The missing umbilicus is part of the dramatic story that Ezekiel tells in bronze. The absence of the navel reminds the viewer that Eve is unlike us. She is not a woman with parents and a family. She is the first woman and she has no mother. All Eve has is Adam and God, both of whom she betrayed, and the snake who she trusted, but who she now realizes betrayed her as well. it was very natural to do so since Eve wasn’t born, but created directly from one of Adam’s spare ribs." 1 An early clay model in Ezekiel’s studio shows her with a navel, the crucial element that he discarded (Fig. In his memoir, Ezekiel deliberately chronicles a conversation with a visitor to his studio about why he sculpted Eve as such: "I had made my Eve without an umbilicus. While conceiving Eve, Ezekiel turned to a close reading of the biblical text, which states that God fashioned Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Ashamed, she collapses into herself, unable to look toward the heavens. Less interested in classical stillness and more in the emotional and physical implications of Eve’s fateful choice, Ezekiel’s sculpture engages viewers, asking them to put themselves in Eve’s place, to imagine the unbearable regret of her impulsive act, and to suffer its consequences. To convey a sense of Eve’s distress in the garden when her sinful act was revealed before God, Ezekiel enlisted her entire body. See also David Philipson’s dated but crucial article, "Moses Jacob Ezekiel," Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 28 (1922): 1-62. (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1985). Greenwald, ed., Ezekiel's Vision: Moses Jacob Ezekiel and the Classical Tradition, exh. For a short but excellent exhibition catalogue, with the most analytic assessments of Ezekiel to date, see Alice M. These details, and Eve’s palpable despair, obscure the most novel feature of the sculpture: Ezekiel fashioned Eve, the only female nude he ever produced, without a navel. Ezekiel took great care to delineate the textures of the serpent’s scales, just as he lavished attention on the thick hair that cascades gracefully down Eve’s muscled back and spirals over her face, down to her left breast (Fig. At Eve’s feet, the serpent coils menacingly around the rock upon which she cowers, and Eve’s bowed head looks downward at her tempter. She crosses her legs awkwardly, attempting to conceal her nudity. The naturalistically modeled Eve theatrically averts her head and painfully attempts to hide her face in the crook of her left arm, which partially covers her bare chest. ![]() This life-sized bronze portrays a nude Eve after she has been tempted by the serpent, eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and at the moment she suffers God’s rebuke. In 1876, Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917), the first Jewish American artist of international stature, sculpted the world’s first woman, to which he gave the unconventional title, Eve Hearing the Voice (Fig.
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