The four-and-a-half years Mahonri Young spent in New York City and Paris were the most important in his development as an artist—not only in the classroom but in the museums, studios, and in the streets where he encountered poor, urban workers. In France his first bronzes of Parisian laborers signaled the direction the rest of his life's work would take.
Manhattan had developed into a cultural mecca around the turn of the century when Young, along with other artists from around the country, arrived there to study and work. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was collecting some of the country's most important treasures. The Art Students League, where Young chose to attend, drew students who either could not meet the entrance requirements of the National Academy in New York City or disliked the academy's rigid curriculum. The league's student body was highly motivated and the faculty included some of the best talent in America.1
About this time, as the nation's values shifted, the arts too changed. In the 1890s impressionism was on the rise in America, especially among academic painters and their wealthy patrons. Younger artists admired American impressionists William Merritt Chase, J. Alden Weir, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, and John Twachtman mostly for their technique, but began to question their idyllic themes and upper-class subject matter. The impressionists for their part considered the new realism, especially the so-called Ashcan school, to be vulgar.
America's long tradition of realism had little to do with the new style that was inspired by the reality of day-to-day life among the working class. The new realism symbolized industrial urban society, and its strongest exponents considered themselves largely free of European influence. Banding together under the leadership of Robert Henri, they called themselves the Group of Eight. Mahonri Young became associated with them. Raised in the West, and having seen and portrayed all walks of life as a newspaper sketch artist, his own temperament was at odds with traditionalists and more inclined toward raw emotion. For Young, life had not been idyllic. He felt a bond with other working people. Despite the innovation that seemed to be evident everywhere in Europe and America, the French schools and their American counterparts still taught in the Beaux Arts tradition where fine art was to be carefully composed and meticulously rendered. The Group of Eight, like Young, revolted against this style and its academic institutionalism.
Young's trip to New York in the fall of 1899 included a layover in Chicago. This was the first big city he had ever seen and he found it intimidating but rewarding. He traveled the entire way in the train's day coach to save money. Upon arrival, he went immediately to the famous Art Institute:
While there in Chicago, I hurried to the Institute; that was the first picture gallery I had ever seen. Things were hung differently there then. Two of Delacroix's finest animal studies, a lioness, and a tiger, and another small picture were all hung against a cornice. A superb Courbet mountain landscape occupied a similar position. These pictures were all beautifully displayed when I last saw them a year ago. The great Rembrandt, the "Girl at a Door," was there then and on loan was Millet's little picture of a "Woman Bathing." To me at that time, it seemed a masterpiece of the first order—it still does. I have seen it every time I have passed through Chicago, and it still remains as good as when I first saw it.2
This experience marked the beginning of a life-long habit of haunting museums. From that time on he considered them his greatest teachers. He said that for the remainder of the trip all he could think about was getting to New York so he could visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When he arrived, he was met by Janette Eastum, his father's half-sister. New arrivals from Utah often stayed with the Eastums while they established themselves. "Net," as she was called, was a daughter of Brigham Young's wife Clara Decker Young who had traveled with the first pioneer company to Utah, and as such she held a prominent place in Utah society. She married and divorced at an early age and accompanied her second husband, Robert Eastum, when he sought to advance his music career by moving to New York. Having previously gained success as a player at the Salt Lake Theatre, she also hoped to further her career. She loved New York, but she also kept close ties with Salt Lake City and wrote a weekly letter to the Deseret News entitled, "Salt Lakers in New York." Mahonri felt that his aunt, a woman with a penchant for earthy stories, was the "truest Bohemian" he had ever known. He stayed with the Eastums until his roommate, Harry Stoddard, arrived, after which they found a room on 63rd and Park Avenue for $12 a month.3
On 1 October 1899 Young registered for classes at the Art Students League. He was pleased that the administration considered his studies with James T. Harwood sufficient to allow him into the life drawing class. Anxious to begin, he arrived every weekday morning when the school opened. Classes were conducted in a precise and orderly manner, patterned after the European académies: students came in beginning at 8:00 a.m. and began to set up, at 8:15 a model was posed, the students worked until lunch time, and the instructor arrived later in the morning to critique their work.4
Young studied with George B. Bridgeman who had taught Life Drawing and Anatomy at the league since 1894. Known as a fine draftsman, he also wrote and published books on drawing and anatomy, some of which are still in use today. Knowing his reputation as a demanding teacher famous for scathing criticism, Young disliked his method from the beginning. Bridgeman appeared twice a day. After being announced, he entered the room, counted his pupils, then looked at his watch to determine how much time to give each one. He made the rounds giving almost the same criticism to everyone, usually to "get the hip action" or "make it go round."5 Sometimes he illustrated his point with a small sketch drawn to the side of the student's work. After a short time Young refused to consider himself Bridgeman's student. Feeling he never learned anything from him, he questioned the value of his teacher's presence. Even so, Bridgeman considered Young one of the best in the class and ranked him number one, then number two when the professor's previously favorite student began attending again.6
The instructor in Young's afternoon course, Kenyon Cox, had taught at the league from 1884 to 1909. Known as a portrait painter and muralist in the classical tradition, Cox gained prominence as a result of the large murals he executed for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. One of America's best muralists, he received other major commissions, including work for the Library of Congress, and emerged as a major figure in the American Renaissance movement. A series of lectures published in 1911 as The Classic Point of View made Cox the best-known voice and spokesman for the theories and ideals of academic classicism.
