Elie Nadelman and American Sculpture

Apparently, although I find it hard to believe, the word is not out on Elie Nadelman. The last couple of weeks with publications about Lincoln Kirstein, the establishment critics have been totting up the rights and wrongs of his taste, which was certainly eccentric enough, and included Paul Cadmus, Pavel Tchelitchew and the Wyeth family en masse, all on the down side. Then his bad taste in sculpture is featured. His predilection for Gaston Lachaise, William Rimmer and Elie Nadelman.
Kirstein assembled the first museum show of Nadelman's work, at the MOMA, and wrote the catalog. I can see how he fits into Kirstein's taste, but he was one of Kirstein's brilliant picks.

Nadelman was in Paris before and during the early cubist years. As is well known, he came up with an abstraction of his own before the cubists had begun with theirs, which resembled cubism, although it was really somewhere between it and the later futurist ideas. Nonetheless, it has been said to have influenced Picasso.  When he returned to the USA he fell in love with American folk sculpture, which he collected avidly. It became a major influence on his work, and he used that influence to simplify the forms in his works, increase their rhythm to great intensity, and was influenced by the way in which clothing was treated as a major sculptural form by folk artists. He also learned to mix media from them. He often painted on his wood, bronze and other sculptures. The other pole of his art was neoclassical. That work was also often formally rich and beyond what the style could do in others' hands.

 Now, none of these influences were bad for him. He began academically, and then abstracted his work, intensifying the formal structure. He came to the United States and found a wonderul new source of ideas, thus far untapped by any sculptor, anywhere.  His taste was such that the folk sculpture he admired was not klutzy, clumsy incompetence, but brilliant folk simplification and invention. His own work grew from all these influences and he remained an original, unlike any other sculptor in this country. In Arturo Martini's best work, influenced by Etruscan and archaic Greek sculpture, there is some overlap. But I am not sure either of them knew the other's work.

At any rate, an establishment critic threw Nadelman away with all the other bad picks of Kirstein's. Apparently, in the establishment art world, no one has gotten a clue yet. Formally, Nadelman was the strongest living American sculptor of his time. Imaginatively, he was the most original.

By the way, Nadelman has been accepted by major American museums and institutions, but that acceptance has not included those who think themselves a serious part of the current art world establishment. It should be impossible for a major critic [in position not understanding] to throw Nadelman away.

Kirstein should be honored for the show he gave him and the catalog he wrote, not despised.

Love,
Gabriel

Comments

[Douglas Anderson]

[this is good] It is hard to understand why Nadelman would be considered "bad taste", when we have been so beleagured by the bad taste of the establisment which forces on us mediocrities. One need only go to the Musum of Modern Art to witness the failures whom the museum curators continue to insist, absurdly, are important artists. Nowhere will you find Helion, or Derain, or Alfred Russell, or

[Gabriel Laderman]

Dear Douglas,I get up to the word Russell, don;t know how that sentence ends. I don't even think Nadelman should be that controversial. During his life time, his work was never part of the conservative establishment, but outside of it completely. There is only one way he could be rejected, because Kirstein liked him!! That, of course, is nonsense. The problem is that doctrinaire and unknowledgeable critics will reject all sculpture which was not completely abstract, even in the 1920s. That is where the fault lies. In the ignorance of the critics.Love,Gabriel