Paul Schad-Rossa's oeuvre can be located between Symbolism, Neo-Romanticism and Art Nouveau. He enrolled at the Munich Academy as a student of Defregger. In his tradition, his first large painting depicts a Corpus Christi procession characterized with a naturalistic appeal (Neue Galerie Graz, Universalmuseum Johanneum). Although Schad-Rossa did not belong to an artists' association such as the Munich Secession, he sought forms of expression that lay outside the academic repertoire of motifs and forms. His interest in the human figure, its lines and movements, in which the flowing, ornamental principles of Art Nouveau are reflected, became particularly apparent in the 1890s. The dynamically continuing line, which allows the "flow of directly experienced inner movement" (Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik, 1906), was of central importance for the aesthetics of the time. Not only Schad-Rossa, but also artists such as Ludwig von Hoffmann and Henry van de Velde in Weimar were committed to this linear principle of movement, which finds its counterpart in dance. Life and art as continuous movement and development became the central motif. On his trip to Bavaria around 1912, when he was already based in Berlin, Schad-Rossa took up the motif of dance as the original expression of pure vitality and joie de vivre. Like the incomparably more famous Ferdinand Hodler, who caused a sensation with his monumental figure paintings, Schad-Rossa depicted the spinning couples larger than life. Their feet barely seem to touch the ground. Twisting and turning, with arms and legs swinging, and the women's skirts forming a vortex that seems to continue outside the canvas. Stylistically, the line also plays a central role in the strong outline of the contours. The painting thus unites central artistic, aesthetic and philosophical themes of the time, lending it significance and depth far beyond the folkloristic impression it evokes at first glance. [KT]