At the school Cox had a reputation as an excellent but exacting instructor. All beginning students under his tutelage began by drawing from plaster casts and advanced to a live model only when Cox thought they were ready. He allowed students to enter competitions only when he felt their work was good enough. Young studied with him the entire season. Despite the fact that his methods were conservative and controlled, Young learned concepts from Cox that stayed with him his entire life. "He never told me anything which I found out wasn't so. I have always had the sincerest respect for Kenyon Cox."7 The instructor's ideas and philosophy of art influenced Young's later approach to the human form. About his teacher's interaction with students, Young wrote:
He proceeded to study the drawings in relationship to the model and indicated corrections. He sometimes made his corrections with a line. In this he carefully ran his charcoal over the drawing from point to point, . . . [making his] line with firmness and assurance. There were no free flowing, finding-out lines. That operation he apparently had made in his mind.8
In addition to classes, Cox gave a series of lectures on anatomy which Young found especially instructive. The lectures were geared to the needs of the artist rather than to a purely physiological approach. "He didn't go very far into the deeper muscles . . . his aim being to give an idea of the structure of the figure, not to take it to bits. He explained the articulation of the skeleton and the function of the larger muscles and the ones that determine the form."9 Cox taught that the artist needed "first, to develop in the highest degree the abstract beauty and significance possessed by lines in themselves, more or less independently of representation: second, to express with the utmost clearness and force the material significance of objects and, especially, of the human body."10 These theories and ideas had a lasting influence on Young's later work. He strove for what he considered the essential rather than the specific in his art, an objective he achieved in the finest of his later statues of laborers and prizefighters.
During his studies at the Art Students League, Young thought of becoming an illustrator. He had worked as a newspaper artist and admired magazine illustrators, so this was perhaps predictable. Even though Cox was a personal friend of the prom-inent sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens who had also previously taught at the league, Young neither studied nor mentioned experimenting with sculpture in New York.
The theme of labor abounds in Young's New York sketches. Captivated by the energy he saw in the city and the new construction everywhere, he found artworthy scenes all around him. The Vanderbilt Building underway next door to the Art Students League attracted his attention, and he later wrote that during rest periods in the life drawing class he and other students looked out the windows to watch progress on the site. One time Young observed an Italian workman breaking stones with a heavy sledge. Fascinated, he called the attention of another student to the man, professing that one day he would like to do a statue of him. Young benefitted not only from what was on the model stand but from what he saw out the window and in the streets below. He later commented that the inspiration for one of his most successful sculptures came to him at this time in New York City.11
Later that year Young enrolled in an illustration class taught by Walter Appleton Clarke (1876-1906), one of the best-known illustrators of the period whose own career had its beginnings when he was a student at the league. After seeing some of the work there, the art editor of Scribner's magazine awarded Clarke his first professional commission. Although his career ended abruptly with his untimely death, Clarke executed many exceptional magazine covers and memorably illustrated Percy MacKeye's modern version of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.12 He also attended an advanced class taught by the illustrator Robert Blum.13
Of all of his experiences, Young felt that a lecture on landscape painting delivered by the American impressionist John H. Twachtman was the most rewarding. Although much of impressionism in America was merely a copy of French style and technique, Twachtman was one of the few who brought to America his own unique interpretation. This was one of the last lectures he delivered, for the next year he died. More than any other experience, this expanded Young's understanding and insights into what art could be:
His talk to us was one of the highlights of my year in New York, and gave me more than all the rest of the year put together. His lecture was just like his standing there and rolling back some curtains, and there were vistas that he showed us. He spoke of people we were vaguely familiar with, but he clarified why they were and why they weren't. He was a creative artist who thought deeply on his art, talking to us, giving us credit for more than we were entitled to, and it made a tremendous impression.14
Young also attended a lecture course on composition taught by academic painters George de Forest Brush and Bryson Burroughs which he considered enlightening and beneficial.15
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The Deseret News, 1903
GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 8 3/4" x 9 3/4"
(MSS. 4, SKETCHBOOK 27,
PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES,
HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY,
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY,
PROVO, UTAH) |
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Young's accomplishments in those eight months in New York were remarkable considering the fact that health problems plagued him constantly. His night job as a newspaper artist for The Salt Lake Tribune altered his sleeping habits so much that he still had trouble sleeping nights, even after studying all day at the league. When he suffered a long bout with the flu, his aunt Net nursed him back to health, but to his great concern he was then plagued by severe headaches. He was greatly relieved when eyeglasses remedied the problem.16
Never indulging in luxuries, his drive to learn all he could absorbed him so that he had little desire for anything else. Whenever he was not studying he visited exhibits and museums. When he found he had to return to Utah a month early—in eight months rather than nine—he was physically and financially exhausted.
Despite the difficulties, he felt rewarded and decided to resume his studies as soon as possible in Paris. At the turn of the century, Paris was the center of the art world and every serious student hoped to study there. The Académie Julian, which was popular with Americans, was established for the purpose of accommodating the ever-growing number of foreigners. Its open enrollment policy made it accessible to Americans, and this is where Young decided to continue his training.
The most prestigious academy was Ecole des Beaux Arts, but it was expensive and the entrance requirements were difficult and competitive. A popular option was the Académie Julian. The académie's founder, M. Julian, had studied art for years but had no particular skill or originality. In fact, his only significant success was opening his académie. Classes ran all day from 7:00 a.m. or 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. Two live models posed simultaneously at each end of the room, as students meticulously drew in charcoal, pencil, or pen.17
Young was influenced by his friend, Lee Richards, who had just completed a proselyting mission for the Mormon church in England. At the conclusion of his mission, Richards toured France where he visited museums, sketched, and talked with American art students. In letters to Young, he urged his friend to study there.18 When Richards returned from England and Young from New York, they finalized their plans to take classes and room together in France.
In order to do this, they both needed money, so Young returned to his old job as a newspaper illustrator and engraver for the The Salt Lake Tribune. Because he had studied in the East, the pay was better now. He received $18 a week, supplemented by free-lance work for the Deseret News. Although he scrimped and saved over $500 that year, he still did not have enough until he obtained an additional $500 from the sale of a piece of property, the same lot where he had played ball as a child, the Eighteenth Ward Square. Mahonri's mother believed that the church owned the land, but in 1900 she learned that it had been given to her husband as part of Brigham Young's estate.19 She asked the church for a settlement; President Lorenzo Snow offered so little that she refused. In October 1901 Joseph F. Smith became president of the church. She again asked for a settlement. This time the full market value was offered, so the family accepted. As Young later recorded: "They were willing to settle with us especially as our portion was to be used for education. President Joseph F. Smith turned over to my mother our share. This allowed my brother Wladmir to go back to Stanford; my other brother Winfield Scott allowed me to use his share so that with what I had saved I had something over $1000. With this I started for Paris."20
He left for Paris in late 1901, beginning with a long train ride to Boston where he was to board a ship to Liverpool. During a three-hour layover in Buffalo, New York, he went straight to the art pavilion. There he saw the work of J. Alden Weir for the first time, several watercolors by Winslow Homer, and recent sculptures by Cyrus Dallin. He had followed Dallin's career with interest and hoped that he would soon have the opportunity to meet him in Boston where he resided.
