Art: Monumental Dolls

When a man named Elie Nadelman died two years ago, his passing was barely noted. Last week Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art opened a retrospective show that went a long way to prove that Nadelman, who made two splashy successes, then tried to hide, had been one of the best sculptors the U.S. had seen.

Nadelman had his first show in a Paris gallery in 1909. His command of classic sculpture caused so much talk that Matisse put up a sign in his studio, forbidding discussion of Nadelman. The sculptor was then 27, a shy, handsome Pole in a turtleneck sweater who stayed away from the cafes, almost never left his studio except for long walks at night.

A Reciprocal Curve. It was not Nadelman’s academic skill that started all the talk. Right alongside of his classic nudes he was showing other figures geometrically distorted in a way that foreshadowed cubism. Describing them in his Journal, Novelist André Gide wrote that “Nadelman draws with a compass and sculpts by assembling rhomboids. He has discovered that every curve of the human body is accompanied by a reciprocal curve which opposes it and corresponds to it. The harmony which results from these balancings smacks of the theorem.” Gide had put his finger on one undeniable weakness of Nadelman’s art—its cold intellectuality.

The sculptor’s restless mind was bound to lead him into new ways of expression. He moved to Manhattan and took it by storm in 1917 with an exhibition of a totally different kind: a roomful of carved comments on modern life. Now Nadelman’s slimmed-down Venuses did high kicks, his Jupiters wore boiled shirts and derby hats, his Muses played the piano. Critic Henry McBride described the show as “culture to the breaking point.” It all but sold out.

A Quiet Game. Two years afterwards Nadelman married a rich woman, settled down in a Riverdale, N.Y. mansion. When friends came to call and asked “what he was doing,” he proudly showed them his raspberries. Neighbors knew him as a man who liked a quiet game of bridge.

In secret, Nadelman was developing a new form of sculpture. His final works, rescued from the obscurity of his Riverdale attic, were the hits of last week’s show. Made mostly in plaster or papier-mâché (a mixture of paste and paper pulp), they ranged from life-size figures to tiny dolls. Proof of his brilliance lay in the fact that the tiny ones, of which he did hundreds, had a monumental quality. With their archaic smiles, compactness and classic grace of pose, they looked like quick sketches for heroic statues. But that was not Nadelman’s notion in modeling them : he had hoped to take sculpture out of the park and put it on the mantel. Such little figures as his, he reasoned, could be reproduced for thousands to buy and enjoy at home.