Description:
Standing nude African-American female figure

Label Text:
Emilie Stamm made this work while studying at the Grand Central School of Art in New York, where she won a gold medal for sculpture in 1937. In a formal announcement reported in The Art News: An International Pictorial Newspaper on June 21, 1924, the school’s director Edmund Greacen declared the mission of the school as conducting education “along American lines,” and offering “an opportunity for the development of individual expression as opposed to the existent ‘follow-the-master’ fallacy.” Stamm’s piece depicts the model in a naturalist manner. Compared to Chana Orloff’s Maria Lani or Jacob Epstein’s Chaim Weizmann, it refuses the abstract stylization of the human figure associated with European sculpture of the time. In its emphasis on the unidealized body, this piece evokes the work of earlier sculptors in this exhibition, in particular Alfred Gilbert’s truthful depiction of the adolescent body in An Offering to Hymen.

-Gülru Çakmak, Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art, University of Massachussetts Amherst
A Very Long Engagement: Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and Its Afterlives (July 29, 2017 - May 27, 2018)

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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1989.3.1

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