When his ship was delayed for a few days, Young arranged a meeting with Dallin. He found him to be warm, cordial, and encouraging, and since he had recently returned from studying in Paris, they talked for hours. "Dallin gave me such priceless advice that I still value. The things he said to me were, study the old masters and . . . [in art] general truths are more valuable than particular ones."21
In Liverpool Young sketched the activities of the crowded streets of this English port. He considered watching the people there "better than a Vaudeville show."22 He took a train to London where he visited the British Museum, the National Gallery, and the Tate and Walker galleries, which were vast and important collections that made American museums and galleries seem insignificant by comparison.
He arrived in Paris six weeks later than originally planned. By this time Richards was already attending the Académie Julian and had found an apartment and roommates.23 Needing to make other arrangements, Young moved into a studio at 7 rue Relline with Howard McCormick, a former friend from the Art Students League. Rustic at best, their studio apartment was constructed from materials salvaged from the 1900 World's Fair and lacked such basics as drapes or even a couch.24
Young enrolled in a drawing class taught by Jean-Paul Laurens. Well-known in the Paris art world, Laurens was a life-long friend and confidant of sculptors Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin, two artists who would become important influences on Young. Laurens taught in the same manner Young had become familiar with at the Art Students League. Class began at 8:00 a.m. and ended at 5:00 p.m. with an hour break at noon for lunch. At the start of each class a model was posed and the students commenced drawing, and Laurens would later come in to critique their work.25
Laurens chose drawings to enter in student competitions, and at first Young's work was consistently chosen for the "concours" but later ignored. Young was puzzled. He wrote:
Jean-Paul [Laurens] would indicate the ones he wanted for the Concours by a nod of the head to Raphael, the man of all work. Jean-Paul seemed to indicate that my drawing was to be marked, but Raphael never seemed to see it. An "Ancient" [who had studied at the academy more than one year] suggested that maybe if I crossed his palm, his eyesight might be better. The next day I said, "Raphael, if Jean-Paul marks my drawing today you get two francs." That was all that was needed. My drawings were marked from then on, but I had to continue crossing the palm.26
From the beginning Young did not do as well in drawing as he had hoped and became discouraged. Academic training emphasized tight and controlled technique and meticulously-rendered finished drawings. Constantly struggling with this style of drawing, Young never felt as successful as at the Art Students League. This bothered him. "That's not drawing life," he later wrote. "Life moves. Those fellows are trying to stand still—those models are trying to stand still, and somebody in the class is always yelling at them to hold the pose. They've got to learn when they leave there to draw things that don't pose and are always moving, or they've got to learn to memorize them and draw them afterwards."27Over the course of the year Young spent less time in class and more time visiting the Louvre and Luxembourg museums.
Still his studies in France brought him fresh opportunities and a new circle of influential friends. Initially concerned about a language barrier, to his relief he found that students at the academy spoke English, as most were from America and Great Britain. He already knew Richards and McCormick and soon met other students including the American artist Eugene Higgins who impressed Young with his drawings and paintings of society's outcasts. He sensed in Higgins's work a genuine sentiment that he felt must come from personal experience. Young said that Higgins used to say, "I am not melancholy; when I become melancholy I paint a murder and get rid of it that way."28 Higgins was known as an artist of talent, but, because of his unusual life style, his fellow artists referred to him as a "poor beggar in a garret who paints beggars and miserables because he is one of them."29
During this time Young became close friends with two influential men, Alfred H. Maurer and Leo Stein. He met Stein at the academy "where he was trying to draw." Stein first studied in Italy under the famous art historian Bernard Berenson, then moved to Paris to study painting. As beginning students at the academy, they quickly became good friends:
I have only known one or two men in my life as well informed as he, especially in art. He was still comparatively young, just past thirty, very much alive, interested in everything connected with art, discovering new things in the old and the new and loving to talk about his discoveries. It was later he discovered the modernist. I remember his taking me to see a show by a young Spaniard, named Picasso, held in a furniture store. He was entranced.30
Leo's sister Gertrude Stein, the innovative American writer, joined him in Paris in 1903, and by 1906 their apartment had become a meeting place for avant garde artists, among them Matisse and Picasso. Among the first collectors of modern art, the Steins amassed an impressive collection.
These friendships proved to be lifelong. In later years, for example, whenever Mahonri, Leo, and Alfred were together in Paris, they went to lunch regularly at a favorite spot. Before coming to Paris in 1897, Maurer was an academic painter with training from the National Academy in New York City. In 1904, when he became good friends with Gertrude and Leo Stein, he converted to modernism. One of the first Americans to comprehend the art of Matisse and the Fauves, Maurer incorporated similar elements into his work. After Maurer's thirty-sixth birthday, Young said of him, "From that day on he painted like a wild man. He was never the lighthearted, gay Alfy we had known."31
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Alfy (A. H. MAURER), 1902
CONTE ON PAPER, 10" x 6"
(©COURTESY MUSEUM OF ART,
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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It is worth noting that among Young's closest and most enduring friends, Stein and Maurer were influential figures in the history of modernism. These associations intimately acquainted Young with the movement, but he never found himself drawn to it. Throughout his life he expressed only disdain for modern art. Intellectually and emotionally tied to the pioneers of modernism, Young could have been in on the ground level of the avant-garde, but his own avenue of expression remained realism.
