Valerie Bettis – Desperate Heart – A

Between black and white, shadow and light, flying drapery and skewed stage is the American dancer Valerie Bettis. Based on John Malcolm Brinnin’s poem “The Desperate Heart,” an exploration of the longing for a past love, Bettis’s performance had a tremendous impact upon New York audiences and critics when she first performed it in 1943.Impressed with the beauty of kinetic art and seeing photography’s technical advances in artificial light, Barbara Morgan preserved and documented the fleeting visual forms of dance. An openness and overriding humanity are felt in her images, where Morgan expresses her abiding interest in rhythm, design, and movement by recording both famous poetry and dance. Although it is now one of Morgan’s iconic works, Desperate Heart was not originally intended for publicity or documentation. Now, although Bettis’s face is concealed, she is recognizable by anyone familiar with her work. Morgan’s image of her movement becomes an icon for the dancer herself. (“15 Minutes: Exposing Dimensions of Fame,” curated by undergraduate members of Cornell’s History of Art Major’s Society and presented at the Johnson Museum April 16 – July 24, 2016)