A Panorama of Pittsburgh
at the Frick through 10/5
Learn about Pittsburgh's past by viewing more than 130 printed views of the city.

Meissonier masterpiece
now on view at the Frick
1806, Jena is on view at the Frick through May 31, 2009.

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RADical Day at the Frick
Visit the Frick on 10/5 for a full day of activities and fun!

Rob Rogers discusses
political cartooning on 10/12
The Post-Gazette's award-winning editorial cartoonist will discuss his experiences covering the 2008 presidential campaign and conventions.

Music for Exhibitions
begins new season 11/18
Join Katherine Soroka and Chatham Baroque for an evening of memorable music.

View photos from the 2008 H. C. Frick Horseless Carriage Tour
Twenty-six teams of drivers made it a day of fun.

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September 21, 2001 - December 30, 2001
Elie Nadelman: Classical Folk, the first major survey of the artist in over two decades, opens on September 21, 2001, at the Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh.

More than ninety works by Elie Nadelman, one of the leading modernist sculptors during the first half of the twentieth century, will be on exhibit at The Frick Art Museum, Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh, beginning September 21, 2001. Entitled Elie Nadelman: Classical Folk, the exhibition focuses on the American phase of the artist's career, from 1914 until his death in 1946, during which time Nadelman arrived at his brilliant synthesis of forms inspired by such divergent sources as classical sculpture, folk art, and popular theater. The exhibition remains on view through December 30, 2001.

The selection of more than seventy-five sculptures and twenty related drawings has been loaned from more than fifteen public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Estate of the Artist. The works are representative of virtually all the major subjects, stylistic innovations, and media the artist explored during his years in America-universally acknowledged as his most crucial and creative period. In addition to such celebrated images as Man in the Open Air, Hostess, Orchestra Conductor (Chef d'orchestre), and Dancer (High Kicker), the exhibition includes rarely seen works produced at the end of the artist's career.

Danforth P. Fales, acting director of the Frick Art & Historical Center, says, "Nadelman's extraordinary ability to draw inspiration from the past as well as the present, from 'highbrow' to 'lowbrow' art, from classical statuary to Cigar Store Indians, helped forge a new way of thinking about and making art in the United States. Indeed, a host of leading sculptors in America today-among them Joel Shapiro and Kiki Smith-readily acknowledge their debt to this boldly inventive and original artist. This exhibition is a rare and remarkable opportunity to see the whole man-to observe the development of his distinctive vision and the many sides of his fascinating and often enigmatic artistic personality."

Elie Nadelman: Classical Folk has been organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) and is made possible, in part, by The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. The exhibition is a project of ART ACCESS II, a program of the AFA with major support from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. Guest curator of the exhibition is Suzanne Ramljak, editor of Metalsmith magazine and a former AFA curator.

Elie Nadelman (1882-1946)
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, Elie Nadelman was encouraged to study art and music from an early age. During his early twenties, he spent time in Munich, where the important collection of early classical Greek sculpture in the city's Glyptothek museum made a deep and lasting impression. By 1904, he was living in Paris, where he became a part of the avant-garde circle of artists and intellectuals that included Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein (who wrote a prose portrait of Nadelman). At a time when many dismissed classical art as outmoded and inimical to modernism, Nadelman daringly asserted its enduring validity as the ultimate standard of aesthetic and formal beauty. In his own work, he struggled to discover and emulate classicism's underlying principles of balance, harmony, and proportion. Intense and melancholic, poor but utterly passionate about his art, the young sculptor "seemed to live on plaster," wrote the poet André Gide.

With the outbreak of World War I, Nadelman moved to New York. Although his first impression of the United States was not positive-he described it as "a country of bluffers and snobs"-he soon became enamored of the energy and optimism of American life. Thanks to the support of prominent New York art world figures, such as Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, his career blossomed. His sources of inspiration also began to take on a new and decidedly American cast, and included the popular culture of his adopted country. Nadelman was delighted by vaudeville performances and other popular amusements, which he sometimes incorporated into his work. He was also fascinated by American folk art, which he admired for its directness of expression, simplicity, and charming lack of pretension. In 1919, he married a wealthy American widow, Viola Flannery, and together they formed a collection of American and European folk art that eventually exceeded 10,000 objects. In 1926, a portion of their country estate in Riverdale, New York, was transformed into the Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts, the first museum of its kind in this country.

