standing figure, Elie Nadelman

“Immigrants, we get the job done.” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton lyric has become one of the musical’s most popular lines. In the arts, as in countless other fields, the contributions of creative immigrants have been vital. They get the job done. Without them, American art, American culture, American life as we know it would be unimaginable.
In 1914, the Polish-born artist Elie Nadelman arrived in New York from Paris where he had spent a formative decade among the moderns. By the following year his work was featured in a solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering 291 gallery, a promising American debut. Nadelman grew fascinated with American folk art, which was then being newly appreciated by artists. Eventually, with an artist’s sensibility more than a scholar’s, he amassed an enormous collection of American and European works that he featured in his private Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts. The holdings were diverse, from ancient Tanagra figurines to carved tobacco shop signs and ship figureheads, from 19th-century chalkware decorations to toys and dolls by the hundreds. In many cases the objects paralleled the artist’s own evolving sculptural interests, in type or materials, chiefly figures made of carved wood, painted ceramic, or papier-mâché. Late in his life, his finances ruined by the Depression and his health failing, Nadelman turned to modeling or casting small plasters such as this standing figure, doll-like in scale and posed like circus performers, their features generalized nearly to androgyny. CCE