American Folk Art Elie and Viola Nadelman Collection at The

The sculptor Elie Nadelman (1882–1946), known for his sleek modernist figures, and his wife Viola Spiess Flannery Nadelman built one of the earliest and largest American folk art collections almost by accident of passion. After Nadelman immigrated to New York in 1914 and married Viola in 1919, the couple amassed roughly 15,000 objects — furniture, ceramics, glass, textiles, toys, weathervanes, chalkware, and carved wood figures — spanning six centuries and more than a dozen countries. In 1926 they opened it to the public as the Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts in Riverdale, in the Bronx, widely considered the first folk art museum in the United States. The 1929 stock market crash devastated their finances, and they closed the museum in 1937, selling the bulk of the collection to the New-York Historical Society that same year. Today, The New York Historical holds more than 1,600 objects from Nadelman's acquisitions — more of his material than any other single repository — including furniture, sculpture, paintings, ceramics, glass, pewter, drawings, and household tools. The collection got its fullest public airing in the 2016 exhibition The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman (May 20–August 21, 2016), accompanied by the scholarly catalogue Making It Modern.