Elie Nadelman : Sculptor of Modern Life

by Haskell, Barbara

• ISBN13: 9780874271300
• ISBN10: 0874271304
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-08
• Publisher: Whitney Museum of Art

Summary

This book is the most comprehensive publication to date on the work of Elie Nadelman (1882-1946), an important sculptor and a key member of the New York art scene in the first half of the 20th century. Accompanying the first major retrospective of Nadelman's work since 1975, it brings his achievement to a new generation of art enthusiasts. Nadelman fused classical influences with the subject matter and imagery of popular culture. Using bronze, marble, wood, and plaster, he created stylized, curvilinear emblems of modern life whose formal motifs referenced both the antique and the modern. Here, Barbara Haskell presents a fully researched and broad-based examination of Nadelman's art by juxtaposing his elegant drawings with related sculptures, filling a gap in the literature on 20th-century American sculpture.

Author Biography

Barbara Haskell has been a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art since 1975; she is now Curator of Early Twentieth-Century Art. A well-known scholar on American art, she organized and wrote the book for part one of the landmark Whitney exhibition The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-2000. Ms. Haskell has written extensively on early twentieth-century American modernists

Table of Contents

Foreword	7	(2)
Maxwell L. Anderson
Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life	9	(193)
Formative Experiences: Poland, 1882--1903	11	(9)
An Aesthetic Emerges: Munich, 1904	20	(7)
Launching a Career: Paris, 1904--09	27	(12)
Statement of Aesthetic Principles: Camera Work, 1910	39	(1)
Paterson Gallery and Helena Rubinstein: London, 1911	40	(11)
Success Accelerates: Paris, 1912--14	51	(22)
Unintentional Immigration and Meteoric Success: New York, 1914--17	73	(28)
Whimsical Insouciance: Plaster Genre Figures, 1917--19	101	(14)
Tubular Modernity: Wood and Bronze Genre Figures, 1920--25	115	(36)
Nadelman as Collector: The Museum of Folk Arts	151	(6)
Galvano--Plastiques, 1925--27	157	(12)
Toward a Domestic Market: Small-Scale Papier-maches and Terra-cottas, 1928--35	169	(11)
The Depression and Its Consequences, 1929--35	180	(7)
An Art of Flux, Anxiety, and Uncertainty: Miniature Figurines, 1938--46	187	(15)
Notes	202	(10)
Exhibition History	212	(10)
Chronology	222	(2)
Selected Bibliography and Writings by Nadelman	224	(6)
Acknowledgments	230	(2)
Lenders to the Exhibition	232	(2)
Index	234