The recent International Exhibition of Art in New York was, from
one angle, at least, a protest against certain set standards of
art generally accepted today as inevitably right because they have
“always been.” Some of the by-products of that stimulating
movement toward freedom have been variously characterized as
“courageous” “self-expressive” and “insolent.” Certainly much of
it was a serious effort toward individual expression—a revolt
against academic rules—partaking in some instances of a defiance
which was a law unto itself, a frank disregard of what impression
the mystified public carried away.
Such, however, was not the attitude or feeling of at least one
exhibitor whose work aroused much interest and comment, and who
was one of the first artists of standing to reflect in her work
the spirit of awakened social consciousness so apparent today.
Abastenia St. Leger Eberle showed two groups, the more striking of
which was The White Slave, reproduced on the cover of this issue
of THE SURVEY. They are the work of a sculptor who has strongly
defined views as to the part the artist should play in the common
life.
“The artist should be _the_ ‘socialist,’” says Miss Eberle. “He
has no right to work as an individualist without responsibility to
others. He is the specialized eye of society, just as the artisan
is the hand, and the thinker the brain. More than almost any other
one sort of work is art dependent on society for inspiration,
material, life itself; and in that same measure does it owe
society a debt. The artist must see for the people—reveal them to
themselves and to each other.”
This is a far cry from “art for art’s sake.” That it is the
viewpoint of an artist of high standing is attested by the early
and generous recognition accorded Miss Eberle’s work from
conservative and radical alike.
Most of her training was received from George Gray Barnard, with
whom she studied for three years. In 1904, she was awarded a
bronze medal at the St. Louis Exposition; the Girl on Roller Skate
was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 1907; the Windy
Doorstep was awarded the Helen Foster Barnett prize at the exhibit
of the New York Academy in 1910; her figure of the veiled Salome
was bought by an Italian Art Society in Venice; and she is one of
the ten women who belong to the National Sculpture Society.
Miss Eberle is best known, perhaps, for her dancing figures, and
her depiction of the everyday picturesque life on the lower East
Side in New York, where she lived for years. Her people live for
us, and speak for themselves,—from the placid, necessitous hunt of
the Rag Picker to the tremulous wistfulness of the loving Little
Mother; from the tender feeling of The Bath Hour to the intense,
joyous absorption of the Rag-time dancer and the exultant balance
of that flying little figure on the Roller Skate—and please notice
that, characteristically, there is only one—borrowed, no doubt for
a precious three-minute “coast.”
[Illustration:
THE WINDY DOORSTEP
]
The qualities which art critics first look for—the sure touch and
line of her modelling, the line composition and massing—are
especially apparent in The Windy Doorstep, in which Miss Eberle
touches the high-water mark of her more objective figures.
Here it will be more interesting to note the steps by which social
values have crept into her work.
First of all, her deep and instinctive love for children, and her
appreciation of human values, led her to select types that until
recently have been almost entirely disregarded.
To this keen observer and lover of human nature, the many years of
contact with this vivid, arduous East Side life—reinforced and
interpreted by constant reading and thinking—brought an
ever-increasing sense of social interrelation and interdependence.
Jane Addams’ books have, more than anything else, she says, helped
to clarify and mould her vision of the constructive part the
sculptor may play in social readjustment.
This growth of social consciousness has been reflected in her
work.
[Illustration:
THE LITTLE MOTHER
]
Just as The Windy Doorstep, with its fine feeling for the dignity
of everyday homely tasks, outranks the Roller Skater which, she
says, was done in a purely objective spirit, so the White Slave
records a forward step which is a difference of kind even more
than degree.
[Illustration:
_THE RAG PICKER_
]
Here she has turned from her more objective work to the graphic
interpretation of a social menace; and it is here, perhaps, that
she finds herself with surest touch. Her conception of white
slavery is as searching in its indictment, as ruthless, cruel and
scourging as the fact itself. One visitor who saw those haunting
figures at the International Exhibition said afterward:
“I was passing through that room of the exhibit when suddenly I
faced it—I could not go on. I had vaguely realized that this
horrible thing was in the world, but it had never touched _me_. I
sat there for perhaps an hour, thinking—and thinking—”
This woman was one who has led what is called a “sheltered”
existence, whose instinct would be to turn from any discussion or
writing on this subject. It is this thought-compelling quality in
such work which links it as a social force with, say, the
dispassionate but terrible report of the Chicago Vice Commission,
or with Elizabeth Robins’ My Little Sister.
It is interesting to know that Miss Eberle worked out the
composition for the White Slave four years ago; but the actual
work of modelling was done in the four weeks’ interval between the
time she was invited to send some of her work to last winter’s
International Art Exhibition and its opening. Until then, she had
felt that the time had perhaps not come when such a group would be
received except as an unwelcome effort toward sensationalism. It
is the first of several such interpretative subjects which she has
in mind, and which, if worked out in an equally sincere spirit,
should be big in social significance.
But after all is said, Miss Eberle consistently holds with the
many who believe that the first function of art is not didactic.
Much of her work besides that shown here is conceived in a spirit
of sheer joy in beauty of form and line, and one may go far to
find a more exquisitely modelled figure than that of the utterly
submissive, despairful child-victim of the white slaver. To use
her own words:
“It is the beauty that is in the world _today_ that appeals to
me—not what may have existed centuries ago in Greece. Though I
love that, too, I will not shut my eyes to the present and
continue to echo the past. No matter how ugly the present might
be, I would rather live in it. After all, ugliness, as well as
beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,—and the present _isn’t_
ugly at all, but full of a wonderful interest, as a few of us
are beginning to find out. We are trying to find new bottles for
new wine—Greek vases are about worn out.”
[Illustration:
_THE BATH HOUR_
]
And so we may, as she asks, leave her work to make its own
eloquent plea for what Emerson calls “the eternal picture that
nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars
and fine ladies, ... capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.”
“MY LITTLE SISTER”