Sarah L. Kaufman is the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Dance Critic. For over twenty years, as she has written about dance, art, sports, and everyday life, she has discovered a major dynamic that elevates the extraordinary from the humdrum: grace.

Grace injects a sense of ease and harmony into what otherwise would be routine and ordinary. It’s the sort of quality that we sense when it crosses our path, and Kaufman—whose career has been devoted to describing its existence—now shares some of her accumulated perceptions in The Art of Grace; On Moving Well Through Life. xxxxx

The good news, she suggests, is that grace is “wonderfully democratic” and within everyone’s reach “with practice.” The bad news is that our fast-paced, plugged-in, fragmented culture nurtures gracelessness; so does a popular culture that “stokes delight in humiliation and conflict.” Kaufman explains that she decided to write this book “to locate grace and hold it up for examination.” She believes that examining grace in others will allow us to feel some of their ease ourselves “and to enjoy a heightened vitality as we sympathetically move in harmony, too.” Natural imitators, it is possible that if we practice ease of movement, self-control, and warmth we might actually become graceful. (pp. xxiv, xxv)

Sandro Botticelli,’The Three Graces’ (detail from Primavera), 1482. Collection Uffizi, Florence.

We imperfect humans have long sought a path to grace. The ancient Greeks and Romans both gave us “Graces” who charmed, pleased, and enhanced the enjoyment of life. (xiv) A teenage George Washington copied a list into his commonplace book of 110 Rules of Civility and Good Behavior in Company and Conversation, including “Reprehend not the imperfections of others,” and “Be not angry at table whatever happens.” (xxiii)

Kaufman’s fondest model of grace is Cary Grant, whose movement and manner never failed to inspire a sense of perfect harmony. Trained as an acrobat in his vaudeville youth, Grant could launch himself into back flips (Holiday), scramble across rooftops (To Catch a Thief), haul Katharine Hepburn to the top of a dinosaur skeleton (Bringing Up Baby), below, left, or pull Eva Marie Saint up Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest). But it wasn’t only his physicality, or even the elegance of his clothes: it was his inner grace that illuminated everything he did. As Kaufman writes, “Grant infused routine actions with a theatrical sense of purpose and an artist’s subtlety.” He also possessed a hard-won inner dimension, a “beauty and nobility of soul” that reflected a man at ease in his own skin (xviii, xix).

Unsurprisingly, iconic sports figures can be exemplars of graceful movement. Kaufman describes the unmatched gracefulness of tennis champion Roger Federer: “The shapes he creates in space are organic and full; you see this in his arching jump with toes pointed, in his oceanic surge forward, and in the winged sweep of his forehand. The way he moves is almost lyrical, with a fluid, continuous motion and rhythm.” (118) In contrast, she argues that other top players such as Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic employ a fist-pumping aggression that lacks the grace of Federer’s velvety play. Similarly, four-time Olympic champion diver Greg Louganis epitomized grace in “the supple way he moved through the air, each shape emerging seamlessly from the last and foretelling the next” in a kind of silent movie performance. Like Cary Grant, Greg Louganis embodied an ideal balance of outer appearance and inner nobility (119).

Margot Fontayn, in Swan Lake.

Dancers, the main subjects of Kaufman’s career, are able to make human gracefulness transparent. In ballet, iconic dancers like Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova wowed audiences by injecting every movement with mind-boggling grandeur. On screen, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers effortlessly evoked constantly the music and lyrics of America’s greatest songbook composers—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins. But Kaufman also discovered grace in an East Village dive that featured not only rock bands but…strippers! One was a platinum blonde burlesque dancer named Miss Ekaterna who “lit up the room like moonlight” (161).

Sarah Kaufman also explores the spiritual dimensions of grace, with various theologians defining grace as “divine movement,” “a superabundance of life and love,” an expression of “God’s grandeur,” and as “a quality that engenders love.” As she learned more about the enormous permutations of “grace,” Kaufman also came to understand “how grace underlies so much of what we hold dear, despite our different faiths, cultures, traditions….”

Left: Martin Schongauer, The Madonna (c.1490-91). Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In the end, she decides that just as life is a cascade of mysteries, grace “is the deepest of these,” a thing beyond our understanding. Like the beloved song “Amazing Grace,” which began as an 18^th century poem but evolved into a nondenominational classic in American culture, the idea of “grace” is ultimately amazing because it can be infinitely distributed (253).

Although the grace of Cary Grant, Mikhail Barishnikov, or Roger Federer may be beyond the power of ordinary mortals, Sarah Kaufman graciously leaves us with a list of ten “tips for moving well through life.” All are doable in everyday existence—things like “slow down and plan,” “practice tolerance and compassion,” and “be generous.” She saves the best for last: “Enjoy. Raise a glass, as Lionel Barrymore did in the movie Grand Hotel, “to our magnificent, brief, dangerous life—and the courage to live it!” (278).

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Writer

Amy Henderson is a cultural critic and Historian Emerita of the National Portrait Gallery

Sarah L. Kaufman, The Art of Grace: On Moving Well through Life (W.W. Norton & Company: New York, London, 2015). 310 pp. Illustrations.