Marguerite Agniel (1891 – c. 1971) was a Broadway actress and dancer, who then became a health and beauty guru in New York in the early 20th century. She is known for her 1931 book The Art of the Body: Rhythmic Exercise for Health and Beauty, one of the first to combine yoga and nudism.
After appearing in Vogue in 1926, she wrote for Physical Culture and other magazines. In the 1930s, she published a series of books, including Body Sculpture and Your Figure, advocating health and beauty practices, illustrated mainly with photographs of herself.
Marguerite, born January 21, 1891, Marguerite was born January 21, 1891, one of the six children of George Agniel and Ada Lescher Flowers. Her father was an Indiana farmer. He died in 1893 while she was an infant, leaving her mother to raise the children alone.[1] The Agniel family was French-Jewish; her mother's family was English.[2] She was married in New York on March 21, 1917.[3]
In 1931 Agniel wrote the book The Art of the Body: Rhythmic Exercise for Health and Beauty, illustrated mainly with photographs of herself;[8][9] she notes in the preface that her dance technique derives from Ruth St. Denis (who in turn followed François Delsarte), but that her "system of 'aesthetic athletics'"[10] was based mainly on that of Bernarr Macfadden, an advocate of physical culture. She names the sexologistHavelock Ellis and the musicologistSigmund Spaeth as major influences, stating that both had shown "an extraordinarily intuitive understanding"[10] of her work.[10]
Agniel wrote a piece called "The Mental Element in Our Physical Well-Being" for The Nudist, an American magazine, in 1938; it showed nude women practising yoga, accompanied by a text on attention to the breath. The social historian Sarah Schrank comments that it made perfect sense at this stage of the development of yoga in America to combine nudism and yoga, as "both were exercises in healthful living; both were countercultural and bohemian; both highlighted the body; and both were sensual without being explicitly erotic."[11][12]
"Elegant, though sharply ironic":[13] "Head and Hand" photographic portrait of Agniel by Margaret Watkins, 1925, including portrait sculpture head by Jo Davidson[13]
Her friend the sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote in a letter to Louise Stevens Bryant (May 17, 1936) that Agniel's books were "full of beautiful illustrations, nearly all of herself. She has a wonderful art of posing, & they are largely nudes, though she is no longer young."[2]
Agniel is depicted in an "elegant, though sharply ironic"[13]Palladium photographic print by the Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins, "Head and Hand". It shows her hand holding a portrait sculpture head of herself by Jo Davidson.[13] This was one in a series of portraits of Agniel by Watkins that Agniel used in The Art of the Body. Devon Smither describes Agniel as "a leading health and beauty guru",[14] and the Art of the Body as "a moralizing exercise manual" providing a mixture of exercises, advice on cosmetics, and spiritual guidance.[14]
The scholars Mary O'Connor and Katherine Tweedie comment on Watkins's portraits of Agniel that they were circulated sometimes as artistic "nudes", sometimes as portraits, and sometimes as instances of "a regime of exercise and body modification".[15] They write that since Agniel chose to use these photographs of herself, she is presenting them "not as the passive victim of an objectifying male gaze ... but as the means of promulgating her own vision of the world and her own expertise. She circulates her body as an image of the ideal and for commercial profit."[15]
^King, Jay W. (February 10, 2020). Past Masters of the Nude: An Illustrated Bibliography of Nude Photography Books Published in England from 1896 to 1960. Wolfbait Books. p. 18. ISBN978-1-916215-11-5.
