Ethel Myers - Reviews & Comments

"Ethel Myers in her three powerfully expressed sculptured figurines impress this reviewer with the fact that she is worthy of a place alongside of Daumier, Meunier and Mahonri Young."  (The Brooklyn Eagle)

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"Mrs. Myers' statuettes are many sketches of New York life, exceedingly plastic and full of expression." (New York Herald-Tribune)

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"Mrs. Myers has an extraordinary graphic talent in her sculpture, and is doing a perfectly original and delightful thing." (Evening Mail - N.Y.)

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"There is sculptural quality in these ingenious and clever little figures and the artist has said something worth while in her own amusing way. The little show is worth while seeing." (New York Sun)

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"To name the pictures one would like to possess and the bronzes and tanagras and plasters would mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. The little group called 'Gossip' by Ethel Myers is one which has something of the quality of the famous Fifteenth Idyl of Theocritus." (Thedore Roosevelt on the Armory Show - The Outlook Magazine)

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"Must congratulate you heartily on your little figures at the Folsom's. It's a case of good goods coming in small packages. I'm sending every one I know in to see them. Most charming things of the kind I've ever seen." (Letter from Henry McBride to Ethel Myers - Jan.24,1913)

A figurative sculptor and art activist in New York City, Ethel Myers is known for her caricature bronzes of city people, many of them in humorous poses.   She exhibited nine of them in the 1913 Armory Show that introduced modernist art to America, and according to art historian Charlotte Rubinstein: "It is now clear tht Myers was one of the most creative of the Americans who exhibited at the Armory Show." (from Ask/Art)

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Ethel Myers was praised in a New York Sun article just prior to the Armory Show for her individualistic works. Her choice to depart from the conventional representation of women in sculpture earned her the compliment of "not hesitating to see things as they are." The anonymous reviewer, perhaps Henry McBride, also admires "her own amusing way" of constructing her sculptures. Susan Fort has noted Myers' satirical stance, which "poked fun at her gender's slavish devotion to modish attire" (Fort 77). Myers' work has most often been compared to that of the Ashcans, yet her sculpture also shows formal exploration that was not customary in American sculpture at this time. Abstenia St. Eberle, who critics have also cited as a sculptural counterpart to the Ashcan school, employed long-established modeling techniques in her work. Myers' sculpture, on the other hand, can be usefully compared to Lachaise's Statuette or Lehmbruck's Kneeling Woman, which exaggerate and simplify the features of their subjects. Myers studied painting, not sculpture, at the Art Students' League, but after marrying Jerome Myers and having a child, she switched to small sculptures, which occupied less space and allowed more room for her husband's painting. Fifteen of her sculptures were exhibited in late 1912 at Folsom Galleries, where Maurer's work was shown just prior to the Armory Show. Nine of Myers' sculptures from the 1912 exhibition were chosen for the Armory Show. Myers seldom exhibited in the 20s; she gave up sculpting and supported her family by designing women's hats and clothes for celebrities (Rubinstein 169). When she started showing her work again after her husband's death in 1940, her work seems to have been little affected by the Armory Show.

(“The Part Played by Women:” The Gender of Modernism at the Armory Show)

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Two other painters, Kathleen McEnery and Anne Goldthwaite, were among the artists who participated in post-Impressionism before the show, but, in many senses of the word, remained independents. McEnery moved from New York not long after the Armory Show, and Goldthwaite, who never accepted modernism, began producing representational studies of the American South. Ethel Myers, who has been recognized primarily in relation to the Ashcan school, produced small caricatures comparable to the work Lachaise produced and received favorable reviews at the Armory Show. These artists are not exceptions; they attest to the fact that many women artists were working in New York in the early 20th century and that some explored non-representational form to a certain extent before the Armory Show. McEnery, Goldthwaite, and Myers, however, were not announced as modernists at any of Stieglitz's galleries, at Whitney's Studio Club, Dreier's Societe Anonyme, or by any other champions of American modernism.

(“The Part Played by Women:” The Gender of Modernism at the Armory Show)