Elie Nadelman

Elie Nadelman (1882-1946) was an important sculptor and a key member of the New York art scene during the first half of the twentieth century, whose distinctive fusion of classical European tradition and modern American subject matter secured him a singular place in the history of modern sculpture. Nadelman fused the classical influences of his Beaux-Arts style training in Europe with the subject matter and imagery of popular culture in America to create his uniquely abstracted works. At times his sculptures seemed to combine the traditional with what was radically modern in his own moment, and his so-called radically simplified drawings were deceptively spare in their economy of line and form.

Born in Warsaw, Nadelman pursued his early artistic training in his native city and later in Munich before moving to Paris, where he would spend the crucial formative years of his career. In Paris he immersed himself in the great collections of classical sculpture at the Louvre and developed his distinctive vocabulary of smoothly curving forms and elongated proportions. His early years in Paris placed him within the vibrant international avant-garde community of pre-war Europe, where his work attracted the attention of major collectors and critics including Leo Stein.

Nadelman emigrated to the United States in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War, and he would spend the rest of his life in America. His mature work developed a distinctive fusion of classical Greek influences, European Beaux-Arts refinement, and the imagery of contemporary American life. His celebrated wooden figures of tango dancers, orchestra conductors, hostesses, and everyday Americans transformed the observed types of modern urban culture into sculptures of surprising formal elegance, treating popular subject matter with the compositional care traditionally reserved for classical themes.

Nadelman was also a passionate collector of American folk art, and together with his wife he built one of the most important early collections of the field, eventually founding a private museum devoted to the subject in Riverdale, New York. His sculptures are held today in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major American collections.