Nadelman

Prudent critics have arraigned the artists and musicians of this latter day, not without some show of justice, for being jongleur who, tongue in cheek, execute their insolent pastiches, sing their thin songs with nothing in their heads but a bitter and windy laughter. These critics have listened to the compositions of Composers Ravel and Satie, whose music laughs at music, have seen the works of Sculptor Nadelman, whose sculpture laughs at sculpture, until the accumulation of all this malign mirth has inspired them to plead: "If we must laugh, let us laugh honestly. This mockery is unworthy of the staunch hearts. Where is the belly-shaking-chuckle of Aristophanes? Where in Music, in Sculpture, is the Classic Spirit?"

For the past fortnight, Sculptor Nadelman has held an exhibition at the Scott and Fowles Gallery, Manhattan. The critics who visited it were prepared for the famed, familiar ribaldries of this satirist in clay--his grotesquely vivacious figures fully clothed, often painted as well, postured in the more ridiculous attitudes pf contemporary life. These, to be sure, were there, but the prudent, hurrying over them as if they had been jokes in Holy Writ, discovered, in addition, many heads of classic purity, some exquisite busts of children, a big torso in the antique manner. Upon these things lay the lustre of an immemorial beauty that was, assuredly, Classicism. And because he had caught some glimpse of that chaste, magnificent and lonely shape whose massive sandal was set, long ago, upon the hills of Greece, but who has since confined her excursions to the rhetoric of tuppenny writers, the prudent thought more gently of Sculptor Nadelman, of this age of drollery, as they left the gallery of Messrs. Scott and Fowles.