Such things are always debatable, but Toone says that Young is probably Utah's most famous artist, both nationally and internationally." He had an impressive reputation during his life time." Unfortunately, says Toone, Young has been somewhat neglected inthe past 40 years. A couple of factors come into play. One is the shifting trends of popularity in the art world—representationalism is out and modernism is in. And the other is that nothing has been done to promote awareness of Young'sartistic contributions.

But Toone would like to change all that. As a student at BYU, he studied Young, but the book is primarily based on his dissertation for his doctorate in art history at Penn State. Toone currently teaches art history at Utah State University. Young is known mostly as a sculptor, but he was also a painter and a drawer. "I don't think most people realize how significan this contribution is," Toone says.

Mahonri Young was born Aug 9, 1877, in Salt Lake City, a son of Mahonri Moriancumer and Agnes Mackintosh Young, and a grandson of Brigham Young. He spent his first eight years living at the Deseret Woolen Mills, which were run by his father. But with his father's death, the family moved into town, and it was there as a teenager that Young received his first art instruction under James T. Harwood.

Young worked as a sketch artist for Salt Lake newspapers so he could earn enough money to study in the East. He left in 1899 for the Art Students League in New York City. This was followed in 1901 by studies at the Academie Julian in Paris. Returning to Utah in 1905, Young tried to build a career as a sculptor, but commissions were hard to come by and funds were scarce. He decided that if he was going to have a career in art, he would have to move to New York City, which he did in 1910. There he finally began to find both work and recognition, but he also maintained his ties with home and was pleased in 1912 when he received a commission from the LDS Church to do the Sea Gull Monument.

Over the next three decades, Young also received major commissions from the American Museum of Natural History, the American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Paris, and the 20th Century Fox Film Studios in Hollywood, Calif. It was during this time, too, that he completed a series of bronzes of boxers that brought a great deal of recognition. In1941, Life magazine referred to Young as "the George Bellows of American sculpture." Then came the commission to do the This Is The Place Monument, to be unveiled as part of the church's centennial celebration of the arrival of the Mormon pioneers.

Young's major competition for this commission was Utah sculptor Avard Fairbanks, and the selection process was long and somewhat frustrating. When Young was finally awarded the job, he was ecstatic. "This will fittingly memorialize, in an appropriate and substantial manner, the achievements of the Pioneers," he wrote to a friend. "I would rather have the This is the Place commission than any other that could come to me." At the dedication of what Young referred to as "The Big Job," the sculptor was allowed a minute to speak. "My friends, in two weeks, come the ninth of August, I will be 70 years old. This is the greatest day of my life. I thank you," he told the audience.

One more major commission would come his way, however, and it was also a tribute to his famous grandfather: the Brigham Young statue for the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol. These large pieces are what Young is most known for, but his career included a vast amount of work. At his death in 1957, Toone says, "his estate alone included 320 pieces of sculpture, 590 oil paintings, 5,500 watercolors, 2,600 prints and thousands of drawings." Although he worked extensively in other media, it was sculpture that brought him his first recognition and success as well as his largest and most important commissions. It was, Toone says, "the heart of his career."

But Young's legacy includes more than just the works he left behind. "It was Young and others who, at the beginning of the 20th century, brought sculpture off its pedestal and transformed it into a free and independent means of expression," Toone writes. Art historians feel one of the major trends of art during this time was to win for sculpture "the right to be as independent as easel painting. "Young's work, especially his small bronzes of laborers and prize fighters, played a significant role in the push for independence and free form," Toone says. "This alone has assured him a significant place in the history of American sculpture."

In writing his book, Toone had access to Young's personal journals and correspondence. These were extensive because in his later life, Young began writing his life history with the idea of getting it published. Toone also had materials collected by Young's friend Jack Sears, who also had ideas of writing a book about the sculptor. Neither of those books came to print, but the materials provide a great deal of insight into and detail of Young's life.

