Krakowskie Przedmieście 5, 00-068 Warszawa, Poland
In 1899 and 1901, Elie attended Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Krakowskie Przedmieście 5, 00-068 Warszawa, Poland
In 1899 and 1901, Elie attended Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Elie and Viola Nadelman near Berlin, Germany, around 1921. Courtesy of the Estate of Elie Nadelman.
Elie Nadelman was born on February 20, 1882, in Warsaw, Russian Empire (present-day Warsaw, Poland). He was the last of seven children of Philip Nadelman and Hannah (Arnstan) Nadelman. Philip Nadelman, a middle-class jeweler, was a Jewish man of liberal intellectual interests, well-read in the philosophical literature. His wife came from a family of artists, writers and musicians.
In his early years in Warsaw, Elie attended Warsaw's Gymnasium and the High School of Liberal Arts. In 1899, Nadelman briefly attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, to which he returned in 1901 for one year. Moreover, during his time in Warsaw, he attended drawing classes under the guidance of Adam Badowski and Jan Kauzik.
In 1902, Elie visited Munich, where he studied the classical Greek sculpture on display in the city's museums. In 1905, he attended the Académie Colarossi in Paris for several months.
In 1900, Elie voluntarily joined the Imperial Russian Army and for a year performed the relatively insignificant duties of teaching officers' children and producing paintings for barracks. In 1902, Elie left for Munich, where he remained for six months, an interval, that proved to be highly significant for his later career as a sculptor. There, Nadelman made his first study of antique sculpture with a penetrating examination of the Glyptothek's warriors of Aegina. His questioning eye also found in Bavarian folk art an essential simplicity of form, that he felt to be somehow analogous to the archaic Greek works.
At the age of twenty-one, Nadelman gave up painting for sculpture. Settling in Paris in 1904, he was, for a decade, obsessed with the problem of demonstrating the formal principles he assumed to be the operational method of the Aeginian sculptors. As he became much more than a mere copyist of the antique, his art was permeated by a variety of influences, some of them seemingly irreconcilable. For example, although Elie followed Rodin's portrait style, he also absorbed much from the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley.
It's important to mention, that, during his time in Paris, Elie befriended famous members of the avant-garde, such as Pablo Picasso and Leo and Gertrude Stein. Also, through the Polish brothers Thadée and Alexandre Natanson, founders of La Revue Blanche, he met such artistically influential persons, as Octave Mirbeau and André Gide.
Between 1903 and 1909, Nadelman produced a large number of works, which, when shown at the Galerie Druet in 1909, attracted a great deal of critical attention. As early as 1905, Nadelman had begun what he termed research into the nature of physical matter with analytical drawings of the human form, based upon sequences of curves. He was later to say, that he had "completely revolutionized the art of his time" and that "cubism was only an imitation of the abstract form", discovered in his drawings.
Nadelman was of importance in Parisian artistic circles during his years there. The deliberately innovative character of his conceptions was noticed favorably both by the sculptor Alexander Archipenko and by the critic Bernard Berenson. In an age, when Rodin's expressionistic surfaces were widely imitated by younger sculptors, Nadelman's highly polished "antique" heads were a departure from sculptural norms, although their technical counterpart can be found in the contemporary work of Constantin Brancusi.
In London, in 1911, for an exhibition of his sculpture, Nadelman met Madame Helena Rubinstein, the wealthy Polish-born proprietor of beauty salons in the United States and Europe, who purchased the entire exhibition. Nadelman's last showing in Paris was at the Galerie Druet in 1913, and although it was both smaller and less spectacular, than the exhibition of 1909, it caused André Salmon to publish the first full-length article, devoted to Nadelman's art. Salmon characterized Nadelman as almost Byzantine in his uncompromising sacrifice of everything to the Euclidean interrelationships of forms in the glyptic art.
Encouraged by Madame Rubinstein, Nadelman came to the United States in the fall of 1914 and began, with her help, to prepare for his first New York exhibition, held at the Alfred Stieglitz Photo-Secession Gallery ("291") in December of the following year. There, his "Man in the Open Air" bespoke a new satirical approach to the subject matter, based in part upon a study of Seurat drawings, made before he left France.
Nadelman's first large New York showing came in 1917 at the galleries of Scott Fowles and received high praise from Henry McBride, one of America's most perceptive critic columnists. Nadelman, now a notable force in New York's artistic life, during the next few years completed a prodigious number of works. His subjects were of three kinds: commissioned portraits, concert and theatrical subjects and satirical references to drawing-room behavior.
After his marriage to Viola M. Flannery, Nadelman's career took a curious turn. His wife, a daughter of Countess Naselli of Rome, was then unwell, and she and the artist virtually retired from New York life to live in seclusion on an estate in the Riverdale section of the city. There, they amassed an important collection of American folk art, numbering some 15,000 items. In 1926, the couple opened the Museum of Folk and Peasant Art (later called the Museum of Folk Arts) in Riverdale, New York City. During the Great Depression, however, the Nadelmans lost their wealth and were forced to close the museum.
Nadelman continued to work, but the new pieces were nearly unknown to the art world, as he refused either to sell or to exhibit them. In the 1930's, however, he responded to commissions for two large architectural decorations, and it was probably these, that caused him to think of sculpture on a new scale. The late Amazonian pairs of females, circus riders, standing at rest, were seen only after his death, as were also the dozens of figurines in papier-mâché, terra cotta and plaster. The last are modern equivalents of the Tanagra works of Hellenistic Greece, some authentic fragments of which were found in Nadelman's studio.
To sum it all up, it's important to note, that, although Nadelman's oeuvre is marked by an admirable stylistic coherence, it is still possible to distinguish four shifts of formal emphasis in the evolution of his sculpture. The figural work of 1909 shows a somewhat mannered concern with linearity. Yet, during the next decade Nadelman produced heads in marble and bronze, distinguished by a classical volumetric lucidity. In the earlier phase of his American career, working often in cherry wood, Elie used color both to clarify forms and to sharpen the satiric character of his subjects. Finally, from 1930 onward, irrespective of the actual size of pieces, Nadelman achieved an impressive monumentality by stressing the sculptural element of mass.
Some sources of information note, that Elie died after a long illness, while the others say he committed suicide.
Elie Nadelman was a renowned sculptor, who gained prominence for his mannered curvilinear human figures, which greatly influenced early 20th-century American sculpture. Though Nadelman's work was largely forgotten during the latter half of the 20th century, his work has experienced a resurgence in popularity thanks to museum exhibitions, such as the 2003 Whitney Museum retrospective, titled "Elie Nadelman: The Sculptor of Modern Life".
Nadelman's best-known works include "Man in the Open Air", "Classical Head", "Standing Girl", "Chef d'Orchestre", "Two Standing Nudes" and "Tango".
Elie's work is featured in the public collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Philadelphia Art Museum, among many others.
Elie was a collector of folk art.
Elie married Viola M. Flannery, a wealthy widow, on December 29, 1919. Their marriage produced one child - E. Jan Nadelman, who was a foreign service officer and diplomat.
