Elie Nadelman's iconic wood figures draw together classical forms influenced by Greek, Egyptian, and Renaissance sculpture with subjects and materials derived from American folk art. This confluence of high and low culture procured disdain in Nadelman's own day, yet today his genre figures are recognized as icons of modern American sculpture.

Born in Warsaw, Nadelman went in 1904 to Munich, where he saw fifth-century B.C.E. pediment sculptures from the temple at Aegina at the Glyptothek as well as polychrome late Gothic German sculptures and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dolls at the Bavarian National Museum, all of which had an impact on his artistic style. The following year, he moved to Paris, where he became part of Leo and Gertrude Stein's artistic circle, meeting modern artists such as Pablo Picasso as well as critics, gallery owners, and collectors. During his seven years in Paris, he began sculpting in a classical style, and his drawings and figures were exhibited in several Salons d'Autumne and Salons des Indépendants, as well as the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York.

At the beginning of World War I, Nadelman went to America, where his classical heads and figures were very popular. Soon after his arrival, he married an heiress, and they began to collect American folk art, hoping someday to create a museum of their collection. Folk art, often made of painted wood and other quotidian materials, took as its subject the daily lives of common people. Nadelman began incorporating these themes into his cherry-wood works of 1918-24, with subjects such as a circus performer, a woman at a piano, and three versions of the sculpture Dancer, two painted and one unpainted. Most of his wood and plaster sculptures of this period were painted with color to delineate clothing and facial features. The Jewish Museum's unpainted Dancer retains the commonly held notion of classicism of his earlier unpainted wood and marble heads, although he may have intended to paint it as a variation of the other Dancer figures.

Nadelman's interest in popular culture extended beyond folk art to American vaudeville and circus. In his studio, he kept a photograph of the vaudeville dancer Eva Tanguay posed in a position similar to that of the Dancer sculpture. He also made a drawing entitled High Kicker (about 1917-19), perhaps of Tanguay. An additional source may have been the well-known painting Le Chahut (1890), by Georges Seurat, which depicts French can-can dancers kicking up their legs much like Dancer.

Nadelman's genre sculptures received harsh criticism from a public that had previously revered his classical works. His sculptures depicting contemporary life-from vaudeville performers to bourgeois types-were ridiculed by critics who felt that the artist was mocking high society. His chosen material, cherry wood, and his choice to paint many of the works may have irritated an audience that expected the restrained classicism of his earlier marble heads. Despite the criticism, Nadelman continued to work in this style, and his stylized genre sculptures were regarded as his best work only after his death.