WOMAN IN ART
Abestenia St. Leger Eberle is one of a group of artists who have found incentive for art expression largely in diminutive statues. Miss Eberle's productions, though usually small, are large with human significance for social inspiration.
It takes all sorts of people to make a world, and all kinds of artists to mobilize for an artistic nation or epoch.
American art really began with the portraits of the first President of the United States, and a few of the loyal, brainy, practical men who assisted in shaping and laying the corner stone of the American republic. Now that the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Monroe Doctrine and the Gettysburg Speech have built up and cemented the human walls of the Republic into the fabric of a Nation, the refinements of peace and prosperity are at bud and bloom, in forms of the arts and sciences.
There are many in this American commonwealth who, through the decades of nation-building, have realized that growth and development prepare for the next stratum of national achievement, and so have augmented educational facilities, not only for those born under the flag, but also for all who disembark at our flag-guarded ports.
Abestenia Eberle is a plastic artist of plastic clay, whereby she is modeling the plastic forms, the plastic minds and hearts of the child-life in New York's East Side. She is gifted with art ability, with the understanding of and love for children; she has visions of their value to the world, and helps unthinking people to understand that value. Nowhere is there sculpture more convincingly human than Miss Eberle's. Her studio is a miniature of the community where she dwells. There is the shy little girl, hands in jacket pockets and chin 'way down on her chest; she wants to look up but dare not raise her head—so shy. Then there is "The Little Mother" with the baby in her arms, keeping her out of doors while the mother is washing within. Children are far more expressive than adults who have learned to control their feelings. There is the child flying along on one roller skate, hair to the wind, arms extending in her exhilaration, with no idea that she is skating for the public and into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She personifies Joy, because she is brimming over with joy.
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