Word: nadelmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...performers of the period as Augustus Saint-Gaudens-eventually made an accommodation with modern style through art deco. In the studios of beaux-arts figures like Saint-Gaudens and Karl Bitter, as well as those of decorators like Paul Manship and protomodernists like Gaston Lachaise, John Storrs and Elie Nadelman, sculpture made its last pub lic stand before the museum became its sole arena...
Nobody complains that Cole Porter was not Stravinsky. A modern problem in judging Nadelman's work, with its high stylishness and often lapsed vitality, is that we expect "serious" sculpture to look tough and problematic. Nadelman was so expert at masking problems that he seems to have had none. He wanted to sculpt modern life, but in terms of classical ideality; and in this task he was surprisingly successful...
Only Magritte and Leger - and in his different way, Nadelman. He could take a bowler hat and, perching it on the head of Mercury, give it a classical density as form. The headgear worn by his Man in a Top Hat (1927) has the formal and slightly absurd dignity of an old liner's funnel, played off against the scrolly beard and bronze blade of a nose...
...work like Tango (circa 1919), the dress suit and the white vest-rendered with the utmost economy as a patch of gesso on the smooth cherry-wood - take on a sleek, concise elegance far removed from the naive woodcarvings of country America that provoked Nadelman's hand. He was an exquisite connoisseur of gesture, and his finest works-particularly the suite of woodcarvings to which Tango belongs-stem from his delight in performance: in music halls or burlesques, at plays, piano recitals or even tea dances...
...Nadelman's biographer, Lincoln Kirstein, observed, he "refined all coarseness into a subtle fixity of ostentation." He could give the postures of invitation and entertainment a detached grace almost worthy of an archaic kouros. The Whitney show reminds us how good minor...