Boston Sunday Journal_August 17, 1902

Newspaper article from the Boston Sunday Journal dated August 17, 1902. "American Colored Girl Startles Paris By Her Art. Paris, Aug. 16 - Americans in Paris are much interested in the work of Meta Warrick, a colored American girl, and a sculptor. She had hardly enough money to travel and keep herself in a half-starved way, for a year, then her mother managed to keep her antoher year. What she has accomplished is marvelous: marvelous because she found a way to accomplish it, and marvelous her art will be. When she went to Rodin with a piece of her work, he said 'But madamoiselle, you are a sculptor, your work is powerful. Miss Warrick will prove, if she works long enough, to have not only talent, but genious. There is already signs of it in the work she exhibited at Bings. To critics and amateurs they were a revelation. 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 Theif on the Cross is almost freightful to behold. It is the realistic face of the theif in the throes of death, with protruding lips, that becomes 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 theif revealed them ot her. In her studio she has a small plaster relief which was inspired by these lines: Be still, sad heart, and cease repining; Behind the clouds the sun is shining The releif 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. 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 neared Edgar Allan Poe's weird tales by heart. All this she materializes in plaster and some of her works 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: "I might stay 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."

Eph1.41.28

Boston Sunday Journal dated August 17, 1902

1902