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Newsletter - Fall 1999
Acquisitions

Elie Nadelman's Classical Head

Elie Nadelman's exhibition at the Galerie Druet, in April 1909, attracted the attention of a host of avant garde artists, including Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, Archipenko, and Lipchitz. Henri Matisse was sufficiently disconcerted by the distraction to post a sign on the wall of his studio: "Defense de parler de nadelman ici" ("No talking about Nadelman allowed here").

What so astonished the elite of Paris was seeing the way Nadelman had reduced form to its geometric essentials, setting an example for the principles of decomposition and plastic construction that would soon be elaborated by the cubists. His knowing references to the history of art were matched by his brilliant technique, as one contemporary historian recalled: "An artist as able as he was intelligent, he had assimilated the Hellenistic formulae of the Second Century [B.C.E.] in his bronzes, chiseled with the virtuosity of the Renaissance Florentines, and in his marbles polished as in antiquity, he united a rational science of proportion with a refined elegance of form."

In spite of the variety of styles represented in the 1909 exhibition, from realistic torsos with Rodinesque modeling to fragmented plaster busts to cool classicizing nudes and heads, the young sculptor was single-minded in his artistic goal. A year later, Nadelman wrote an important statement about his art which was printed in Camera Work (Alfred Stieglitz's illustrated quarterly magazine devoted to photography and avant garde art). The following two key paragraphs are often quoted:

But what is this true form of art? It is com-posed of geometrical elements.

Here is how I realize it. I employ no other line than the curve, which possesses freshness and force. I com-pose these curves so as the bring them in accord or in opposition with one another. In that way I obtain the life of form, i.e., harmony. In that way I intend that the lie of the work should come from within itself. The subject of any work is for me nothing but a pretext for creating significant forms, relations of forms which create a new life that has nothing to do with life in nature.

At the time Nadelman wrote this statement, he was working on a series of classical female heads. In April 1911 he had another important show in London, at Patterson's Gallery, where he exhibited ten of these heads, including the one that was recently acquired by Mount Holyoke. This show again caused a sensation and was bought in its entirety by Helena Rubenstein (Princess Gourielli-Tchkonia).

Classical Head represents a significant aspect of Nadelman's oeuvre - in it he achieved a dynamic interplay between the antique on one hand and the formal and spatial preoccupations of the first decade of the 20th century on the other. The powerful monumentality of the head and its classical features reflect eloquently Nadelman's deep knowledge of Greek and Roman sculpture. The "distinctly Roman flavor" of the face, which has been noted by scholar's of Nadelman's work, constitutes a useful point of comparison with Mount Holyoke's Roman portrait head of Faustina. The distinctive coiffure, which features a roll of hair articulated by softly modeled waves that radiate around the forehead, evokes classical prototypes; at the same time the clear emphasis on the relationship of geometrical elements is emphatically modern.