Nadelman, Elie

Nadelman, Elie (b Warsaw, 20 Feb. 1882; d New York, 28 Dec. 1946).
Polish-born sculptor who became an American citizen in 1927. After brief studies in his native Warsaw and in Munich, he settled in Paris in 1903 or 1904 and lived there until 1914. With the outbreak of the First World War, Nadelman moved to London and then New York. He had a successful one-man show at Stieglitz's gallery in 1915 and was befriended by Paul Manship and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney among others. His patrons included Helena Rubinstein (he had known her in Paris), who commissioned him to make sleek marble heads for her beauty salons. He married a wealthy widow in 1919 and his work has a witty sophistication appropriate to the high-society world he moved in, as with the delightful bowler-hatted bronze Man in the Open Air (1915, MoMA, New York). With his humour went a bold simplification and distortion of forms that places him alongside Lachaise as one of the pioneers of modern sculpture in America. The Depression had a disastrous effect on his market and his career virtually ended when much of his work was accidentally destroyed in 1935.