During the Easter recess of 1902, a group of students invited Young to travel to Italy with them. No longer the most influential art center, Italy still held a powerful hold on artists, as it had for centuries, as a living museum. At first reluctant because of the cost involved, Young finally decided it would be a valuable learning experience. Most of the students viewed the trip as a vacation; Young considered it an education. During the three weeks he spent there, he visited Venice, Florence, Milan, Padua, and Rome. Thoughout the trip he kept a sketchbook journal of drawings and notes. Each night he returned to his room to go over his sketches, some of which later inspired a number of important works: "From that most revealing trip I brought back a number of ideas and observations that have been invaluable to me. . . . I discovered that modern pictures were too simple—that is there wasn't nearly as much of interest in them as in the Italian ones. In most Italian pictures . . . there was something to look at wherever one looked."32 In reviews of Young's later works, critics often compared his work to, and found strong influences from, the masters of the Italian Renaissance whose works were similarly full of life and energy. Undoubtedly their impact on Young during his Italy trip strengthened his resolve to stay with realism.
Young returned to Paris and soon branched out into other mediums, feeling more hopeful about oil painting, which up until this time had been difficult and frustrating. He also started making prints. His previous experience with printmaking as a newspaper artist had taught him much about the technical aspects of the craft, but now he could turn his attention completely to printmaking as an art. His first print, a view of the famous Spanish Steps in Rome, was based on a sketch he had done in Italy. He also completed a print of an unused blacksmith's forge near the apartment he and Alma Wright now shared. The Forge Rue St. Jacques was the result. The forge was tucked away in an old dilapidated architectural façade that had been converted to a depot and outlet for coal, wood, and wine. Attracted to the subject since childhood, Young expressed his fascination for forges and farriers. He later wrote, "I didn't go in for such things as blacksmith tools, though I never passed a blacksmith shop without stopping and watching the smith at his work."33 The work was displayed to favorable response at the first public exhibit of his etchings in 1904.34
In the fall of 1902 Young decided to turn to sculpture. After returning from Italy he went with Maurer to Chesey for a short vacation, where he spent time reviewing what he had accomplished and planning his future. Lower in class standing at the Académie Julian than at the Art Students League, he was discouraged with his progress in drawing and no doubt questioned his future as an illustrator. He felt that a change might do him good:
The next winter I determined to go back to my earliest love, and enter the modeling class at Julian's under Raoul Verlet. After the first month, I never took criticism from M. Verlet. I had no sympathy with his sculpture or his point of view. My studies in the Luxembourg, the Louvre, and the trip to Italy had given me a very different idea of what sculpture should be. In the spring, I modeled, in my studio, my first original work The Shoveler followed by Man Tired.35
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The Shoveler, 1903
BRONZE, 10 3/4"
(MUSEUM OF CHURCH HISTORY
AND ART, THE CHURCH OF JESUS
CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS,
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH)
PHOTO BY R. T. CLARK |
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Sculpture may have been his earliest love, but this was Young's first sculpture class and the first time he had worked in the medium to any extent. It is interesting that his formal training in sculpture, or in art in general, for the remainder of his stay in Paris was not extensive. From then on he attended a few drawing classes now and then at the Académie Delacluze. Later he studied with Jean-Antoine Injalbert for two or three months at La Grande Chaumiere Académie Colarossi. Young considered Injalbert his greatest teacher and said, "He may not have been a great sculptor but for me, he was much more important—he was a master sculptor in the sense a master plummer is a master plummer, or a master carpenter is a master carpenter, in other words he knew his job."36
That same fall Howard McCormick returned to America. At about the same time Al Wright arrived from Salt Lake City, so Young and Wright arranged to share accommodations. They both worked in Young's studio and slept in Wright's apartment. By this time there was quite a group of Utahns studying in Paris. That same year, Louise Richards arrived, joining the ranks of the small colony of former Harwood pupils: Lee Richards, Alma Wright, and Young.
Although this period marks the beginning of Young's sculptures of laborers, in an article published in 1924 Young confirmed that the theme occurred to him as early as 1897.37 In fact, images of workers appear in many of his early drawings and sketchbooks. Given the artist's background, it is not surprising that he would be drawn to this subject. Work was the lifeblood of pioneer Utah. The theme quickly became his deeply-felt personal statement: "You might say this is my tribute to honest toil."38
The theme of labor in Young's art was a natural extension of his life and times. To survive in the Great Basin of the Rocky Mountains, hard work was a way of life—preached from the pulpit and practiced everyday. For Young, this sentiment would find expression in his Sea Gull Monument and culminate in his This is the Place Monument. But hard-working subsistence was more than a pioneer heritage; it was central to life in America, and had already been featured in the paintings of Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, and Thomas Eakins, as well as in the poetry of Walt Whitman.39 At the turn of the twentieth century the country and particularly the East experienced a major upheaval. Emerging as a manufacturing giant after the Civil War, the nation became industrialized, vast fortunes were made, and urban populations were created. To counterbalance the power of corporate management, labor began to assert its own power. By 1905 the American Federation of Labor reached 1.5 million members, with other labor unions increasing rapidly. Strikes were frequent and the conflicts and inequities brought by industrial growth found expression in art and literature of the period under the banner of naturalism and realism, specifically in the writings of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, and the paintings of the Ashcan school.
During the first decade of the new century alone, nine million people immigrated to the United States. More people meant more construction. In this restless milieu the art that emerged was unrefined and drew its vitality from street life. When Young studied in New York City, this new art was in its infancy. In just over a decade he would return to become a significant American sculptor associated with the Ashcan school.
It was in Europe, however, that Young discovered the artistic potential of common labor—particularly in sculpture. By the end of the nineteenth century the subject was well established in France, having first appeared in French painting and to a lesser extent in sculpture shortly after the revolution of 1848. As a result of the growing influence of labor movements and the size of the labor force, combined with the productivity of the Industrial Revolution, the worker had changed the face of Europe and America. The noble qualities of a simple life and honest work attracted artists.
Painters such as Courbet and Millet produced some of the most famous and memorable images in this genre. Millet's work especially became widely known and popular both in Europe and America. Young became aware of Millet's work through magazine illustrations.
