude, "[it is] in the silent halls and ceremonial temples that the elements of the neo-classical dance will unfold as a great sacred flame". Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture 1910-1935. Karl Eric Toepfer.