NADELMAN, ELIE

NADELMAN, ELIE (1882–1946), U.S. sculptor. Nadelman, who was born in Warsaw, studied art there and in Cracow. He lived in extreme poverty in Paris for some years, but his first one-man show in 1909 was a triumph. His work at this   time was mainly influenced by classical Greek art, but certain drawings and pieces of sculpture hinted at a search for a new direction. Andre Gide wrote in his Journal (1909): "Nadelman draws with a compass and sculpts by assembling rhombs. He has discovered that each curve of the human body is accompanied by a reciprocal curve opposite it and corresponding to it." Nadelman, who regarded himself as the father of cubism, resented his not being recognized as such. He made his way to the U.S. early in World War I, and had his first American one-man show in New York at the end of 1915. Over the years Nadelman became very successful with his fashionable, witty portrait busts. Nadelman and his wealthy wife assembled one of the finest collections of American folk art. The depression of the 1930s, however, brought a change in his fortunes and after 1932 he was virtually forgotten. He spent his last years doing voluntary occupational therapy at the Bronx Veterans' Hospital and making sentimental little plaster figures for mass reproduction. Nadelman was rediscovered when in 1948, two years after his death, the New York Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art, mounted a memorial exhibition of his work. This revealed him as an important sculptor, remarkable for the supple languor of his marble heads, his translations of folk art, and his comments on human foibles. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: L. Kirstein, Sculpture of Elie Nadelman (1948), includes bibliography; idem, Elie Nadelman, Drawings (1949). (Alfred Werner)