[Rarebooks] FS: An American Sculptor in 1920s Paris- 1/50 copies

[Joslin Hall Rare books]

Gauthier, Maximilien.  "NAT SMOLIN"

Paris; Editions Le Triangle: 1931. An example from the Deluxe edition of
50 copies (of the English printing) printed on velin d'Arches paper with
an original signed pencil portrait by the artist.

Nat Smolin [1890-1950] was born in New York on the Fourth of July, the son
of Russian and Polish immigrants. He was expected to take over the family
millinery business, and he did in fact give that career a start in New
York, but art called and he took time, while in Europe on business, to
tour Europe's great museums. As his friend, the Parisian art critic
Maximilien Gauthier, speculates in the prefatory essay in this book,
working with fabrics and learning how they drape and shape on the human
body probably gave Smolin a great leg up on his later sculpting career -or
perhaps his natural sculptor's eye for form and shape helped him be a
successful fashion designer. Perhaps both.

But the "House of Smolin" was never to be, for in 1920 his father
mysteriously disappeared while traveling in Europe and Nat packed up and
moved to Paris to devote his full time to art. Once there he drew and
sculpted, often working on five figures at once. He believed that the
perfect studio had two rooms, one for observing the model and one for
sculpting, and he would often turn his back on a model to work from
memory.

"Nat Smolin does not permit himself the caprices of inspiration" Gauthier
remarks concerning Smolin's penchant for long, regular hours in the
studio, but while he adopted a workmanlike approach to his art, he also
lived by a code of personal artistic freedom that he would not surrender
to current fashion. "Climb the mountains, even at the risk of breaking
one's neck, but climb" he wrote. "Success and glory frighten him" Gauthier
adds, "He fears to become their prisoner, he fears being obliged to
conform to the appearance that the public might choose for him". Probably
just as well that he gave up fashion design, then. Goethe was among his
favorites, and Plate 32 in this volume reproduces a "patinated plaster"
head in triangle (there is no better way to describe it) monument of
Goethe in the artist's studio that was then shipped to Yale where it
became part of the Speck Collection.

This volume consists of 32 plates illustrating a range of the artist's
work, prefaced by an extended appreciation and commentary by Gauthier, who
is willing to mention it when he does not agree with a direction in which
several of Smolin's works went. An altogether interesting study of the
life and work of an American expatriate artist working in the decadent and
exuberant milieu that was Paris between the wars.

Card covers. 9"x11.5", 23 pages plus 32 b/w plates paper covered boards. A
few small tears in the paper covers along the seams a little soil and
wear. Inscribed by Nat Smolin on the front free endpaper. With an original
pencil portrait by Smolin of a young woman's head with fashionably bobbed
hair, laid-in loose; portrait with several very short tears along the
border.  $250.00

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