Word: nadelmans
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...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...
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...