The crash of the stock market in 1929 devastated Nadelman financially and emotionally, and forced him to close his beloved museum. He became increasingly withdrawn, stubbornly refusing invitations to exhibit his work. The artist was, however, coaxed into lending three works to an exhibition of American sculpture at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1938 after initially declining the institution's invitation for submissions. In 1946, plagued by debts, illness, and depression, he took his own life. At the time of his death, Nadelman's studio was filled with hundreds of small figurines-none of them ever exhibited-created during the last decade of his life.

The Exhibition
Elie Nadelman: Classical Folk is organized thematically, according to the principal motifs and sources of inspiration that occupied the artist during his decades in America: Classicism, Folk Art, Dancers and Performers, and Modern Life. The final section of the exhibition is devoted to the late works of the 1930s and 1940s.

Classicism
Nadelman's first fame and commercial success in America came from bronze and marble busts that overtly-in style, subject matter, and technique-paid homage to the classical past. A number of exceptionally beautiful examples are on view, among them his Woman's Head (Goddess) (marble, ca. 1916), whose serene expression, idealized features, and crisply chiseled contours are derived from ancient Greek images of female deities. Although Nadelman soon began to experiment with subjects and forms derived from American culture, classical art remained-albeit sometimes quite subtly-a source of inspiration throughout his life. For example, the exhibition includes Woman with Leg Raised, a marble of ca. 1930-35: While the figure's softly rounded, rather plump physique owes little to canons of classical art, her pose is modeled after the Thorn-Puller, a famous Hellenistic image of a young boy pulling a thorn from his foot.

Folk Art
Beginning around 1917, Nadelman began to incorporate references to European and American folk art in his sculptures. The apparent crudeness of these images, often made of painted wood and carved with doll-like features and limbs, startled many admirers of Nadelman's classicizing sculptures. (One critic accused him of making a bizarre and grotesque joke.) Today, they are regarded as among Nadelman's most original and visionary works. The exhibition features a number of these homages to folk art, including the celebrated Orchestra Conductor (Chef d'orchestre) (1918-19, carved 1919-23). In this deceptively simple work, the figure stands stiffly at attention, on clothes-pin like legs; and yet the image is imbued with an extraordinary elegance of line and economy of form.

Dancers and Performers
Another significant and very American source for Nadelman's art were performers from the circus and vaudeville stage, who astonished him with their athleticism and feats of coordination. One of the most famous works in this genre is Dancer (High Kicker) (ca. 1918-19), in which a female figure is balanced on the tiny ball of one foot as she thrusts her other leg high in the air. Carved from cherry wood, the smooth, simplified forms of the dancer are reminiscent of American folk art. In fact, however, it is a work of enormous sophistication, whose carefully orchestrated curves and counter-curves emulate the formal harmony of classical sculpture. This section also includes The Acrobat (bronze, 1916-20) in which Nadelman captures the fleeting moment of equilibrium in a hand-stand.

Modern Life
Nadelman was an astute observer of the habits and fashions of contemporary life, which he often, quite wittily, transposed into classical high-art modes of representation. His Man in a Top Hat (bronze, ca. 1924), for example, is strikingly similar to antique conventions for representing great military leaders, which showed them bust-length, bearded, and with their helmets pushed high on their head. The exhibition also includes what is undoubtedly Nadelman's most famous classicizing take on contemporary life-Man in the Open Air (1915). In this life-size bronze, a young gentleman wearing a derby hat strikes a casual pose against a stylized tree. The contrapposto stance, with the weight on one leg, is a hallmark of Greek sculpture. Specifically, the Nadelman bronze alludes to a well-known sculpture by the Greek master Praxiteles, showing a marble faun resting one arm on a tree trunk.

