Female Dancer

Description

“Is Nadelman serious?” asked a writer for the New York World in 1919. “Are these things art, or only insolence?” This indignation was sparked by Elie Nadelman’s choice to depict people in contemporary clothing rather than the classical drapery used by most sculptors at the time. Here, the woman’s short dress and high heels evoke modern city life during the Roaring Twenties with whimsy and charm.

Provenance

The artist; by descent in his family; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2016.

Female Dancer

Elie Nadelman

c. 1920

Accession Number

233228

Medium

Bronze

Dimensions

82.6 × 43.2 × 19.1 cm (32 9/16 × 17 1/16 × 7 9/16 in.)

Classification

sculpture

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Through prior gift of the Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection; purchased with funds provided by the Antiquarian Society; through prior gifts of Albert A. Robin, the Estate of Felicia Mayer Marsh, the Friends of American Art Collection; through prior purchase of Dr. A.J. Ochsner, Mrs. Margaret Cook, J.N. Eisendrath, Dr. W.H. Allport, Mrs. T.A. Shaw, Miss Bertha Randolph, Mrs. Pauline Dohn Rudolph, and the B.F. Ferguson Fund; The Kate S. Buckingham Fund; through prior purchase of the Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel M. Mencoff; through prior gifts of the George F. Harding Collection, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., and Mary and Leigh B. Block; through prior bequest of Dr. John J. Ireland; purchased with funds provided by Jamee J. and Marshall Field; through prior purchase from the Roger McCormick Fund; through prior gifts of Yvonne and Richard Angarola, Miss Gertrude Finch, Mrs. Ignatius Jelinski, the Charles H. & Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, the Walter H. Schulze Memorial Collection, and Donn Shapiro; Jane and Morris Weeden Endowment Fund; through prior gifts of the Society for Contemporary American Art and Mr. Sam A. Lewisohn; through prior purchase of the Charles S. Peterson Purchase Prize Fund; through prior gift of the Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Nickerson Collection; Vance American Arts Fund; through prior gifts of the estates of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch and Marie F. Lennards; through prior purchase of the Samuel P. Avery Fund; through prior gifts of Joseph R. Shapiro, Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Dewey Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection, Evelyn Padorr and Helene Segil in memory of Sarah and George Ehrlich, Honoré Palmer, Alexander Bing, Chicago Normal School Alumni, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Leonard Florsheim, Mrs. Abram Poole, and Mrs. Maurice L. Rothschild; through prior purchase of the A. A. McKay Fund

Background & Context

Background Story

"Female Dancer" is a c. 1920 bronze sculpture by Elie Nadelman that captures the Polish-American artist in his most elegant and stylized mode, the image showing a female dancer rendered with the same classical simplification and modernist abstraction that made Nadelman one of the most influential sculptors of the early twentieth century. The composition is a medium-sized bronze—82.6 × 43.2 × 19.1 centimeters—showing a woman in a dance pose with the elongated proportions and the simplified forms that suggest both the classical statuary of Greece and the modernist aesthetics of Art Deco. The bronze medium creates a surface of extraordinary warmth and luminosity, the patina suggesting both the ageless quality of classical sculpture and the contemporary elegance of modern design. The c. 1920 date places this work in the period of Nadelman's most intensive production of bronze sculptures, when he was producing the works that established his reputation as the leading sculptor of the modern classical style. Art historians have connected this sculpture to the broader tradition of the dancer in modern art, from the ballet drawings of Degas to the kinetic sculptures of the Constructivists, noting that Nadelman's treatment is more focused on the static beauty and the formal elegance than the movement or the mechanical energy of these other traditions.

Cultural Impact

This c. 1920 bronze made dancer elegance classically modernist through medium-scale elongated simplified Art Deco proportions and warm luminous patina, using static formal beauty to bridge Greek statuary with 1920s contemporary design beyond Degas kinetic movement tradition.

Why It Matters

It matters because Nadelman cast a dancer in bronze and made the metal feel like it was still holding a pose—proving that even stillness could dance if the proportions were elegant enough.

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