Easy to Love

By ROBERT HUGHES

New York museums are now as bent on resurrecting lost reputations as, a decade ago, they were on promoting new ones. A revisionist ecstasy is in the air, and one of the more important artists to benefit from it (if posthumously) is Sculptor Elie Nadelman. A definitive retrospective of some 150 sculptures and drawings opened last week at the Whitney Museum, organized by Art Historian John Baur, director of the Whitney until his retirement last year.

When Nadelman died in New York in 1946, his name vanished as suddenly as a stone into a well; and yet, for the first 50 years of his life, he had been the epitome of worldly--and, to an extent, aesthetic--success. Born in 1882 into a cultivated family of Warsaw Jews, Nadelman settled in Paris and moved with ease and originality through the circle that included Picasso, Apollinaire and the Steins; his early work from 1906 to 1907 is known to have influenced Picasso's own sculpture, and Nadelman's place among the progenitors of Cubism is assured. Exhibition after exhibition of his work sold out, and he moved to New York on the eve of World War I. In the '20s Nadelman and Marcel Duchamp were the male sex symbols of transatlantic culture.

Elegant and worldly, with the profile of a melancholy hawk, Nadelman was adored by rich women and duly married a millionairess; he acquired a Manhattan house and a splendid estate on the Hudson. In five years (between 1923 and 1928) the Nadelmans spent more than half a million dollars buying American folk art and were the first systematic collectors to do so.

Elegance v. Disclosure. But then the family fortune was wiped out in the Crash. The town house went and then the unparalleled private museum of Americana. "The dismantling of the museum," Nadelman wrote to a friend in 1937, with his usual reticent dignity, "did also dismantle something in me." The market for his own sculpture slowly caved in. By 1946 the very word elegance--the passion of Nadelman's life and the quality of his sculptures--had become suspect. "Elegance" had nothing to do with social utility, or Freudian disclosures, those ruling interests of a postwar American avantgarde. So the oubliette yawned and swallowed him.

Elie Nadelman was the Cole Porter of modern sculpture, a stylist to the very root. His art possessed the mellifluous, urbane seriousness that only wit confers and that was rare in American culture, whose usual tone (during Nadelman's life) was more dogged and puritanical.

He was one of the very few artists who experienced no difficulty with language while working here. He did not feel provincial, either in time or in space. His wide-ranging traffic with other styles, from "naive" folk art to Periclean and Hellenistic sculpture, was conducted on a level of affable ease. At times too affable, perhaps: witness the series of classical heads he carved in marble from about 1908 onward. They are among the most intelligent pastiches of the antique made in the 20th century. Yet despite the tact with which Nadelman unfolded the contours of these portrait heads, they look molded rather than carved.

The marble has the soft, veiled surface of wax. The play between smooth volume and wiry, chiseled line that gave such life to Nadelman's Greek models is not there.

Tubes and Bowlers. Does it matter that Nadelman was not Praxiteles?

Nobody complains that Cole Porter was not Stravinsky. A modern problem in judging Nadelman's work, with its high stylishness and often lapsed vitality, is that we expect "serious" sculpture to look tough and problematic. Nadelman was so expert at masking problems that he seems to have had none. He wanted to sculpt modern life, but in terms of classical ideality; and in this task he was surprisingly successful.

Since Cezanne, one of the stumbling blocks of figurative art had been mod ern dress. Cloaks and perukes are all very well, but what artist in this century has made anything of the dull flaps and tubes that constitute a business suit?

Only Magritte and Leger -- and in his different way, Nadelman. He could take a bowler hat and, perching it on the head of Mercury, give it a classical density as form. The headgear worn by his Man in a Top Hat (1927) has the formal and slightly absurd dignity of an old liner's funnel, played off against the scrolly beard and bronze blade of a nose.

In a work like Tango (circa 1919), the dress suit and the white vest--rendered with the utmost economy as a patch of gesso on the smooth cherry-wood -- take on a sleek, concise elegance far removed from the naive woodcarvings of country America that provoked Nadelman's hand. He was an exquisite connoisseur of gesture, and his finest works--particularly the suite of woodcarvings to which Tango belongs--stem from his delight in performance: in music halls or burlesques, at plays, piano recitals or even tea dances.

But as Nadelman's biographer, Lincoln Kirstein, observed, he "refined all coarseness into a subtle fixity of ostentation." He could give the postures of invitation and entertainment a detached grace almost worthy of an archaic kouros. The Whitney show reminds us how good minor art can be.

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