Word: nadelman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Elegance v. Disclosure. But then the family fortune was wiped out in the Crash. The town house went and then the unparalleled private museum of Americana. "The dismantling of the museum," Nadelman wrote to a friend in 1937, with his usual reticent dignity, "did also dismantle something in me." The market for his own sculpture slowly caved in. By 1946 the very word elegance-the passion of Nadelman's life and the quality of his sculptures-had become suspect. "Elegance" had nothing to do with social utility, or Freudian disclosures, those ruling interests of a postwar American avantgarde...
...Elie Nadelman was the Cole Porter of modern sculpture, a stylist to the very root. His art possessed the mellifluous, urbane seriousness that only wit confers and that was rare in American culture, whose usual tone (during Nadelman's life) was more dogged and puritanical...
...sculpture, was conducted on a level of affable ease. At times too affable, perhaps: witness the series of classical heads he carved in marble from about 1908 onward. They are among the most intelligent pastiches of the antique made in the 20th century. Yet despite the tact with which Nadelman unfolded the contours of these portrait heads, they look molded rather than carved...
...marble has the soft, veiled surface of wax. The play between smooth volume and wiry, chiseled line that gave such life to Nadelman's Greek models is not there...
Tubes and Bowlers. Does it matter that Nadelman was not Praxiteles...