North American_1902

Long newspaper article with a separate headder "Philadelphia Woman is a Successful Playwright and Another a Maker of Weird Statuary" with pencil notation "The North American Sunday". The article about Meta is longwise and contains two pixel images of 'Secret Suffering (Sorrow) and "The Wretched". The article has another headder "Philadelphia Mulato Girl's Statuary Weird as Rodin's" The article is as follows: "There are women who model in clay and women who carve in marble. They sometimes produce things of beauty having lines of charm and delicacy, but in these examples of feminine art one misses that touch of power which characterizes the work of men. Let the things they do be cast in the most lasting bronze, they will yet look as soft as wax. One woman there is, indeed, who may claim exception from this mild indictment. She is Meta Vaux Warrick, sculptor - one hesitates to use the term sculptress. Climb four flights of stairs in the quaint old-fashioned building, 1432 South Penn Square, rap on the door that bears her card, and it will be opened by a young mulatto woman of remarkably prepossessing appearance. She is the sculptor whose masterly epression of strange and original thought led Rodin - the celebrated, uniquel Rodin - to give her his special attention and a great deal of his valuable time during the three years of study she spent in Paris. Meta Warrick was born 23 years ago in South Twelfth street, Philadelphia, of hardworking, ambitious parents. Her mother is a hairdresser, her father was a barber. She does not know of anyone related to her who has taste or talent for art. When she went to the public schools, modeling clay was put into her hands and she found her element. Those people who in the educational movement stand up for the aesthetic principle, hoping to discover artistic talent in teh children of the people, must congratulate themseles on this young woman. It was worth while putting modeling tools into many inept fingers to discover a gift like hers. She won a scholarship in the School of Industrial Art and there carried off first prize for modeling. She is to-day on its board of control. Urgued by her instructors and aided by her self-sacrificing mother, she sailed for Paris to study the art to which she was born. There she drew under Collin, modeled the antique under Carles and had as instructors Ingalbert and Rollard. She studied the art galleries and throught long and hard, finding herself a stranger in a strange land in more ways than one. After six months of this she abandoned the paths of conventional study, took a studio and worked by herself, depending on an artist friend for criticism. Thus she labored, alone but not lonesome, so eager and earnest that she frequently forgot to eat the food she had purchased with her scanty allowance. Despair came to her after - the black despair of the artist possessed by talent too great to be set aside or destroyed. When she was scarcely nineteen she took to Rodin a small clay which caused him, who had seen and known so much, to gasp at its power and daring. It was the study of a man eating his heart. In some strange, obscure way which one shrinks at analyzing, she has drawn the heart from the breast of an agonized man and put it into his convulsed hands where he gnaws it. It symbolizes unceasing sorrow profoundly secret and silent. Under the great master she produced rapidly. After her study with Rodin, M. Bing, of the celebrated galleries of L'Art Nouveau, threw open his salon for an exhibition of her works, of which he sold a number. The well-known art critic, Edouard Gerard, wrote a glowing preface to the catalogue and stirred Paris with interest. M. Bing had "The Wretched" cast in bronze, and when the critics saw it they called it genius. It is the expression of wretchedness in all its phases: in resignation, in despair, in torpor, in rebellion, and in defiance. The original conception, the movement of palpitating life, the mature man. As it is the work of a young girl one ponders deeply for an explaination. The answer is found, perhaps, in the artist's mixed race. The white blood in Miss Warrick's veins cannot say "It is mine," for African speaks here. In the "Man Gnawing his Heart" her Ethiopian descent expressess itself, and in all her other works there is the voice of that people. In her graceful "Spirit Dancing" with its roughly modeled face, there is a visible and mad abandon of the Voodoo. "The Impenitent Thief," starting in its unsparing truth, shows the crucified man cursing God as he dies in the determined defiance of bondage. The most nearly feminine thing that this young woman has yet done is a little fancy six inch high called "Dispair." The face is hidden, but the writhing limbs closely interlaced tell its thought. Turn it any way you choose, glance at but a part of it, and still you perceive clearly that it is the despairing remorse of a woman's heart. In all her work there is the sadness of serpent-infested swamps, the mysteris of miasmatic forests, the sombre glow of evening skies relfected in lonely payous. Yet Miss Warrick has not a morbid personality. Canaries sing in her little studio and she has a feminine fondness for pretty clothes. The fingers that modeled the "Impenitent Thief" can trim a hat with Parisian 'smartness.'

Eph1.41.47

The North American Sunday

c.1902