Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, Sculptor (1878-1942): Des Moines Art Center, July 15-August 17, 1980

From “Abastenia St. Leger Eberle is one of the lost women of American art whose sculpture is just beginning to gain the recognition which it deserves. Working in New York City in the first two decades of this century, she is best known for her small sculptures of the urban poor. She produced a body of significant work which in many ways is a sculptural counterpart of the paintings of ‘The Eight’, a group also known as the ‘Ashcan School’ because it used lowly urban scenes as subject matter. Eberle’s figure of the ‘Ragpicker’--a poor immigrant woman searching for rags in a trashcan--could well have been the symbol of the ‘Ashcan School’. Yet her work hardly caused a ripple in contemporary New York art circles in contrast to the uproar which arose in 1908 over an exhibition of ‘The Eight’ because their subject matter did not conform to current standards of beauty. This lack of notoriety probably stems from the fact that sculpture does not lend itself to depicting the environment in which people like the ‘Ragpicker’ lived--an environment of crowded, dirty streets with pushcarts, or squalid, trash-laden yards. Viewers of the ‘Ragpicker’ are free to supply their own imagined surroundings for this genre sculpture. Since sculpture in this period was generally considered a secondary art to painting, it had to be monumental and grandiose in order to be considered worthy of the highest acclaim. Small-scale genre pieces with overtones of social observation such as Eberle modeled, although often regarded as ugly, were not considered important enough to excite public controversy. Yet Eberle’s work of this type has an honesty, skill, and breadth of vision for which recognition is long overdue.”