In sculpture, the acceptance and popularity of people doing menial jobs grew more slowly. Mid-century classical figures appeared with allegorical references to work. For example, a nude female holding a string of fish was meant to represent the work of fishermen. This type of representation remained unchanged for several decades. Allied with the tradition of classical French sculpture and the academic style, these representations had little to do with real life.40
It was not until the 1880s that sculptures of working peasants finally began to take on the realism of a Courbet or Millet painting. Allegorical depictions gave way to figures actually doing work. Even after literal depictions replaced classical idealizations, the nude still remained unchallenged as the basic mode of representation. Alfred Boucher's To the Earth,41 exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1890, depicted a nude man in the act of shoveling.
By the last two decades of the century believable images, contemporary figures, authentic in dress and realistic in pose, began to appear in France and the rest of Europe. In Italy as early as 1880 D'Orsi's Proximus Tuus and Vela's The Victims of Labor in 1882 preceded the continental trend. However, it was the Belgian artist Constantin Meunier who first gained international attention. Meunier began his career as a painter, although he was also trained in sculpture. Primarily known until 1880 for his somber religious paintings, he turned, without explanation, to sculpture. Some say this resulted from his spending time in the industrial and mining regions of his country, where van Gogh was living—though the two never met—where he experienced an awakening of social consciousness. He tried painting laborers but soon found that the canvas was inadequate to express his deep feelings. The heroism of common physical exertion demanded a heroic medium—sculpture. In his native Belgium he became a leader of the avant-garde, then began to gain recognition in France as well when he sent paintings, then sculptures, to the Paris Salon beginning in 1881. Until his death in 1905 he exhibited variations on the same topic almost every year at the salon and became an admired member of the French artistic community. In a study of Meunier's life, Christian Brinton wrote: "To have led an art from palace to factory, to have delivered her from the hands of king, priest and noble patron and presented her unfettered to the people, is not the least triumph of the nineteenth century."42
Jules Dalou was the first French sculptor of note to take up the theme of the contemporary worker. Next to Auguste Rodin, Dalou was France's most talented and well-known sculptor. He began his career with decorative sculpture for hotels and homes of the rich but later turned to monumental sculpture, doing only subjects that were personally important to him. We find laborers in his work as early as 1879, the year he began his monumental Triumph of the Republic, which took ten years to complete. Amid the monument's neobaroque and allegorical splendor, Dalou sculpted a blacksmith in contemporary dress. This was a new kind of worker, the modern workman, in his apron and sabots. His muscular body and defiant glance give the figure a forceful dignity. In the 1890s Dalou produced a model for a workers' monument that was never completed. The work exists today in a small plaster model and small figure studies. When asked about his proposed Monument to Workers, Dalou replied that such a monument was an inevitable necessity of modern times; it was "in the air."43 By the end of the nineteenth century, the theme of labor reached such a status that not only Dalou but Rodin, the most famous sculptor of the age, designed a colossal monument to it. Unfortunately it too never progressed beyond the design stage. Rodin's Tower of Labor would have been more universal than anything previously conceived. The monument consisted of a tall central column topped with two large winged figures and surrounded by a spiral staircase. On the column workers were represented in relief, and as one ascended the type of labor changed from manual to mental. Rodin called it a gospel of labor. "The Middle Ages had their cathedrals," he wrote. "The soul of the populace was expressed through them, their stones were like the phrases of a canticle; they sang the enthusiasm of popular faith . . . Today, the people believe above all else in work; almost everyone puts his faith in it. Thus it is to work, to work the King, that I wish to raise a monument which would be at once architectural and sculptural."44
As with so many artists of that period, Young's early works were influenced by Rodin. This can be seen in general poses and figure types, but modeling of the surface shows Young's greatest debt to Rodin. A master of surface, Rodin's work came to life through his impressionistic sensitivity to the play of light. Young made at least two visits to Rodin's studio. Once when he went with an English friend, an assistant invited the young men to look around the studio and Young marvelled at the wonderful studies of arms, legs, hands, and torsos scattered throughout the room. As he studied these pieces, Rodin himself walked in:
After looking around and nodding to us he [Rodin] proceeded to inspect and criticize the work being done. I remember very distinctly seeing him examine very attentively and very closely. It was then for the first time I realized that he was very short-sighted. After inspecting the surface with his eyes very close to the marble, he took a pencil and . . . marked some corrections and said a few words to the carver and then passed on. After he had gone over the other works being carved, he came over and greeted us very simply and departed. Unfortunately I didn't understand French well enough to know what he said, and I don't remember my friend's translation.45
Young felt that the best of Rodin's works were small enough to be handled, that the greatest possible enjoyment came from feeling with one's fingers. In many ways the same can be said of Young's early statues. They are small pieces with strong emphasis on the surface modeling, and various textures and subtle light-and-shadow-play were rendered with skill to enhance the overall effect. It was Meunier and Dalou, however, rather than Rodin, who influenced Young's art directly. Not only the theme but also the poses are more like theirs than Rodin's. Young added his own unique statement, rendering laborers in classical Greek and Renaissance style with emphasis on movement and clad in contemporary apparel.
His first sculpture in Paris was a small statuette of a man with a shovel. By this time Young had become discouraged with his classes at the Académie Julian and in 1903 began to work more on his own. After obtaining some clay, he set up a stand and armature in his studio and began working on a piece he called The Shoveler.
His inspiration came from the streets where he observed workers and, with an image in mind one day, retired quickly to his studio and began to sculpt. As the work progressed, he returned to make sketches to better capture the pose and feeling. He relied extensively on these sketches. Whenever he went out walking he stopped and drew the workers he saw, considering this more valuable than any posed model to achieve the feeling he wanted.
The Shoveler depicts a man lifting a heavy spade of earth. The shovel handle bends and his back bows under the strain. Stripped to the waist, the subject clearly exposes his taut, straining muscles. The heavy, baggy trousers give the figure a contemporary and realistic feeling.
Although the workers Young saw in the streets inspired this piece, Alfred Boucher's sculpture of a man shoveling entitled To the Earth could have influenced Young as well. This life-sized marble was exhibited at the salon some twelve years earlier where it won critical acclaim. Afterward it became part of the Musee Galiera collection on permanent display. Young mentioned seeing it: "It was beautifully modeled and cut in marble but it didn't shovel and didn't give me the impression I perceived from the workmen, going about their jobs of removing dirt etc, from one place to another [as] I saw everywhere in the streets, so I tried a shoveler of my own."46 Although more conservative and traditional, Boucher's classical nude has a similar pose. The difference is in Young's more honest, contemporary feeling which portrays an authentic street worker. Young saw more nobility in that than in any classical nude.
