Elie Nadelman
Elie Nadelman
1882 - 1946
American sculptor, draughtsman and collector of Polish birth. After studying briefly in Warsaw he visited Munich in 1902, where he became interested in the Classical antiquities at the Glyptothek. He lived in Paris from 1904 to 1914 and was closely involved there with the avant-garde, exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants and at the Salon d’Automne from 1905 to 1908. At his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Druet, Paris, in 1909 he exhibited a large series of plaster and bronze classical female heads and full-length standing nudes, as well as somewhat mannered Cubist drawings; a number of the latter were purchased by Leo Stein, who had brought Picasso to Nadelman’s studio in 1908. During this period Nadelman also benefited from the patronage of the Natanson brothers. By the time he left Paris for New York at the outbreak of World War I, Nadelman had already produced groups of works in a variety of styles, including generalizations from the Antique, tubular nudes and primitive animals, inspired by a visit to the cave paintings in Dordogne in 1911. For Nadelman, formal considerations took precedence over materials and methods; as he explained in a statement published in 1910: ‘I employ no other line than the curve, which possesses freshness and force. I compose the curves so as to bring them in accord in opposition to each other.’
One of Nadelman’s sculptures and twelve of his drawings were selected by Arthur B. Davies for inclusion in the Armory Show, the first large-scale show of European art that started in New York in 1913. Supported by Helena Rubinstein, who in 1911 had purchased the complete contents of his exhibition at the Patterson Gallery in London, Nadelman moved to New York in 1914. He was immediately drawn to the city’s popular culture, to its theatre, jazz, dancers, circus performers and society types, as a source of subject-matter. His most important early work, Man in the Open Air (1914–15; New York, MOMA), combines an elegant figure style indebted to the work of Georges Seurat with an American naivety and humour; dressed only in a bowler hat and a curly bow-tie, the man is supported by a tree trunk whose branch appears to grow through his arm. This witty rendition of Apollo Sauroktonos by Praxiteles, which was first exhibited in December 1915 at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291, combines a genius for gesture with an aristocratic simplification of form. Nadelman’s growing interest in American folk art, combined with his daily observations of society types, resulted in an important series of figures carved from wood and then stained and painted; among the most popular are Woman at the Piano (c. 1917; New York, MOMA) and Orchestra Conductor (c. 1919; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn). These figures represented Nadelman’s halcyon years, in which he was widely exhibited and financially secure.
After marriage in 1919 to Viola M. Spiess (1878–1962), formerly Mrs Joseph Flannery, a wealthy widow, Nadelman purchased Alderbrook, an estate at Riverdale, NY, and a town house on 93rd Street in New York, where he set up a studio with three assistants to do much of his preliminary carving. He and his wife spent over £500,000 on American folk art between 1921 and 1924 and built a museum for the collection on their estate in 1924. Nadelman became an American citizen in 1927 and retired to Riverdale in 1929. During the remainder of his life he became increasingly reclusive and removed from the art world; he held his last one-man exhibition in 1930 (Paris, Bernheim-Jeune) and after two architectural commissions in 1935 worked only on small ceramics and clay figures. The stock market collapse forced him to sell his home in Manhattan and his folk art collection, and in 1935 many of his plaster figures and wood-carvings were destroyed by workmen sent to remodel his studio. Nadelman packed away all his pre-1935 work in the attic and cellar of his home in Riverdale and left it there to disintegrate, but this sculpture was restored after his death under the supervision of Lincoln Kirstein and reintroduced to a wide American public in 1948 in a retrospective at MOMA, New York. [Francine Koslow Miller. "Nadelman, Elie." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T060727.]
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