SCULPTOR ELIE NADELMAN

Head of a Woman

              SCULPTOR ELIE NADELMAN

                       By Diane Tichell with Joan Yanni

The captivating bronze Head of a Woman (62.7), by Elie Nadelman, is on view again in the Forman Gallery--a reminder of the talent and skill of the artist. The bronze head was the gift of an anonymous donor in honor of former director Gertrude Herdle Moore.

The Memorial Art Gallery owns two Nadelman sculptures, a   marble head created around 1920 and the bronze, 1916-32. Both are simple and elegant, created in his early classical style. The bows on the side of the head of the bronze are a Nadelman trademark and appear on several of his works. There are at least two other versions of the bronze, both in marble. One is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, the other at the Whitney.

Nadelman was born in 1882 in Warsaw into a family of a Jewish jeweler and a mother interested in music and theatre.  When his artistic talent was noticed, he was enrolled in the Warsaw Art Academy. A year at the Academy was followed by a period in the Imperial Russian army, then a return to the Art Academy for another year. Restless with the conservative regime there and dissatisfied with the provincial confines, he left once more and never returned. 

In 1904 he went to Munich, where he encountered the stimuli of antique dolls and the sculptures of classical Greece in the Bavarian National Museum. In addition he discovered the work of Aubrey Beardsley, the Englishman who worked in Art Nouveau and who played a prime role in his future work. After six months in Munich he went on to Paris. Here he met Leo and Gertrude Stein, and, through them, Picasso.

Picasso saw Nadelman’s drawings and the plaster head that Nadelman had created exclusively out of convex and concave volumes, and his use of a similar vocabulary several months later outraged Nadelman, who felt that Picasso had purloined his work. In fact, Nadelman’s dissection of mass into curved, intersecting planes and his extrapolation of those fractured planes to three dimensions did precede Picasso’s similar works. But Picasso had already finished Les demoiselles d’Avignon  and had begun the collaboration with Georges Braque on which Cubism was founded.

By 1908 the young sculptor and his works were widely  recognized by the elite of the Paris art world. Dismissing both imitative description and personal expression as irrelevant, he  said that significant form, the harmonious playing of one shape against another was the “exclusive agent of pleasure in art.”

Nadelman exhibited constantly. In 1909 his first one-man show opened in Paris at the Galerie Druet.  He exhibited in Barcelona with other Polish artists in 1911, and saw bullfights and prehistoric cave paintings, which inspired his later sculptures of bulls. He exhibited twelve drawings and a male head in the1913 Armory Show in New York.

Through an exhibit in London in 1911 he met Helena Rubenstein, who admired his sculptures and saw them as the image of the beauty her products made possible. She purchased his entire show and became his most important patron.  She commissioned him to create a large plaster relief for a salon she planned to open in New York City.  In 1914 he left London for New York.

                                                                                            

In New York he was contacted by Alfred Steiglitz and invited to have a show at Steiglitz’s gallery “291.” Since Steiglitz’s clientele expected avant-garde works, the show was not successful. Nadelman was not truly avant-garde; he did not want to change earlier art or to spurn classical art. He saw its value and used it in his works.

In contrast, an exhibit in 1917 at Scott & Fowles Gallery was a complete success. It all but sold out, leaving him swamped with orders for versions of the exhibited works in different materials and sizes and for commissioned portraits in marble. He had a retinue of skilled craftsmen to create these copies.

His art changed again as he began to create works from plaster. He sought ways in which primitive and folkloristic art might be combined with the conventions of high art. The American art world was still divided between traditionalists, who were adamantly opposed to the modern movement, and the modernists who were just beginning to claim more attention from the public. Nadelman at first received a warm welcome from both sides. However, after only four years he gradually lost his market. As he began to create some of his first original work, he met with incomprehension and dismissal from both groups. The use of plaster, paint, and the fact that he changed to genre subjects and clothed his figures were reasons his work lost popular appeal. 

In 1919 he introduced painted plaster figures--pianists, tango dancers and singers. In 1925 he used these figures as a basis for his painted wooden figures which had a whimsical and sometimes satirical flair. Then, in 1927, he presented an entirely new body of work. The material was once again plaster, but this time it was electroplated with a metal alloy and referred to by Nadelman as “galvano-plastique.” He was asking low prices for these works, a fact suggesting that he was trying to make sculpture available to a broad base of collectors.                                                   

   His art kept changing, too fast for his audience to keep up with it.  He went from galvano-plastique with almost life-size figures to experimenting with ceramics and creating large editions of small sculpture, then small papier-mâché figures done in editions from plaster molds, then works in plastiline, a non-hardening clay, again using plaster molds.

  

   In 1942 he enrolled in air warden service in spite of a bad heart condition. Always active, he volunteered to instruct in occupational therapy at Bronx Veterans’ Hospital, teaching ceramics to wounded soldiers. He died in December 1946.