Elie Nadelman as Caricaturist
by Cynthia Nadelman
The first work known to have been at least partly drawn by Elie Nadelman (1882 - 1946) was exhibited in a group show called “Humor in Art,” held at Warsaw’s Salon Krywult in 1902. Nadelman’s collaborator was the painter Witold Wojtkiewicz (1879 -1909). The 1900 student drawing they exhibited - reproduced at the time in Warsaw’s Illustrated Weekly - was titled The March of Modernism, and it depicted a motley crew of artists marching across a landscape, carrying tools of their trade such as palettes and paintbrushes. That the work had elements of caricature, that it was a drawing, and that it took modernism as its theme makes it a good place to begin looking at Nadelman’s relation to plastic and graphic forms of humor and satire. The connection to Wojtkiewicz is meaningful: he was a colorful Symbolist painter (in that era, read modernist) whose short-lived career was focused on a parade of strange sorts of men-children, marionettes, toys, and clowns. The circus and entertainment worlds would also come to figure in Nadelman’s work, and the sometimes distorted plaster figures of doll-like adult babies and sophisticated infants of his last years in some ways represent a return to the period and place in which he started. |
