Classical Head

Sculptor Elie Nadelman worked briefly in Warsaw, then studied in Munich before leaving for Paris, where he lived from 1904 to 1914. His first one-man show of works in plaster and drawings was held in Paris in 1909 at Galerie Druet, and the works shown there-many of them inspired by classical Greece-clearly influenced other artists at the time, including Brancusi, Modigliani, and Picasso. Nadelman then moved to New York City, where he worked for the remainder of his career.

One of the artist's early supporters was Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965), the Polish cosmetics mogul, who had purchased the entire contents of the exhibition of his works held in London in April 1911 at the William B. Paterson Gallery, which included ten marble heads. The AMAM sculpture of a classical head, of exquisite modeling, is one of the most accomplished of Nadelman's early works in marble, and almost certainly was in that exhibition. The sculpture was in Helena Rubinstein's collection until her death.

Nadelman is known for stylized, formally clear faces and busts, almost all of which display a poise and balance inspired by antiquity. Athena Tacha Spear, former AMAM curator of modern art, Oberlin professor, and a sculptor herself, noted in her scholarship on the artist that "he used antiquity as a pretext, he borrowed its vocabulary, to create a language which fitted his own message." Nadelman himself, in 1910 (just about the time he created the AMAM sculpture) said of his art: "I employ no other line than the curve, which possesses freshness and force. I compose these curves so as to bring them in accord or in opposition to one another. In that way I obtain the life of form, i.e., harmony.!.!.!." This is readily apparent in the AMAM bust, whose elegant and harmonious lines create an androgynous, serene face which is indebted to classical works but is strikingly modern.

The AMAM collection includes three other works by the artist: a drawing, a bronze sculpture, and a terra-cotta relief entitled Autumn, a small model for a relief that was part of a series of the four seasons.