Mary Eberle

Mary Abastenia St. Leger Eberle

Born 1878, Webster City, IA

Died 1942, New York, NY

 

Her pioneer work in depicting human beings engaged in everyday activities placed Abastenia Eberle in the forefront of the field of genre sculpture.  As early as 1906, Eberle began to create figures of a social nature, predating the artworks introduced to the public by the Ashcan School.  As a settlement worker on New York’s Lower East Side, she had abundant subjects for her figures of children at play, women performing daily chores, and other scenes from life on the street, including the unpalatable realities of the tenements: unemployment, homelessness, and prostitution.  One of her most popular works, The Windy Doorstep, was inspired by an image of a farm woman in Woodstock, NY, sweeping on a windy day.  Embodying form and movement, it won the Barnett Prize at the 1910 exhibition of the National Academy of Design.  Eberle wrote: “The piece was the expression of a subjective reality – though I myself was not aware of it at the time.  Later I realized why the idea of ‘sweeping something out’ had been so insistent.”

 

The Windy Doorstep

Bronze, 1910

14 x 6 x 4 in.

Signed: A • St. L • Eberle

S.1932.023