Elie Nadelman

Elie Nadelman made sculpture that looks like folk carving and is not, lost his fortune in the crash, and was rediscovered largely because Lincoln Kirstein would not let him be forgotten. He was born in Warsaw, worked in Munich and then Paris from 1904, and arrived at a manner of curved, simplified, almost weightless figures that he claimed - plausibly, and to Picasso's irritation - anticipated cubism. Helena Rubinstein bought his entire London show in 1911 and brought him to New York in 1914. There he became fashionable, made society portraits and the plaster figures in bowler hats and evening dress that are his best-known work: a hostess, an orchestra conductor, a man in the open air, all poised somewhere between elegance and satire. He married a wealthy widow, and together they assembled one of the first serious collections of American folk art and opened a museum for it in the Bronx. The crash of 1929 took the money; the collection was sold, the museum closed, and he withdrew almost entirely, working alone on small painted plaster figures that nobody saw until after he died. Kirstein wrote the monograph and organised the 1948 memorial exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The two large marble figures in the New York State Theater are his, enlarged posthumously. His folk art collection was dispersed at auction and pieces of it are now in the Metropolitan and at Colonial Williamsburg. He worked in a plaster he tinted himself to resemble old painted wood. Kirstein s monograph appeared in 1948, two years after his death, and is still the standard account.

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