Berthold Nebel was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 sculptor.

Berthold Nebel was born in 1889 in Basel, Switzerland, and came to the United States with his parents when he was a year old.

Training

By 1900 his parents had settled in New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, and Nebel as a young boy took lessons in oil painting

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

 from “an artist lady” who told him she could teach him nothing more and that he must go to art school. He began work at a decorative terra cotta

Terra cotta

Terracotta, Terra cotta or Terra-cotta is a clay-based unglazed ceramic, although the term can also be applied to glazed ceramics where the fired body is porous and red in color...

 factory in Perth Amboy, New Jersey

Perth Amboy, New Jersey

Perth Amboy is a city in Middlesex County, New Jersey, United States. The City of Perth Amboy is part of the New York metropolitan area. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city population was 50,814. Perth Amboy is known as the "City by the Bay", referring to Raritan Bay.-Name:The Lenape...

, where he learned to model in clay. This factory produced architectural ornaments for Fifth Avenue mansions at the time. This exposure to a new media shifted his interest from painting to sculpture.

While he was working days he studied at night at the National Academy of Design

National Academy of Design

The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...

 and the Mechanics' Institute, and attended James Earle Fraser's classes at the Art Students League of New York

Art Students League of New York

The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in New York City. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists, and has maintained for over 130 years a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a...

. Fraser was very supportive of Nebel’s work, and encouraged him to enter a competition. Nebel won the prize for the Prix de Rome

Prix de Rome

The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...

 in 1914 when the subject for sculptors and painters was “Good Government.” He won the sculpture’s prize with a group of a seated woman, a standing man, and a child: a family and an interpretation of good government and good living that represented his personal philosophy throughout his life. The group was shown at the 30th Annual Exhibition of the Architectural League of New York

Architectural League of New York

The Architectural League of New York is a non-profit organization "for creative and intellectual work in architecture, urbanism, and related disciplines"....

 in February 1915.

His three-year fellowship from 1914-1917 at the American Academy in Rome

American Academy in Rome

The American Academy in Rome is a research and arts institution located on the Gianicolo in Rome.- History :In 1893, a group of American architects, painters and sculptors met regularly while planning the fine arts section of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition...

 coincided with the early years of World War I. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Nebel remained in Italy and became a supply officer and interpreter for the Red Cross. With this job, he was able to marry the former Maria Lucantoni, whom he met at the American Academy in Rome when she was a model.

While at the Academy Nebel became interested in the plays of Sophocles

Sophocles

Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides...

. Nebel created a plaque of Oedipus Rex at Colonus. His models for this group were his future wife, her sister Francesco, and their father, who, like the literary figure he portrayed, also went blind in old age. As an Academician, Nebel met Rodin and was greatly influenced by his modern style. This encounter encouraged Nebel to depart from the Academy’s classical tradition. He executed the heroic group Wrestlers – two figures locked in Greco-Roman wrestling holds that prevent either man from winning. The figure was exhibited in Rome at the Italian artists’ Exposione di Belle Arte. Nebel was the only Academy to be asked to exhibit with the Italians in their expositions. Wrestlers was later exhibited in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City.

Work in New York

In 1920 Nebel returned to the United States with his wife, and his young son, Emil. He worked as an assistant to Fraser in his studio in McDougal Alley in New York City the winter of 1920, and while there he met Charles Follen McKim

Charles Follen McKim

Charles Follen McKim FAIA was an American Beaux-Arts architect of the late 19th century. Along with Stanford White, he provided the architectural expertise as a member of the partnership McKim, Mead, and White....

 of the architectural firm McKim, Meade, and White. McKim, on seeing the Wrestlers, jokingly asked Nebel if her were “going Bolshevik” by doing all “this modern stuff,” referring to a contemporary association of modern art with Russia. Later that year Nebel accepted the post of Director of the School of Sculpture at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie-Mellon University. He moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife and son in 1920. While in Pittsburgh he won a competition sponsored by the Bureau of Mines and was commissioned to design and execute the Mine Rescue Medal. He was also commissioned by the Department of Interior to make the Congressional First Aid Medal. He designed a portrait relief of Theodore Roosevelt in bronze for the City County Building in Pittsburgh and a portrait relief of then First President of Carnegie Institute of Technology, Arthur Anton Hamerschlog. While teaching at Carnegie-Tech, Nebel and his wife had a daughter named Lucia.

Yearning to be back in New York City, Nebel returned to New York in 1925 and established a studio in the Bible Building on East 8th Street where he became engaged in architectural sculpture, principally ornamentation for the domes and niches of the Cunard Building on lower Broadway in New York City. He was also commissioned to make portrait statues of confederate General Joseph Wheeler for the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., of General John Sedgwick for the front of the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford, and of Alexander Brown for the entrance to Brown Brothers Bank on Wall Street in New York City.

In 1925, Nebel patented an enlarging machine for reproducing 3D sculpture by a “scrape method.” Models of any size could be enlarged from smaller originals. This provided a vast improvement over the “point” system which had been used to scale models up or down since the time of the classic Greek sculptors.

