NEW BOTTLES FOR NEW WINE
THE WORK OF ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE
CHRISTINA MERRIMAN
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”