Brooklyn Eagle_1905

Newspaper article in ten section across three pages of the scrapbook. Above the article written in pencil is "Eagle - Brooklyn N.F. Feb. 12 - 1905". Headline is "Themes in Sculpture Earn Fame in France and America for a Colored Girl". Article follows in three columns. Below the columns on the second page is a large image of "Silenus." with two small cropped newspaper articles on the lower corners. The left states "...only at the Ecole des Beaux Arts under M. Injalbert. Parisians eagerly sought the strange and...". The clipping on the right states "...weird productions of the colored girl. With success won and money coming in freely, Miss Warwick decided to return to her native..." On the third page is a large photograph of "Eating His Heart Out" and a photograph of Meta working on a bust with the caption "Meta Vaux Warwick, Chief Exponent of Horrors in Sculpture." The third small clipping states "...land and city and test the taste of her compatriots for the virile creations of her strange imagination. She has so far succeeded in creating a decided sensation." Main body of article is as follows: "In this era of originality what can be said of the sculpturess who breaks away from tradition and, instead of the beautiful, depicts only the horrors of life? Her work must of necessity attract attention. When the master of Paris approved of the departure it must be admired that a new cult is about to be born. Miss Meta Vaux Warwick, whose exhibition at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia is attracting crowds on that institution, has dared to model a figure that shall depict the man who is popularly said to be "eating his heart out." This weird conception so attracted the attention of Rodin in Paris that he declared the sculptress was a new power in the art world. The points that impressed the master in this pathetic figure of suffering were, first of all, the outline, which viewed from any point is forceful; the sweep of the back that interprets through the face and hands, and its intense humanity. To the laymen the figure, like vice, first repels then attracts. It is grewsome, but compelling; shocking, but holding the attention with magnetic force. Another remarkable figure in the exhibition represents Oedipus, who, according to the Greek legend tore out his eyes after discovering that he had wedded his own mother. This story Miss Warwick has portrayed in a figure of such appalling horror that the spectator stands spell bound. The despair of the sightless cauntenance that is turned upward no words can describe. And yet there is a beauty all its own in the terrible trouble of the face and figure. (From here to end crossed out in pencil) When Rodin saw this figure he looked at is first in amazement and line, after studying it a while said to Miss Warwick, 'My Child, you are a sculptor." "Death in a Wind Storm" is the title Miss Warwick had given to the figure of a skeleton swathed in wraps blown by the wind. He is moving forward with a set purpose. Thrown out in the cold and the wet and the wind he grins to himself for he knowns that no storm can beat him down and no cold rain chill his fleshless bones. "Primative woman" is another strange conception. The catlike crouching figure is repulsive in its animal like apsect, beautiful in the strong impression of materialism that the creation gives when the child by the side of the creeping figure is viewed with it. "Silenus" is another example of Miss Warwick's fearlessness in defying convention. The old god is represented by his true colors as the son of 'Pan'. Drunk himself, he is carried by a faun and satyr shuffling, staggering and in attitudes calculated to shock a fastidious public. Falstaff is an entirely new figure to Shakespearean scholars. He is not so rotund as the popular conception and is depicted laughing in drunken glee and carrying one of his boots in his hand. The expression of the face is a clever portrayal of the mood of the man. This Falstaff is pretty sure to become a standard conception of the jovial man of wine and words. But the conceptions are not all of this nightmare variety. Miss Warwick has done a few things that can be viewed without shuddering. One of the best of these is "An Old Peasant Woman', in which Miss Warwick has caught what Millet, above all painters, has caught in "The Sower." There is, too, the bend of toil, the clumsy trudge of the wayfarer, the earth-grimed mark of years. As a whole, the exhibition impels one to marvel shudderingly at the depth of thought of this young girl. A group called 'The Wretched' represents those afflicted by incapability, physical malady and melancholy. Asked why the subjects of the world's most pathetic ills should have been selected by her for portrayal, Miss Warwick replied: "It is only those who have been through great suffering themselves who can see a positive beauty in suffering." Which epigrammatical sentiment may perhaps become the text of the sermon of future volaries of this new cult. It will be still more astonishing to those who watch the rise of a new figure in the art world to learn that this girl who thus depicts suffering and wretched in gems of the sculptor's art is a colored girl, with a touch of Indian blood in her veins. Her mother is a Philadelphian, her father a Virginian. She is 27 years of age. She won a scholarship in one of the grammar schools which entitled her to a three-year course at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. Her work here was extended to a further two years in the normal and postgraduate departments, at the end of which time, with all the honors in the power of her alma mater to confer, Miss Warwick sailed for Paris in the autumn of 1899. In the French capital she studied drawing for the first half year under Raphael Collin, the figure painter, and for the second worked under M. Carles. Then followed a twelvemonth at the Academic Colarossi and lectures on anat-..."

Eph1.41.77

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 12, 1905

1905