MORRISON HECKSCHER: A female nude holding grapes exudes uninhibited joy in this bronze sculpture called The Vine by Harriet Frishmuth. A dancer posed on tiptoe for the composition. Notice the striking arabesque of her back—and how it creates a beautiful contrast with the straight diagonal of her upraised arm. Frishmuth had dancers model for many of her sculptures at this point in her career. Dancers could hold positions that were difficult for ordinary models to sustain. The early twentieth century was also one of the great periods of modern dance—a time when dancers like Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova elevated the art to new heights. Frishmuth began her career as a sculptor in Paris. There, she studied briefly with the master sculptor, Auguste Rodin. The following is an excerpt of the artist describing this experience, taken from a rare recording made in the nineteen sixties:

HARRIET FRISHMUTH: “That first spring in Paris, we looked around at different art schools and I was just barely 19 at the time and my mother didn’t think she wanted me to go into a mixed class. So the only class we could find there was Rodin’s class, that had a separate class for women and men. So there’s where I went, not knowing anything about Rodin.” “He used to tell me to look at the silhouettes of the figures, which I stuck to very faithfully always working from the outline.”

MORRISON HECKSCHER: Take a moment to look at The Vine to appreciate the elegance of its silhouette.

HARRIET FRISHMUTH: “I made the small Vine life size and I had a wonderful time doing it but it was a little difficult because she bent out her back so far that I had to model the face upside down, which wasn’t an easy stunt to do, up on a ladder and trying to model a face upside down.”