Work at Audubon Terrace

A meeting with Archer M. Huntington in 1928 resulted in a series of commissions that occupied Nebel for more than a decade. The first project was two sets of bronze doors for the Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of the American Geographic Society in the complex of buildings he created at 155th Street

155th Street (Manhattan)

155th Street is a major crosstown street in the Harlem neighborhood, in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is the northernmost of the 155 crosstown streets mapped out in the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 that established the numbered street grid in Manhattan.155th Street starts on the West...

 and Broadway

Broadway (New York City)

Broadway is a prominent avenue in New York City, United States, which runs through the full length of the borough of Manhattan and continues northward through the Bronx borough before terminating in Westchester County, New York. It is the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in the city, dating to...

 in New York City. This work required larger working space, and in 1930 Nebel moved his studio and home to Westport, Connecticut. He first worked in a converted barn on the 9 acres (36,421.7 m²) farm he had bought and later specially constructed a stone studio building.

For the Hispanic Society of America, also at 155th Street and Broadway, Huntington commissioned Nebel to execute nine bas-relief panels measuring 5 feet (1.5 m) wide by 19 feet (5.8 m) high for the south façade of the building in limestone. Each panel’s single figure show a representation of a people – Celt, Primitive Man, Roman, Carthaginian, Arab, Phoenician, Greek, Visigoth, and Christian Knight, who had invaded and flourished in Spain. The work went on for ten years and the panels were installed in 1939. Huntington also commissioned a marble figure of The Nereid for Brookgreen Gardens, the sculpture museum he and his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington

Anna Hyatt Huntington

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington was an American sculptor.-Life and career:Huntington was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father, Alpheus Hyatt, was a professor of paleontology and zoology at Harvard University and MIT, and served as a contributing factor to her early interest in animals and...

, founded in South Carolina.

Medallist

Six months before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Nebel had designed a medal called World Unity or Oblivion. This depicted on the reverse side the then-unfamiliar but now recognized “mushroom cloud” of a pyrocumulus explosion over a foreground covered by mutilated human bodies. Nebel was horrified by the advancing technological developments of warfare and wrote, “Modern warfare has developed to such a degree that civilization may vanish from the earth unless there is a better understanding among nations. This medal was designed to help impress that thought which I believe is uppermost in our minds.” The Society of Medalists issued the medal in 1945 immediately after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. President Eisenhower later presented a copy to Queen Elizabeth II.

In 1957 Nebel was commissioned to design a medal to commemorate the crossing of the Mayflower replica and the 1620 signing of the Mayflower Compact on board the original ship. Silver copies of this medal were presented to President Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth II, and Alan Villiers, captain of the second Mayflower. In 1960 on the 50th anniversary of the Medalic Art Company, Nebel also designed a medal to commemorate that event.

Over the years, while teaching and working on commissions, Nebel made many sketches, some cast only in plaster. These include preliminary designs for future works, ideas he was developing for national competitions and pieces for his own pleasure. Among these last are several portrait heads of his father Emil Nebel; Albin Polasek, a sculptor friend he met in Pittsburgh; Anthony Di Nardo, an architect from Cleveland; and Eugene Francis Savage, a muralist who had been a fellow Academician at the American Academy in Rome. Another group, which he sculpted around 1919, was Mother and Child, posed for by his wife “Marietta” and their son Emil. Another of these studies, sculpted and cast in bronze while he was working in Rome, is Conchetta, a woman carrying on her head the traditional copper water jug of the Italian hill towns.

One of the last figures he worked on, called Adventure, shows a man and woman riding together on a farm horse toward a new life, a tribute to the young people putting their lives together after World War II and perhaps a memory of his own life after World War I. His work had come full circle, again depicting the good life and good government in the simple form a man and a woman, a family, facing the world.

He died of leukemia

Leukemia

Leukemia or leukaemia is a type of cancer of the blood or bone marrow characterized by an abnormal increase of immature white blood cells called "blasts". Leukemia is a broad term covering a spectrum of diseases...

 in 1964 in Westport, Connecticut

Westport, Connecticut

-Neighborhoods:* Saugatuck – around the Westport railroad station near the southwestern corner of the town – a built-up area with some restaurants, stores and offices....

. Nebel was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome

American Academy in Rome

The American Academy in Rome is a research and arts institution located on the Gianicolo in Rome.- History :In 1893, a group of American architects, painters and sculptors met regularly while planning the fine arts section of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition...

; a National Academician of the National Academy of Design, which holds in their permanent collection a small bronze study of Wrestlers; and a member of the National Sculpture Society

National Sculpture Society

Founded in 1893, the National Sculpture Society was the first organization of professional sculptors formed in the United States. The purpose of the organization was to promote the welfare of American sculptors, although its founding members included several renowned architects. The founding...

.

Following his death, Nebel's studio was enjoyed by his daughter Lucia Nebel White, a photographer, and her husband, George A. White

George A. White

Major General George A. White was an American author, journalist and Major General in the first half of the 20th century...

, the well-known builder-architect.

[Written by the late Elizabeth Jessen Hancock, niece of Berthold Nebel.]

Sources

• E. Benezit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs, et graveurs, Volume 10, Grund. 1999
• Glenn B. Opitz, "Berthold Nebel," Dictionary of American Sculptors, Poughkeepsie, NY: Apollo, 1984, p. 290
• Beatrice Proske, "Berthold Nebel," Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture, Brookgreen Gardens, SC: 1968, pp. 344–346
• Maria White, "Berthold Nebel," America's Sculptural Heritage, Gloucester, MA: Gloucester Celebration, Inc, 1998, pp. 68–71