Cosmopolitan Folk

Christopher Benfey | New York Review of Books | 11th June 2016

Folk art is made to express the social narratives and memories of a community. Often labelled as naïve or primitive, its artistic merit only began to be recognised in the twentieth century. An early American collector was sculptor, Elie Nadelman. His work and collection shows that folk art and high art in fact influence each other. Sadly, both his collecting and artistic practice stopped abruptly with the 1929 crash.