Nadelman, Elie

Nadelman, Elie (1882–1946). Polish-born sculptor and draughtsman who became an American citizen in 1927. After brief studies in his native Warsaw and in Munich he settled in Paris in 1903 or 1904 and lived there until 1914. Initially he was influenced by Rodin, but he soon became interested in more avant-garde trends and he later claimed that in some of his work (particularly drawings) of around 1906–7 he had anticipated Picasso in the diffraction of forms typical of Cubism. He knew many leading members of the Parisian avant-garde (including Apollinaire, Brancusi, Picasso, and the Steins), and his early patrons included Helena Rubinstein (1870–1965), the Polish-born cosmetics manufacturer and art collector. His first one-man exhibition was at the Galerie Druet, Paris, in 1909. With the outbreak of the First World War he moved to London and then New York, helped by Madame Rubinstein, who commissioned him to make sleek marble heads for her beauty salons.

Nadelman already had a considerable reputation when he arrived in America and his first one-man show there (at Stieglitz's gallery in 1915) was a great success. Within a short time he was well established in the New York art world, his friends including Paul Manship and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. He married a wealthy widow in 1919 and they lived in some style, with a town house in Manhattan and an estate at Riverdale, New York State. They also spent lavishly collecting American folk art. Nadelman's work has a witty sophistication appropriate to the high society world in which he moved, as with Man in the Open Air (MOMA, New York, 1915), a delightful bowler-hatted bronze in a pose mimicking ancient Greek sculpture. With his humour went a bold simplification and distortion of forms (akin to those of Lachaise) that place him among the pioneers of modern sculpture in America. The Depression had a disastrous effect on his market (he had to sell the house in Manhattan) and his career virtually ended when a good deal of his work was accidentally destroyed in 1935. He was already leading a reclusive life by this time, but during the Second World War he taught ceramics and modelling at the Bronx Veterans' Hospital. Two years after his death there was a major exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.