Tilly Losch: tracing histories through interiors and film

Tilly Losch is commemorated as an absent presence through two 1930s interiors commissioned by her then husband the art collector Edward James: Paul Nash’s design for a bathroom in James’s London town house and a patterned stair carpet ostensibly based on Losch’s wet footprints on leaving her bath. The Nash bathroom, no longer extant, has been recreated for exhibition purposes and the footprint carpet is now housed in West Dean College. Alongside accounts of these interior designs, where Losch appears elusively as the traces of her corporeal form, this essay juxtaposes histories of dance as a means of retrieving Losch’s persona as a professional performer. Well-known in her native Vienna (and subsequently internationally) as a ballet and contemporary dancer, during the 1930s Losch collaborated with the American designer Norman Bel Geddes on a short silent film of her ‘Dance of Hands’. As an aspect of Losch’s dance practice, this film is indicative of ways in which women performers of the period actively participated in the artistic avant-garde, deploying the iconography of body parts as a demonstration of feminine agency. For historians of visual culture, tracking traces of Tilly Losch across interiors and film prompts questions more broadly concerning the significance of different disciplinary historiographies with regard to both modernism and gender.