Dancers: Niddy Impekoven

 

Max Pollak

  1886 - 1970 (biography)

c. 1925  

drypoint 

13 1/4 x 10 13/16" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

26/150 (only around 30 printed) 

pencil titled in lower left; pencil editioned in lower center; pencil annotated "printed a. 30" in lower center sheet edge; red Friedl Pollak Collection stamp in lower left 

 

cream laid 

published 

artist 

23886 

SOLD

Luise "Niddy" Impekova was a German dancer, choreographer, and silent film actor born in Berlin in 1904. She trained in ballet from an early age and was considered a child prodigy, performing publicly for the first time in 1910 at just five years old. She quickly began a professional dancing career that took her throughout Germany, developing a style that borrowed from the physically expressive Modernism of Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan, but which was still greatly influenced by her ballet studies and was set almost exclusively to classical music.

The pressures of performing, along with the stresses of the First World War, led Impekova to have a nervous breakdown in 1919, and she was sent to receive treatment in Switzerland to recuperate.

Following her recovery in 1920 she returned to Germany and continued her dancing career, choreographing her own work, and quickly became popular outside of her homeland. She toured throughout the United Kingdom, the U.S., Java, Ceylon, and Prague in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Ultimately, she retired from dancing as Nazis rose to power, moving permanently to Switzerland in 1934. She wrote a book about her life in 1955, titled Memoirs of a Child Prodigy.

Niddy Imprekoven died in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, in 2002.