American Art Collaborative

Paul Manship’s series Dancing Children shows chubby infants in characteristic poses from the Charleston, an American dance popular in the 1920s. He was inspired by the story of Krishna, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, who killed a snake-demon and danced on the creature’s head in victory. Manship took this image of a dancing child and adapted it to show the American dance
“Sculpture, it must be remembered, was not at any time a distinctly serious, grandiose, or heroic mode of expression. The revered ancients were often in a lighter mood, hence it is not unseemly that an American artist should be.” The artist, quoted in “Paul Manship in a New Mood,” Vanity Fair, July 1927