Nadelman at the Whitney. (Current and Coming).

The elegant and lyrical sculpture Tango, illustrated at right, is an icon of early twentieth-century American art. Its creator, the Polish-born Elie Nadelman, enjoyed enormous critical acclaim and reaped substantial financial rewards from the time he first exhibited his work in Paris in 1909 until the decade preceding his death in 1946. In 1911 he displayed ten marble female heads in a London gallery all of which were immediately snapped up by Helena Rubinstein, one of the most important avant-garde collectors of this period, who had made her fortune in the cosmetics industry. She subsequently commissioned Nadelman to create a sculptural relief for her new beauty salon in New York City and he set sail for the United States in 1914. Rubinstein was initially drawn to Nadelman's sculpture because these reductive marbles, bearing titles such as Classical Head, Ideal Head of a Woman, and Classical Figure, were inspired by antique statuary. From this starting point Nadelman investigated new mediums and responded to events m the ever-changing art world around him. The full breadth of his career is the subject of a retrospective opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City on April 3. Entitled Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modem Life, the show includes more than two hundred works in bronze, marble, painted wood, ceramic, and plaster as well as works on paper and photographs, all of which remain on view through July 20.

In the World War I era, Nadelman was experimenting with plaster to fashion figures that were reduced to simple curvaceous forms. He then painted contemporary clothing on them, which, while not revolutionary was innovative, because it merged conventions of the classical past with contemporary ideas in an utterly playful way In 1919 he married Viola Spiess Flannery a wealthy widow with two grown children. The sculptor's own healthy financial situation was now greatly amplified, and the couple lived in very grand style, spending money freely to assemble a large and pioneering collection of European and American folk art. During this period Nadelman was creating painted bronze and wooden figures of dancers, circus performers, conductors, and the like, all frozen in expressive attenuated positions. In the second ...