Volume 50, Number 10 · June 12, 2003
Logic Is Beautiful
By John Updike
Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life
Catalog of the exhibitionby Barbara Haskell
an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 3–July 20, 2003
Whitney Museum of American Art/ Abrams, 239 pp., $39.95 (paper)
'Up like a rocket, down like a stick'—thus, roughly, the multinational career of the Polish-American sculptor Elie Nadelman (1882–1946), whose present extensive exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York projects, despite the jaunty flair and exquisite finish of many of its items, a shadow of melancholy. Nadelman was captivated by ideas, which inhibited and limited his work even as they inspired it. Born in Warsaw at a time when the Polish nation didn't exist except as an idea, a language, and a fervent if wistful nationalism, and into an assimilated Jewish family whose one concession to their heritage was to name their youngest and seventh child Eliasz (Elijah), Elie Nadelman moved to Munich and then Paris in his early twenties, and to New York when he was thirty-two. He found the émigré artistic communities in these metropolises far from immune to the anti-Semitism that accompanied Polish nationalism; in later life he identified himself as a Pole rather than as a Jew, marrying a Catholic, Viola Spiess Flannery, in 1919, and raising their one child, a son, as a Christian.
Review, 2828 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |