WOMAN IN ART
While still a young woman, she had gained greater reputation than good artists who had studied and labored a life time.
What a revelation it must have been to those hard-shelled directors of those two academies who debarred her entrance and only grudgingly admitted her, denying the right of a woman to aspire to the study of art. Neither one has ever admitted another woman.
Elizabet Ney's portraiture in oil or marble was considered phenomenal. Just here a quotation will enlighten us on another phase of her art: "Her ability to reveal the natures of children and delicate, poetic women is equally striking as the power and force depicted in her statues of Frederick the Great and Bismarck." It would seem that a greater difficulty came to the sculptor in the bust of such a duplex or complex character as Schopenhauer. His was the face of a man powerful and restless, whose very smile was of "sardonic hardness and ugliness, that of a pessimistic philosopher......One day, while she was modeling that robust character, the old philosopher sat studying her for a long time with an amused, quizzical expression. The artist bore it as long as she could, then asked, "Why do you look at me so, doctor?" His reply was, "I was just trying to see if I could perhaps discover the beginnings of a little mustache. It grows more impossible to me each day, to believe that you are a woman." But after all, the feminine in her must have finally impressed him, for in his published letters he speaks of her more than once as a most lovable "Mädchen."
So far the life and works of Elizabet Ney belong to Europe, portraying many of its great characters who made history during the nineteenth century. Why then did the great artist in the meridian of her success come to America? The only answer that has become known is this:
"In addition to her genius for sculpture, Elizabet Ney had a great genius for philanthropy; art for art's sake had been her guiding principle of life, and her motto, "Sursum" (upward), is but another way of saying it. Today we know it was for political reasons.
"Some years after the civil war a little band of Germans desired to form a community in a mild climate, far from the harrassing restrictions of monarchy. Miss Ney was of that group, most of whom soon returned to "Vaterland," but the artist remained and made her home in Texas. For some years she lived in a suburb of Austin, during which time she realized that one great need of the state was the cultivation of public taste and industrial education, guided by the influence of art. While pondering the
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