Young immediately began another work which he called Man Tired.Based on direct observation as before, the idea came to him while walking the narrow streets that meander off the main boulevards of Paris. There he saw a man seated on a doorstep dressed in a laborer's clothing, tired and bent over from what seemed a hard day's work. The artist made a quick sketch and went back to his studio to start another statuette, Man Tired.47 The feeling of introspection and pathos in this project was unusual in Young's work, which was generally more active in feel and dynamic in pose. Seated quietly, dressed in the traditional garb of a French worker—baggy trousers, thin shirt, and brimmed hat—the worker rests on a block representing a door step, slumped over with his head on his hand, elbows on his knees. The figure exudes a feeling of complete exhaustion; his bowed back and relaxed arms express the muscular figure of a laborer.
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Man Tired (Tired Out), 1903
BRONZE, 9"
(LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM
OF ART, MR. AND MRS. ALLEN C.
BALCH COLLECTION)
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Man Tired shows the influence of a popular theme of the time: society's outcasts. This dominated Picasso's work of the Blue Period, though Picasso did not paint laborers. Young's close friend Eugene Higgins did. Higgins emphasized huddled, weary masses in both drawings and paintings. Two of Meunier's sculptures were also similar to Man Tired in theme and pose—Miner Crouching and Iron Puddler. They too emphasized the weary, exhausted laborer and provide an example of heroic-sized bronze sculptures that Young longed to do. Young saw his figures representing more than common laborers or outcasts—they were heroic and profound expressions of humanity. From the beginning he wanted these sculptures cast on a monumental scale, but at this point finances would never allow it. Young did a significant drawing during the period that reveals how he envisioned his work. The drawing, dated 1904, is of a Monument to Labor. In it the large central relief is dominated by The Shoveler, while Man Tired is positioned like Rodin's The Thinker in The Gates of Hell, which Rodin executed between 1880 and 1890. The plaster casts were first exhibited to the public in 1900. On one occasion Young said regarding Meunier's monumental sculptures: "In this quality he is outstanding among men of his day. It lies in his architectural sense of the figure; a quality Rodin was so lacking in. All Meunier's figures are larger than life no matter what their actual measurements. Few modern sculptors have had this quality and none in greater quantity than Meunier."48
Another of Young's works resembles Meunier. In 1904 he produced a piece called Stevedore, portraying a rugged dock hand leaning forward under the weight of a heavy load. The subject makes his way up a small incline, a dock plank, which Young hints at on the figure's base. The surface is roughly textured, adding to the realism and the feeling of life and animation. Of all the works Young did in Paris, Stevedore is most like, and seems to be inspired by, a Meunier sculpture of the same subject. (This particular work is not the best known Stevedore by Meunier, which was erected as a life-size statue in Belgium's port city of Antwerp. This work was of a man carrying a heavy load on his back—almost identical to Young's.)
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Stevedore, 1904
BRONZE, 13 3/4"
(THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
OF ART, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK,
ROGERS FUND, 1914) |
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The Shoveler and Man Tired brought Young delayed recognition. At first the statuettes remained in the studio without particular notice from friends or visitors. Then Young entered them in the American Art Association show in Paris in the winter of 1903. Prominent American sculptor Paul Bartlett, one of the judges, specifically singled out Young's works and spoke highly of them. Pictures of both sculptures appeared in the Paris Herald in a section devoted to the show. The Herald gave a luncheon for several of the exhibitors and included Young. Later Young sent the pieces to the Paris Salon where they were prominently displayed in the main gallery circle and again received notable mention, this time from French critics.49
In the midst of this success, Young's funds ran out. His uncle, John W. Young, then in Paris, offered to pay his way home if he would travel with him. So in the summer of 1903 Mahonri found himself back in Utah where he visited friends and renewed acquaintances, taking a sketching trip with Alma Wright, also just back from Paris. The two artists travelled to Cache Valley, then to Park City where they visited a school friend, Pauline Grew, and her husband, Arthur B. Davies. The drawings in Young's sketchbooks attest to the extent of his Utah travels.50
At the end of a pleasant and productive summer, Young was elated to find that his mother had borrowed enough money to enable him to return to Paris. En route Young took time in New York to visit friends and catch up on trends.51
In Paris he immediately enrolled in an anatomy class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Even though he had studied anatomy with John Hafen in Salt Lake City and Kenyon Cox at the Art Students League, he still felt deficient in this area. Nevertheless his anatomy studies did not last long. In the overcrowded lecture room, the air was foul from cadavers and formaldehyde. After each class he came down with violent headaches and eventually had to drop the course.52
During his last two years in Paris he worked more independently than ever, sketching and drawing constantly. He continued to sculpt and completed three fine pieces—two on the theme of labor and a small statuette of his friend Alfred Maurer entitled Alfy. One of these works would later launch his career in America, a small statuette he called Bovet-Arthur—A Laborer.
