Woman with Moon
Albin Polasek was born in Czechoslovakia in 1879, where he trained as a woodcarver before immigrating to America in 1901. He transitioned to work as a sculptor in bronze after studying at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. George Booth purchased three works by Polasek from an exhibition at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts in 1917 – Aspiration, Maternal Love, and Woman with Moon.
The work’s title, Woman with Moon, is more allusive than descriptive. The woman holds a small jar in her left hand and appears to be blowing on the ball balanced on her right hand, as though she is blowing bubbles. Soap bubbles have long served in art as symbols of the fragility and fleeting nature of life. Here, Polasek inverts the metaphor, giving the almost immaterial bubble the solidity of bronze. The artwork preserves a fleeting moment of imaginative whimsy, the woman balancing the “moon” in her hand forever, or as long as the sculpture endures.
Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
March 2024
Width: 14 1/2 in (36.8 cm)
ProvenanceGeorge Gough Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth (1917-1949)
Cranbrook Foundation (1949-1973)
Cranbrook Educational Community (1973-present)
Credit LineCranbrook Center for Collections and Research
Cultural Properties Collection, Founders Collection
Bequest of George Gough Booth and Ellen Scripps Booth through the Cranbrook Foundation
Medium | MaterialsBronze
SignedIncised: (c) 1917 / Albin Polasek / Roman Bronze Works N-Y-
GenreObject TypeStatues
Alternate Title(s)
- Bubble
