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.