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Elie Nadelman Significant Form

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Elie Nadelman Significant Form ELIE NADELMAN SIGNIFICANT FORM November 7 – December 21, 2019 CYNTHIA NADELMAN IN ANDREW ESCHELBACHER: This show is called Significant Form, a term Elie Nadelman originated in an essay for Alfred CONVERSATION WITH Stieglitz’s Camera Work, 1910, before it was re-used by the DR. ANDREW ESCHELBACHER critic Clive Bell. What strikes you as most important about the idea of significant form for Nadelman—and what exactly did he mean by it? “The subject of any work of art is for me nothing but CYNTHIA NADELMAN: I think it came out of ideas that a pretext for creating significant form, relations of form were certainly swirling around at the time about how to get which create a new life that has nothing to do with life to the basis of things—–an idea of pure, plain form. I think for in nature, a life from which art is born, and from which Nadelman it was about intention. For instance, he talks about spring style and unity. how if you throw a rope it lands randomly, and once you do something to that rope it creates a shape, like a circle. From significant form comes style, from relations of form, AE: Nadelman certainly would have an interesting perspec- i.e. the necessity of form, i.e., the necessity of playing one tive on the ideas of the time, coming to Paris from Warsaw form against another, comes unity. via Munich, where [German sculptor/theorist Adolf von] Hil- debrand obviously has a strong presence at the turn of the I leave it to others to judge of the importance of so radical 20th century. And then when he gets to Paris he experiences a a change in the means used to create a work of art.” city in which Rodin is the dominant figure. I think we see the Elie Nadelman influence of both of these artists in his work, especially in the beginning where he is creating the building blocks that take him forward. CN: It was that argument between the two earlier sculptors: where do you go now between the classicism that Hildebrand argued was the path to ideal forms or the more expressive style of Rodin, leaving evidence of the hand in the sculpture? AE: And each of those sculptors had strong ideas about the intersection of nature, subject, and form. As Nadelman made clear in that same essay for Camera Work, the artistic subject for him was nothing but a pretext for creating this significant form. CN: Yes, that’s right. Nadelman didn’t want simply to imitate nature, but he was also resistant to total abstraction. He want- ed to capture the forms he saw in the world, but not through emoting or expressionism. The significant form would have been the through line, or first principle. AE: His use of the curve is almost now cliché as the building block of his art, which is quite visible formally. He also insisted on its importance when he wrote “I employ no other line than the curve, which possesses freshness and force.” How do you think he arrived at this? CN: Maybe he worked it out in drawings because it certainly was important for him. He almost did a sort of cross-hatching to make curves, and in a way the multiple curves became their own form of cross-hatching—especially in some of his draw- Cover: Ideal Female Head, c. 1920. bronze, 19 x 9 1/2 x 7 1/4 inches - 48.3 x 24.1 x 18.4 cm 1. Elie Nadelman in his studio with Man in the Open Air, ca. 1915. Image courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 2. Femme Drapée, c. 1912. 1 Polished bronze, cast by the artist c. 1920, 22 1/4 x 11 1/2 x 8 inches, 56.5 x 29.2 x 20.3 cm. Quote: From “Photo-Secession Notes.” Camera Work, no. 32 (October 1910), p. 41. curves. Breaking up the face into planes, but they are kind of curvy planes. AE: And then in his more Classicism-inspired works—his iconic marble heads for instance—the curve stays paramount. Despite their clear reference to the past, you wouldn’t typically confuse a Nadelman bust for a Greek or Roman one. CN: Classical heads would be more specific than what Nadel- man created. His were more of a distillation of form, rather than a specific portrait or rendering of a particular figure. AE: And that refers back to that emphasis on the curve rath- er than the naturalistic undulation of the cheekbone or the nuances of a person’s brow. It’s about the simplification of the face, an idealization or essentialization rendered through the harmony of curves. CN: It could almost be that it’s the form that came first then he attaches a face to it. I suppose you can think of it that way. AE: He was not totally averse to adding subject details to his artworks—bowler hats, bows, ties, and other signs of modern, cosmopolitan life—as seen in Man in the Open Air—that are often charmingly at odds with the emphasis on Classicism or, later on, with Folk art. CN: Well that’s a good point. The hairstyles play a role as details, too. The minute the tie or bows and things like that start turning up… there is a kind of humor to the sculpture. But even earlier, the bulbousness of his forms in works like the Gertrude Stein (Standing Female Figure) from about 1907 is fun! I think he de- velops this further after he gets to the United States. AE: Let me stop you for a quick second because you said something that I think is crucial for Nadelman. You said “fun.” When we think of modernity, and often quite rightly, we think of the impact of huge political and cultural strife. The First World War, for instance, was the impetus for Nadelman to come to America. But there is fun and whimsy in his work. Can you expand on that a bit? CN: Well, the struggling artist part of his career was over by 2 the time he came here, it was already over in the later period in Paris. He was 32 when he came to New York. So, although at first he was looking at everything with new eyes, and did think ings. I think that’s where he worked out a lot of what to do much was bizarre and weird, he began to enjoy it. with his forms. AE: And just as a bit of back-story, he was a very charming, AE: He was arriving at this foundation in the first decade very attractive, very sociable society man who happened to be of the 20th century in Paris where Picasso and Braque were an extraordinary sculptor. I think everything that happens after inventing Cubism. Nadelman was also clearly thinking about the stock market crash and the Depression has shaped a dif- ideas of fracture, especially in his drawings, but rather than ferent way that we think about him posthumously. Sometimes create fracture through a focus on the geometry of the cube, that bon vivant quality can be overshadowed. he explored those concepts through the geometry of the curve. CN: He became established in art circles here quite quickly. CN: Even when Nadelman broke up the head into planes in And while he’s taking in the new styles, life around him, he that plaster Head of a Man (now destroyed) that may or may imports some of the motifs he had already been playing with not prefigure Picasso’s Head of Fernande, he’s doing it with in Paris, such as derby hats, though we only have evidence of 3 those earlier ones through pictures and written descriptions. AE: Even the iconic folk-style sculptures often have forms, shapes, poses that Nadelman first deployed in Parisian works, and this type of continuity continues throughout his career. There are motifs from the 1910s that become the underlying forms that make up the body of the Two Circus Women and other late plasters. Those circular globs. CN: The whipped creamy hair [laughs]! And in lots of the small pieces too he seemed to lavish attention on the hair. Curls es- pecially, and the little poodles that appear both early and late. Continuity is important to Nadelman, as even when he start- ed creating more experimental pieces he continued executing the more serious classical influenced sculptures. Those more experimental things—the folk-type figures in plaster and later, wood, and the galvano-plastiques—didn’t make him money but the other work did, so he did both. AE: With these experimental works, the technique and ma- 4 terials are really crucial and signal a departure from traditional fine art sculpture. Where, for example, did Nadelman’s interest in galvano-plastiques [electroplated plaster] come from? 3. Head of a Woman (Emerging from Stone), c. 1915-1920. marble, 9 3/4 x 10 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches - 24.8 x 27.3 x 22.2 cm. 4. Elie Nadelman with Hunt Diederich at the Whitney Club’s CN: The galvanos are interesting because in addition to work- exhibition Indigenous Sculpture, 1918, in front of Nadelman’s Tree of Life. © The Es- ing with his traditional studio assistants—and he had a very tate of Elie Nadelman 5 6 7 8 traditional sculptural practice in many ways, creating pieces in CN: In certain ways Nadelman anticipates seriality, though in different materials and sizes—here he was working with fab- his case, it’s generally about themes and variations —as well as ricators who normally did not make art but made other kinds the play with high and low.
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