One day a man named Bovet-Arthur knocked at Young's door, asking if the artist needed a model. Taken by his appearance, Young decided to hire him and the two became good friends. Engaged in long conversations as Young worked, the artist learned that Bovet-Arthur was not a typical laborer. He was born into an upper-middle class family, his father had lost his money, and Bovet-Arthur was compelled to work from early spring until late fall as a boatman on the canals. In the winter the model returned to Paris. Because work was scarce this time of year, he often frequented the Louvre and other museums to keep warm as much as to admire the art. During breaks Young told Bovet-Arthur what he knew about art; in return, the model read to him the verses he wrote about the great masterpieces he had seen.53
Young began this work the morning they met, initially drawing sketches of Bovet-Arthur, then fashioning a small statuette dressed in the typical thin undershirt and baggy corduroy trousers of a Parisian workman. He posed the figure in a way that showed his dignified humility. The work took two weeks to complete. Afterward Young had the piece cast in bronze, and the next year he entered it in the Paris Salon.54
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left:
Bovet-Arthur, 1904
CONTE ON PAPER,
10" x 6 1/2"
(MSS. 4, SKETCHBOOK 28, PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVES, HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY, BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY, PROVO, UTAH) |
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right:
Bovet-Arthur—A Laborer, 1904
BRONZE, 16"
(©COURTESY MUSEUM OF ART,
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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Bovet-Arthur's standing pose, which is proud but not pretentious, hints at a genuine respect for the man and what he stood for. Although his dress defines him as a worker, his pose is heroic. It is reminiscent of Meunier's Stevedore which stands strong and defiant and later became the symbol of the port city of Antwerp. A full-scale copy of this figure was displayed in the Luxembourg Palace where Young probably saw it. An over-life-sized work by Dalou, The Great Peasant, was completed and shown around 1900 which is similar to Bovet-Arthur as well in the contrapposto positioning of the body, the turn of the head, and the noble yet humble downward glance.
A short time after completing Bovet-Arthur—A Laborer, Young invited his friend John Gregory to see it. Gregory had criticized The Shoveler and Man Tired as unfinished, but when he saw Bovet-Arthur he said—not at the time but later privately—that he could no longer find fault with Young's work.55
The artist began another small sculpture, The Chiseler. As with The Shoveler and Man Tired, his inspiration came from observing working men in the streets. However, this sculpture was nude. Originally Young envisioned it in baggy trousers but forgot to cover the clay adequately one evening and found it the next day cracked in five places. Somewhat discouraged, Young made the necessary adaptations and found that the piece turned out differently from what he had envisioned.56
The finished work reminds one of a Renaissance or classical piece. A muscular man crouches over a large block of stone, one knee on the block, the other foot on the ground. In one hand a chisel is held to the block, while the other holds a hammer ready to strike. The compact yet active pose is reminiscent of Myron's ancient Discobolus. Young admired Greek sculpture, not only for its form but for its "intense, vibrating sense of life."57 Referring to the Discobolus, Young wrote:
How does it achieve this quality [its compactness, as he called it] in such a high degree? By nothing else than by line. By line it achieves its superb unity and also its marvelous sense of movement—movement rhythmical and swift. It, in all its parts, suggests previous positions and others to follow. Nothing is static, and yet, such is the masterly use of the interplay of lines that the statue as a statue maintains a perfect equilibrium and functions perfectly within its total space.58
With reference to the placement of the figure on a block, as well as to the modeling and treatment of surfaces, The Chiseler can be compared to Rodin's The Thinker. With regard to the pose and subject, it is reminiscent of Dalou. This, more than any other work the artist did in Paris, had the closest affinity to the Beaux Arts style still prevalent at the time.
The Chiseler was the first of a series of laborers in the same general pose—the figure crouching over his work in the act of striking an object. Works later done in New York City that follow this theme include The Blacksmith, The Farrier, and The Driller, as well as Man Sawing. Yet his works done in Paris are considered among his best. Nearly two decades later, in 1924 when Young was well established, an article on his laborers was illustrated with these Paris sculptures. 59
The last piece Young did in France was a full-length portrait statuette of Alfred Maurer with whom he had become close. Young wanted to portray his friend as he had seen him so many times with hat, cape, and walking stick standing on the curb, ready to cross the street. Of all his Paris works, this is the most personal and expressive in form and surface modeling, a free interpretation of the subject rather than an exact likeness. The active and flowing surface and lack of detail give the impression of the artistic type, a sense of intrigue and mystery befitting the bohemian artist. This is the first of many of Young's portraits of artists.
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Alfy (A. H. MAURER), 1904
BRONZE, 15"
(©COURTESY MUSEUM OF ART,
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.) |
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As Young finished The Chiseler and Alfy, LDS apostle Heber J. Grant visited Paris on a tour of the church's French mission. A close friend of Young's parents, Grant asked him if there was anything he needed. Young said he was doing fine but wished he had the money to cast his statuettes in bronze. Grant gave him one hundred dollars. He also promised to write friends in Salt Lake City to see if they would also contribute. As a result, Young was able to cast several of his works before leaving Europe.60
Sensing that his time abroad was growing short, in 1905 Young decided to make a final trip to Italy. He considered Italy "the mother of art" and regretted that his first trip had been short. This time he scheduled a four-month itinerary. He visited Genoa, Pisa, Rome, Florence, and Padua, always sketching and painting. He felt that this was an ideal finale to his time in Europe.
Later, when Young was teaching at the Art Students League, the American artist Rockwell Kent asked if he recommended studying in Europe. In a letter, Young advised him to get the fundamentals in the United States and then study in Europe, as he had done. In his journal he wrote:
The last two years abroad were the most valuable. During them, something of the ten years of struggle and study began to take form and fairly definite conclusions were reached. I had been to London several times and I knew pretty thoroughly what was in Paris, but a second trip to Italy was like adding up a long line of figures. How clearly I remembered a saying of Sargent's that one needed ten years of study. In the impatience of youth how ridiculous that seemed; years were so long and contained such infinite possibilities. I remembered Salt Lake too, and our doctor, Harry B. Niles saying, "Study until you are forty, and you'll know more than anybody in the world." I knew I had much still to learn but I felt I had laid down a fairly solid foundation.61
Concerning American artists who studied abroad during this period, Milton Brown wrote, "The majority collected a particular bag of tricks, assumed the artist's mien, and returned to a culture which had suddenly become unreceptive."62 This may have been true of many artists who returned disappointed to their homeland, but for Young his education in Paris was more than a bag of tricks. In Paris he came into his own. Later in life he was asked how he accounted for his success as a student:
They [other students] were just learning one thing . . . I could do what they were doing in Salt Lake or New York, if I could get a model, but I couldn't go to the Louvre. . . . I was trying to get as broad a base as possible on which to grow. That's why I worked at everything and took time to go to all the museums and a great deal of exhibitions. I had long made up my mind not to loaf in my studio. If I wasn't working I went out and if I did nothing else I just watched the passing show. And I'm not so sure I could have done better.63
Notes
1. The Kennedy Galleries Are Host to the Hundredth Anniversary Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures by 100 Artists Associated with The Art Students League of New York, Exhibition Catalogue (New York: The Art Students League and the Kennedy Galleries, 1975), 15-24.