The Late Work
During the last decade of his life-a period of financial hardship and increasing ill health-Nadelman spent his time in seclusion, obsessively producing hundreds of small clay figurines of young girls. The exhibition features forty-three of these works, which were never exhibited during his lifetime and whose purpose remains a mystery. Most are small enough to be held in the hand, and, indeed, must be, for they cannot stand on their own. Plump and child-like in their proportions, some assume coy and flirtatious poses, others appear to be giggling, still others stare out in solemn silence. The so-called Tanagra figures, small clay sculptures of females produced during the Hellenistic period, have been cited as a possible classical source for these works. Some of Nadelman's figurines wear the conical hat typical of many Tanagra figures. However, many of these diminutive nymphets also bear a striking resemblance to fun-house kewpie dolls. Once again, Nadelman seems to have deftly combined "high" and "low" art, popular imagery and classicism, in the creation of something totally original.

The Catalogue
Elie Nadelman: Classical Folk is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that contains essays by exhibition curator Suzanne Ramljak; art historian Avis Berman; Valerie Fletcher, curator of sculpture, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and writer and curator Klaus Kertess. The catalogue also contains a detailed chronology of Nadelman's life and artistic milieus compiled by his granddaughter, Cynthia Nadelman. Elie Nadelman: Classsical Folk, published by the American Federation of Arts, is available at the Frick Art & Historical Center Museum Shop for $29.95 (hardcover).

The Frick Art Museum is the second and final venue for this exhibition, which opened at The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, where it remains on view through August 19, 2001.

Founded by an act of Congress in 1909, the American Federation of Arts is the United States' oldest and most comprehensive nonprofit art museum service organization.

For further information or images, contact Dede Acer at the Frick Art & Historical Center, 412-371-0600, or racer@frickart.org.
 		 
<i>Figurines</i>, ca. 1936-45 Plaster, 5 ½ - 9 ¼ in. high Estate of Elie Nadelman Courtesy AFA


<i>Woman's Head (Goddess)</i>, ca. 1916. Marble, 23 1/4 x 10 1/2 x 16 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase with funds from the Lauder Foundation, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder Fund. Courtesy AFA


<i>Seated Woman with Leg Raised</i>, ca. 1926. Galvano-plastique, 49 ½ x 25 x 28 in. Estate of Elie Nadelman Courtesy AFA


<i>Bust of a Woman</i>, 1924 Bronze, paint, 24 x 18 x11 in. Estate of Elie Nadelman Courtesy AFA


<i>Orchestra Conductor (Chef d'Orchestre)</i>, 1918-19. Cherry wood, paint, gesso, 30 1/2 x 21 1/4 x 11 3/4 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshorn. Courtesy AFA.


<i>Standing Girl (Hostess)</i>, ca. 1918-19 Cherry wood, paint, gesso, 32 ½ x12x13 ½ in. Estate of Elie Nadelman Courtesy AFA


<i>Dancer (High Kicker)</i>, ca. 1918-19. Cherry wood, 31 x 17 x 8 1/12 in. The Jewish Museum, New York. Given in memory of Murial Rand by her husband William Rand. Courtesy AFA.


<i>Female Dancer</i>, ca. 1920 Bronze, 32 ½ x 17 x 7 ½ in. Estate of Elie Nadelman Courtesy AFA


<i>Acrobat</i>, 1916-20 Bronze, 17 x 4 ½ x 6 ¾ in. Estate of Elie Nadelman Courtesy AFA


<i>Dancing Figure (Artemis)</i>, ca. 1916-18 Bronze on marble base, 31 5/8 x 13 7/8 x 11 7/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum; Gift of Countess Helen Naselli. Courtesy AFA


<i>Sur la Plage</i>, 1916 Marble and bronze, 23 1/8 x 26 3/8 x 9 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 50th Anniversary Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation in honor of Lloyd Goodrich. Courtesy AFA


<i>Man in the Open Air</i>, 1915. Bronze, 53 x 22 1/2 x 11 1/4 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of William S. Paley (by exchange), 1948. Courtesy AFA.




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