DGHM 110: Introduction to Digital Humanities

The Daily Eagle_August 10 1902

Newspaper article from The __ Daily Eagle of New York dated Sunday August 10, 1902. Contains a long article about Meta as well as a drawing of her, full bodied, leaning back on a couch wearing a stripped dress and holding a hat. The article is as follows: "Miss Meta Warrick/ An American Colored Woman Who Gives Promise as a Sculptor./ Those of you who are interested in American art, must remember the name of Meta Warrick. Meta Warrick is a colored American girl, and a sculptor. She came here two years ago. She had hardly enough money to travel and keep herself in half-starved way, for a year, then her mother managed to keep her another year. What she has accomplished is marvelous; marvelous because she found a way to accomplish it, and marvelous her art will be. I have very little faith in a woman sculptor. They will succeed in making a bust of a pretty woman or a statuette, which, even in marble, will look as soft as putty. But Miss Warrick cannot be classed in that category of woman sculptors. When she went to Rodin with a piece of her work, he said: 'But, mademoiselle, you are a sculptor. Your work is powerful.' I think Miss Warrick, will prove, if she works long enough, to have not only talent, but genius. There is already the sign of it in the works she exhibited at Bings. To critics and amateurs they were a revolution. Now, people who are fond of sweet little sculptured angels, academical art in general, will at once class Miss Warrick's work as vulgar, gross, painful and pay no more attention to it. Every piece of her sculpture, in fact, tells a tale of woe of sorrow, of fear, or of intense love or joy. For instance, her almost life-sized thief on the cross is almost frightful to behold. It is the realistic face of the thief in the throes of death, with protruding lips, that become blanched with blasphemies as well as death. Every line of the body shows anatomical study and that the girl did not hesitate to produce the lines as her vision of the thief revealed them to her. In her studio she has a small plaster relief which was inspired by the lines: be still, sad heart, and cease repining; Behind the clouds the sun is shining' The relief is a cloud peopled with the suffering, the sorrowful and the desparing, then around the edge, those who can see the light behind the cloud take courage, and the smile of hope on their faces is intense. Think of the powerful imagination of that woman. Her grandfather, while she sat on his lap, as a little child, fed her mind with ghost stories; she saw much suffering around her: she afterward learned Edgar Alan Poe's weird tales by hear. All this she materailzed in plaster and some of her works, I must repeat, are marvelous. She herself is not at all morbid in disposition. She talks well, has a certain education. She is so much wrapped in her work that she said to me, 'I might stay well with my mother in Philadelphia and be well clothed, have a good table, and a better roof than the rickety one of a studio over my head, but no privation can keep me from my work'"

Eph1.41.32

The Daily Eagle of New York, Sunday August 10, 1902

1902