2. Mahonri M. Young, "Notes at the Beginning," in Mahonri M. Young: Retrospective Exhibition (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1940), 51.
3. Mahonri M. Young, "Miscellaneous (as filed by Mahonri M. Young: continued)," Mahonri M. Young Collection, Mss. 4, box 6, folder 38, Archives and Manuscripts, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
4. Ibid.
5. Young, "Etching," box 5, folder 51.
6. Young, "Miscellaneous (as filed by Mahonri M. Young: continued)."
7. Young, "Cox, Kenyon," box 5, folder 33.
8. Young, "Miscellaneous (as filed by Mahonri M. Young: continued)."
9. Ibid.
10. Kenyon Cox, The Classic Point of View (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1980), xlix-lv.
11. Young, "Heavy Sledge and Man with a Pick," box 6, folder 6.
12. Walt and Roger Reed, The Illustrator in America, 1880-1980: A Century of Illustration (New York: Madison Square Press, Inc., 1984), 31.
13. Young, "Miscellaneous (as filed by Mahonri M. Young: continued)."
14. Young, "Notes at the Beginning," box 6, folder 42.
15. Young, "The Salt Lake Tribune," box 7, folder 10.
16. Young, "Miscellaneous (as filed by Mahonri M. Young: continued)."
17. Patricia J. Pierce, The Ten (Hingham, MA: Pierce Galleries, Inc., 1976), 9.
18. Young, "Richards, Lee Greene," box 7, folder 5.
19. Young, "Eighteeneth Ward Square," box 5, folder 49.
20. Young, "Notes at the Beginning."
21. Ibid.
22. Young, "Boston to Liverpool," box 5, folder 15.
23. Young, "Richards, Lee Greene."
24. Young, "Barnard, George Grey," box 5, folder 8.
25. Young, "Julian Academy, 1901-2; Jean-Paul Laurens' class," box 6, folder 18.
26. Young, "Notes at the Beginning," Mahonri M. Young: Retrospective Exhibition, 51.
27. Young, "Miscellaneous (as filed by Mahonri M. Young: continued.)"
28. Young, "Glackens, William J.," box 5, folder 63.
29. Milton W. Brown, American Painting From the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 28-31.
30. Young, "Notes at the Beginning."
31. Elizabeth McCausland, A. H. Maurer (New York: A. A. Wyn, Inc., for the Walker Art Center, 1951), 71, 237.
32. Young, "Paris, 1901-1905, 1923-1925," box 6, folder 45.
33. Young, "Millet, J. F.," box 6, folder 35.
34. Young, "Etching."
35. Young, "Notes at the Beginning," Mahonri M. Young: Retrospective Exhibition, 53.
36. Young, "Notes at the Beginning."
37. "Town Builders of Today," Survey 52 (1 July 1924): 393.
38. Ibid. The Pioneers knew that settling the Valley of the Great Salt Lake could only be achieved through hard work. The first pioneers making their way to the area met Jim Bridger, who was reported to have said he would give one thousand dollars for the first bushel of corn raised in the valley. Although this statement was probably never made, it became a popular saying in Mormon lore, a symbol that with God's help and hard work they could beat the odds. In his journal Brigham Young wrote "[the valley is] a place where a good living will require hard labor," but it would "be coveted by no other people" (Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: Economic History of the Latter-day Saints [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958], 41). Hard work was preached from the pulpit and practiced in daily life. Consider the sermon delivered by Brigham Young from the tabernacle in June 1873:
Follow the spirit of improvement and labor. All the capital there is upon the earth is the bone and sinew of working men and women. . . . Labor builds our meeting houses, temples, court houses, fine halls for music and fine school houses; it is labor that teaches our children, and makes them acquainted with the various branches of education, that makes them proficient in their own language and in other languages understood by the children of men; and all this enhances the wealth and the glory and the comfort of any people on the earth (Journal of Discourses, 16 [Liverpool, 1874]: 66).
39. See Wayne Craven, American Art: History on Culture (Madison, WI: Brown and Benchmark, 1994), 330.
40. John M. Hunisak, "Images of Workers: From Genre Treatment and Heroic Nudity to the Monument to Labor," in Peter Fusco and H. W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin, French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture for North American Collections (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980), 52.
41. Boucher's piece is illustrated in ibid., 53.
42. Frank Owen Payne, "The Tribute of American Sculpture to Labor," Art and Archaeology 6 (Aug. 1917): 83.
43. Hunisak in Fusco and Janson, 59. Today Dalou is considered the most significant sculptor of contemporary labor in nineteenth-century France.
44. Ibid.
45. Young, "Rodin, Auguste," box 7, folder 7.
46. Young, "Gregory, John," box 6, folder 1.
47. Ibid.
48. Young, "Millet, J. F."
49. Young, "Gregory, John."
50. Young, "Trip Home, 1903 and 1905," box 7, folder 18.
51. Ibid.
52. Young, "Julian Academy, 1901-2; Jean-Paul Laurens' Class."
53. Young, "Bovet-Arthur— A Laborer," box 5, folder 16.
54. Ibid.
55. Young, "Gregory, John."
56. Ibid.
57. Young, "Mahonri Young to Mss. Mannes, April 10, 1928," box 3.
58. Ibid.
59. "Town Builders of Today."
60. Young, "Paris, 1901-1905, 1923-1925."
61. Young, "Notes at the Beginning," Mahonri M. Young: Retrospective Exhibition, 56.
62. Milton W. Brown et al., American Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Decorative Arts, Photography (New York: Prentice Hall, Inc., Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 488.
63. Young, "Gregory, John."
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The First Harvest
SEA GULL MONUMENT, 1912-13
BRONZE, 50" x 60"
TEMPLE SQUARE,
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
PHOTO BY CRAIG LAW |
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Loading Hay in a Farm Yard
PAPER/PASTEL, 19" x 22"
(©COURTESY MUSEUM OF ART,
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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