Marguerite Agniel was a Broadway actress and dancer, and then 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.
Early life
The Agniel family was French Jewish; her mother's family was English.
Broadway career
Agniel performed in Broadway plays including The Amber Empress with music by Zoel Parenteau in 1916, and Raymond Hitchcock's Pin Wheel in 1922.
Author
She appeared in the 15November 1926issue of Vogue, demonstrating slimming exercises in the form of floor stretches, with postures close to the yoga asanasSalabhasana, Supta Virasana, Sarvangasana and Halasana. She wrote for Physical Culture magazine in 1927 and 1928. In 1931 Agniel wrote the book The Art of the Body : Rhythmic Exercise for Health and Beauty, illustrated mainly with photographs of herself; she notes in the Preface that her dance technique derives from Ruth St. Denis, but that her "system of 'aesthetic athletics'" 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" of her work. 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."
Reception
Her friend Havelock Ellis wrote in a letter to Louise Stevens Bryant 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." Agniel is depicted in an "elegant, though sharply ironic" Palladiumphotographic print by Margaret Watkins, "Head and Hand". It shows her hand holding a portrait sculpture head of herself by Jo Davidson. 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", and the Art of the Body as "a moralizing exercise manual" providing a mixture of exercises, advice on cosmetics, and spiritual guidance. 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". 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."
