Maximilian Lenz - A World, 1899

      It features a man, deep in thought, apparently oblivious to the beauties of his surroundings and the circle of women dancing towards him as he walks through the meadow. A peculiar tension arises between the man’s modern, civilised, urban appearance and the enigmatic, bewitching female figures, drifting and dancing with abandon. The flowing, graceful movements of the dancing figures may have been inspired by the pioneering ideas of the American dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan, who popularised the free and natural motion of the body. The painting might also be interpreted as a lyrical expression of the essential ambiguity that characterised symbolist art: the contrast between bleak reality and the idealised dream world.

                          Dóra Lovass