At the Fox-Trot Ball

Richard Cork (loc. cit.) comments on the present work: 'Very far from non-representational, however, is a 1914 drawing inscribed At the Fox-Trot Ball, where Roberts seems momentarily to forsake the ruthless carpentry of his earlier Dancers painting. Broad, undulating curves replace the mechanistic angularity of the Dancers with a more fluid, naturalistic idiom. Roberts is not afraid to particularize facial features or details of clothing in among his sweeping rhythms, and the irregular motion of the wash shows his willingness to admit realistic observation into his work. There is little attempt here to confuse the spectator by playing off figuration against abstraction: everything is easily identifiable, nothing admitted for its own sake as a formal prop. And yet, for all its seeming directness, At the Fox-Trot Ball is in many ways a disturbing drawing. Roberts pitches the perspectival angle as steeply as he had done in The Return of Ulysses, establishing an aerial viewpoint that accentuates the dramatic positions taken up by the dancers' arms. Seen from above, they resolve themselves into sinister pincer shapes, like the tentacles of so many crabs extending their full length into space and then stopping to wave. Caught in this weird pose, the figures appear to be engaged in an activity half-way between dancing and struggling, and this feeling is reinforced by their forbidding surroundings: the crazily tilted floor leads up at a giddy inclination to the claustrophobic bare walls hemming the figures in at the top of the design. A bleak setting indeed for a supposedly festive party'.