"Kirchner regarded dance as an expression of ecstatic nudity. By nudity, however, he meant not just the display of flesh but the display of light within the body and the display of otherwise invisible color hidden within light. The nude body was a kind of prism that refracted light, and dance was the optimum expression of this kinetic interaction of light and flesh. Color, not movement or physiognomy, was what ultimately individuated bodies and differentiated them from each other."
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Empire of ecstasy: nudity and movement in German body culture, 1910-1935 by Karl Eric Toepfer (University of California Press, 1997)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker.
