We are pleased to announce the opening of our next exhibition, Elie Nadelman / Eugène Druet: Sculpture Photographs & Drawings

Saturday, January 24 - February 28, 2026.
Open Saturdays 1- 7 pm and By Appointment. 

Press Release: Elie Nadelman / Eugène Druet: Sculpture Photographs & Drawings

Known primarily for his modernist sculptures of female heads and nudes, Nadelman was a Polish born artist who spent the last decades of his life in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. His works display his interest in classical sculpture and European Folk Art, combined with the Cubist influences he gained through his relationships with avant-garde artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whom he met while living in Paris from 1904 to 1914.  There he settled into the Polish art colony of Montparnasse.

Nadelman began to exhibit in group shows and met Leo Stein, Andre Gide, and Eugene Druet. In 1909, Druet gave Nadelman his first solo exhibition, featuring thirteen plaster sculptures and 100 of his “radically simplified drawings.” The show electrified the Parisian artistic community. Leo Stein, the brother of Gertrude Stein, bought two-thirds of the drawings. His drawings “so bordered on abstraction that he would later use them to support his claim that he, not Picasso, had invented cubism (Hankins).” Another supporter of his work was Alfred Stieglitz who featured Nadelman in his October 1910 issue of Camera Work. The following year, Nadelman had a one-person show at the William B. Paterson Gallery in London. This show included ten female heads chiseled in marble and was purchased in its entirety by Helena Rubenstein.

Nadelman is represented in the collections of most major museums in the United States, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Amon Carter Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Baltimore Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Wadsworth Atheneum, and many others.  New York’s Lincoln Center is home to 24-foot marble versions of Nadelman’s papier-mâché sculptures, Two Circus Women and Two Circus Women (Standing and Seated) from around 1930. 

THE SHOW IS IN TWO PARTS:

1. Group of eight vintage silver gelatin exhibition photographs of Elie Nadelman sculptures, approx. 1908 -09, each roughly 15 x 10 inches (38 x 25.5 cm), taken by the photographer and gallerist Eugène Druet on the occasion of Nadelman's first ever solo exhibition, Galerie Druet, Paris, 1909. Some of the original exhibited plaster works were destroyed and these remarkable photographs (other examples of which are in the Lincoln Kirstein Photograph Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library), constitute thus the only record of some of the works included in this historic exhibition. Each stamped "Phot. Procédé DRUET" in blue to the inner mount and with the drystamp "E. Druet / 20, Rue Royale / Paris" lower right. 

2. Collection of six pencil drawings, unsigned and undated, various sizes (largest 7 x 8.5 inches; 18 x 22 cm). In studio mounts inscribed on the verso "Nadelman" and "Frederick Maddox." Provenance: Lincoln Kirstein to Frederick Maddox. 


“In April 1909, with the opening of his one-person exhibition at Paris's Galerie E. Druet, Nadelman publicly showcased the full range of his sculpture. Druet's many years of work as Rodin's photographer no doubt sensitized him to the novelty of Nadelman's sculpture, and he had responded promptly and enthusiastically when Natanson proposed that he show the work. It may also have helped that the gallery had successfully debuted the paintings of Witold Wotkiewicz, Nadelman's earlier collaborator, two years before. Druet was one of the most important commercial agents for modernist art in Paris; in 1913 he would lend more pieces to America's Armory Show than any other single contributor. Inclusion in his roster thus carried an imprimatur that guaranteed attention. Nevertheless, the thirteen plaster models and one hundred drawings that Nadelman exhibited that April took even Paris by surprise. His radical simplification of form and stylized distortion of shape became a pulse point of debate about the future of sculpture, reportedly disturbing even Picasso and stimulating Amedeo Modigliani to turn temporarily to sculpture." (Barbara Haskell, "Elie Nadelman: Sculptor of Modern Life"[2003], p. 31)

Of particular interest in our grouping is the photograph of Nadelman's 1908 plaster head which, according to Lincoln Kirstein, "Picasso saw in Nadelman's studio" and "did not fully understand, but from which, as so often happened in his voracious career, he

appropriated stylistic mannerisms. head was a fragmentation of curves with their logical echoes; he was not decomposing form as much as he was drily describing its anatomy. The head by Picasso , dated 1909, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, is close to Nadelman's, now lost, which in plaster was exposed at the Galerie Druet in April 1909. Comparison of the two illuminates the capital differences between Nadelman's personal research and Analytical Cubism of 1909. Nadelman's head, based on knowledge from his mirror, is a bold demonstration of emphatic planes and curved-edged forms. The volumes repeat the normal anatomy of the skull; the distortion is neither accidental nor Expressionist, but accentuates the underlying geometry. (Kirstein, "The Sculptures of Elie Nadelman" [1948], p. 11-12)

Eugène Druet, an amateur photographer, was the owner of the Yacht Club Café in Paris, which had Auguste Rodin as one of its frequent guests. From 1896 to 1903, Eugene Druet worked as a photographer at Rodin’s studio, carefully recording the sculptures of the famous French artist. He often captured each sculpture from different angles in order to properly convey the intrinsic elements of the work. This successful collaboration between Druet and Rodin led to a very fruitful business: Rodin used to exhibit Druet’s photos together with his sculptures and sign them with his own name next to Druets. In 1903, Druet took Rodin’s advice and opened a gallery in Paris, which was mentioned in Gertrude Stein’s book Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and where up to 1,300 artists have been exhibited over the years.

These lively and idiosyncratic drawings are undated but appear to be very late works by the artist. The free, even somewhat wild hand, as well as the exposed shoulders of some of the female figures suggest a date of the mid-late 1930s. In any event, Nadelman's longstanding interest in costume, fabric drapery, fashion elements like feathers or flowers, as well as the energy of performance or theatricality, is clearly visible. Works of his like Concert Singer (1918-19) referencing Leonetto Capiello's Yvette Guilbert (1899) or his Dancer (1920-22), referencing Georges Seurat's Le chacut (1890), testify to such lifelong preoccupations even while being in very different styles. 

Provenance: Collection of Lincoln Kirstein, thence to the architect Frederick Maddox (1939 - 2013). Early on encouraged by Philip Johnson, it was he who introduced Maddox to Lincoln Kirstein [American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, and cultural figure in New York City who, with George Balanchine, founded the New York City Ballet in 1948] and his wife Fidelma, with whom he then had a long and enduring friendship, inheriting their home in Weston upon their deaths. Maddox established his architectural firm in 1975, and for 38 years provided architectural and engineering services in the Manhattan and Long Island areas.

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