Word: nadelmans
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...York museums are now as bent on resurrecting lost reputations as, a decade ago, they were on promoting new ones. A revisionist ecstasy is in the air, and one of the more important artists to benefit from it (if posthumously) is Sculptor Elie Nadelman. A definitive retrospective of some 150 sculptures and drawings opened last week at the Whitney Museum, organized by Art Historian John Baur, director of the Whitney until his retirement last year...
...When Nadelman died in New York in 1946, his name vanished as suddenly as a stone into a well; and yet, for the first 50 years of his life, he had been the epitome of worldly-and, to an extent, aesthetic-success. Born in 1882 into a cultivated family of Warsaw Jews, Nadelman settled in Paris and moved with ease and originality through the circle that included Picasso, Apollinaire and the Steins; his early work from 1906 to 1907 is known to have influenced Picasso's own sculpture, and Nadelman's place among the progenitors of Cubism...
Elegant and worldly, with the profile of a melancholy hawk, Nadelman was adored by rich women and duly married a millionairess; he acquired a Manhattan house and a splendid estate on the Hudson. In five years (between 1923 and 1928) the Nadelmans spent more than half a million dollars buying American folk art and were the first systematic collectors...
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...
...Hirshhorn collection as a whole, they will not be found at the Guggenheim. From the 37 Daumiers to the 17 Degas, the 27 Moores and the 15 Giacomettis; from the three heads of Baudelaire-one by Duchamp-Villon, one by Rodin, and a third by Elie Nadelman-to Leonard Baskin's mournful John Donne in his Winding Cloth, to the delicate construction by Naum Gabo, the exhibition provides one delight after another...