Elie Nadelman
Nationality / Dates: 1882-1946
Elie Nadelman (1882-1946) was born in Warsaw, Polish Russia. He studied art briefly in Poland and spent six months in Munich before arriving in Paris in 1904. Nadelman spent time at the Louvre making drawings after Michelangelo's sculpture, and was also influenced by the work of Auguste Rodin and Georges Seurat. His first one-man show in April of 1909 was a success. Between 1909 and 1913, Nadelman's work was exhibited in Barcelona, London (where Helena Rubinstein purchased the entire collection), Berlin, and again in Paris. Twelve of Nadelman's drawings and a plaster male head were included in the Armory Show in New York in 1913.
In 1914, Nadelman went to Brussels to enlist as a reservist in the Russian army after the outbreak of war, but was told it would be impossible to cross Europe. He was able to reach London and, with the help of Helena Rubinstein, obtained passage to the United States in October of that year.
Nadelman's first one-man exhibition in New York took place at Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Gallery "291" from December to January, 1915-16. Included was a plaster version of Man in the Open Air, later cast in bronze and now one of the most significant sculptures in the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery collection. (There are four other bronze castings of this work, one of which is in the collection at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City.)
Describing his work, Nadelman wrote in Stieglitz's publication, Camera Work, "The subject of any work of art is for me nothing but a pretext for creating significant form, relations of forms which create a new life that has nothing to do with life in nature, a life from which art is born, and from which spring style and unity."1
References:
1. Elie Nadelman, Camera Work (October 1910): n.p., quoted in John I. H. Baur, The Sculpture and Drawings of Elie Nadelman, exhibition catalogue (New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1975), 7.
Other Works:
Man in the Open Air, c. 1915, bronze
|
