Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Head Turned Right, Looking Down

Preview image of work. black ink on off-white wove paper mounted on board, Head Turned Right, Looking Down 9049

1979.44

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Head Turned Right, Looking Down

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Artist

Elie Nadelman (Warsaw, Poland, 2/20/1882 - 12/28/1946, Riverdale, New York)

Title

Head Turned Right, Looking Down

Creation Date

ca. 1904-1907

Century

early 20th century

Dimensions

12 1/4 in. x 8 1/8 in. (31.12 cm x 20.64 cm)

Object Type

drawing

Creation Place

North America, United States

Medium and Support

black ink on off-white wove paper mounted on board

Credit Line

Museum Purchase, George Otis Hamlin Fund

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

1979.44

The sculptor Elie Nadelman published this early drawing in 1914 but did not include it in later surveys of his work. Lincoln Kirstein, who dedicated a volume to the artist’s drawings in 1949 and chose to reproduce this head, wondered whether at a later time “the expression of the face might have seemed too fortuitously tragic or full of accidental sentiment.” Born in Russian Poland, Nadelman encountered ancient sculpture and contemporary art first in Munich and, from 1904, in Paris, where this drawing originated. (He moved to New York in 1914.) Nadelman explained in 1910, in a statement for Alfred Stieglitz’s journal “Camera Work,” “I employ no other line than the curve, which possesses freshness and force. I compose the curves so as to bring them in accord in opposition to each other. In that way, I obtain the life of form, i.e., harmony.”