Nadelman at the Whitney

Magazine Antiques, April, 2003 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The elegant and lyrical sculpture Tango, illustrated at right, is an icon of early twentieth-century American art. Its creator, the Polish-born Elie Nadelman, enjoyed enormous critical acclaim and reaped substantial financial rewards from the time he first exhibited his work in Paris in 1909 until the decade preceding his death in 1946. In 1911 he displayed ten marble female heads in a London gallery all of which were immediately snapped up by Helena Rubinstein, one of the most important avant-garde collectors of this period, who had made her fortune in the cosmetics industry. She subsequently commissioned Nadelman to create a sculptural relief for her new beauty salon in New York City and he set sail for the United States in 1914. Rubinstein was initially drawn to Nadelman's sculpture because these reductive marbles, bearing titles such as Classical Head, Ideal Head of a Woman, and Classical Figure, were inspired by antique statuary. From this starting point Nadelman investigated new mediums and responded to events m the ever-changing art world around him. The full breadth of his career is the subject of a retrospective opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City on April 3. Entitled Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modem Life, the show includes more than two hundred works in bronze, marble, painted wood, ceramic, and plaster as well as works on paper and photographs, all of which remain on view through July 20.

In the World War I era, Nadelman was experimenting with plaster to fashion figures that were reduced to simple curvaceous forms. He then painted contemporary clothing on them, which, while not revolutionary was innovative, because it merged conventions of the classical past with contemporary ideas in an utterly playful way In 1919 he married Viola Spiess Flannery a wealthy widow with two grown children. The sculptor's own healthy financial situation was now greatly amplified, and the couple lived in very grand style, spending money freely to assemble a large and pioneering collection of European and American folk art. During this period Nadelman was creating painted bronze and wooden figures of dancers, circus performers, conductors, and the like, all frozen in expressive attenuated positions. In the second half of the 1920s he experimented with electroplating metal to a plaster core.

The Nadelmans' fortune suffered greatly in the stock market crash of 1929, forcing them to sell off some of their real estate holdings and, inevitably, objects from their enormous collection. In 1930 Elie Nadelman installed a kiln adjacent to his studio in Riverdale, New York, and began making ceramic sculptures on a small scale. These he either decorated in bright colors or left unpainted.

He cut back considerably on his artistic endeavors to concentrate on managing the folk art museum he and his wife had established on their estate. But in the end the museum failed, and the Nadelmans negotiated the sale of their entire folk art collection to the New-York Historical Society in New York City late in 1937. Elie was briefly installed at the society as curator of the collection, but infighting caused his dismissal in 1939. From then until his death in 1946 Nadelman made a large number of diminutive figures based on ancient sculpture created in Tanagra and Myrina However, his relatively early withdrawal from the art world meant that by the time of his death he had already been largely forgotten.

A monograph on Nadelman written by Barbara Haskell, the curator of early twentieth-century art at the Whitney Museum, has been published in conjunction with this exhibition, of which she is the curator. To order a copy telephone 800-288-2129

RELATED ARTICLE: Tango, by Elie Nadelman (1882-1946), 1920-1924. Stained, gessoed, and painted cherry; height 35 7/8 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, purchase with funds donated by Mr. and Mrs. Arthur G. Altschut, Joan and Lester Avnet, Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, Mrs. Robert C. Graham, in honor of John I. H. Baur, Mrs. Percy Uris, and Henry Schnakenberg in honor of Juliana Force; photograph by Jerry L Thompson.

Dancer, by Nadelman, 1920-1924. Stained, gessoed, and painted Mahogany; height 28 1/4 inches. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, gift of James L. Goodwin and Henry Sage Goodwin from the estate of Philip L Goodwin.