In choosing the book for the Evans Award, judges noted that it is"an elegant book, tells us about the man, his art and a western culture." "He was quite an individual," says Toone, who over the course of writing the book has come to know Young quite well. "He was a very charismatic figure." Toone admires Young's work and values the contribution he made to 20th century art. But, as much as anything, he admires Young's tenacity.

Young was not the first Utahn to study in Paris, but he had to do it all on his own. His family was not wealthy, and the church did not pay his way. "He could have given up so many times," Toone says. "He really worked very hard." In summing up his own life, Young wrote: "The challenge to everyman's conscience is to choose for his life's work the thing he loves to do, and once he has decided upon a course, he must work conscientiously to learn about it. There is in the heart of an ambitious, sincere man—to do well—that which in his honest opinion he knows to be right." And that message, too, as much as the tribute to the Mormon pioneers, is etched in stone and bronze at the mouth of Emigration Canyon.

Association for Mormon Letters, Benson Young Parkinson
Mahonri Young is a name that has resonated for me almost as long as I've been aware of our history. Here was a fellow Mormon (a relative no less), who had managed to achieve national prominence in art and use it to do something significant with his pioneer heritage, and with a given name even more unusual than mine. I didn't know much about him (I believe my grandfather must have known him), but I figured he was someone Mormons could look to as a source of pride, and perhaps as a model for how young Latter-day Saints might make their way in the world of art.

My impression on reading Thomas E. Toone's new biography is that in large measure I was right—Young's achievement is monumental (what else do you call epical public statuary), and he plays out, in the course of his life story, all the big themes in the lives of Mormon artists, visual and literary.

Mahonri Mackintosh Young was born in 1877 in Salt Lake City, the youngest grandchild of Brigham Young born while Brigham was alive. He spent his early years near the mouth of Parleys Canyon on the grounds of the old Deseret Woolen Mills, which his father owned and ran. When Mahonri's father died, his mother moved the family to Salt Lake.

Mahonri conceived his artistic vocation in childhood, dropped out of high school after the eighth grade, studied under James Harwood, one of the Paris art missionaries, and worked as a newspaper artist and engraver to earn money to pursue his education abroad. He learned the basics at the Art Students League in New York, and then refined his craft at the Academie Julian in Paris and on intensive sketching tours in France and Italy. (Though he endured teasing for his unusual name as a boy, he came to view it as an asset, signing himself M. M. Young, then Mahonri Young, then just Mahonri.)

In 1907 Mahonri married Cecelia Sharp in Salt Lake City, not in the temple, and with her had two children. He spent the years 1906-09 in Salt Lake, trying to scratch out a living as an artist. He sensed rightly that the time was ripe for a sculptor in Utah, that his generation would be the one erecting monuments to their pioneer parents and grandparents. The sculptor also has to figure out how to make a living in the meantime.

He convinced B. H. Roberts to sit for a bust, which received good notices in the Salt Lake papers, but which failed to bring any commissions. He did a sculpture in butter at the Utah State Fair and wrangled a contract to do the friezes on the Deseret Gym. He found the LDS Church enthusiastic about his idea for a seagull monument but was unable at that time to come up with the money. They did give him a commission for a statue of Joseph Smith, entrusting him with Joseph's death mask, but apparently paid him so poorly that Mahonri could not afford a studio or adequate plaster or clay. He was dissatisfied with the finished Joseph, and the Church rejected it. Desperate, he told them if they would let him do the matching statue of Hyrum, he would include another statue of Joseph at no additional charge. They agreed, and this time secured for him a studio, and he completed the pair to their satisfaction. (They are now located immediately south of the Salt Lake Temple but originally stood in alcoves in one of the big east doors.)

He bid for sculptures and friezes for the Technical Arts building of the Salt Lake High School, but still struggled to make a living. At one point he was reduced to pitching hay. The Salt Lake High School job, as well as Mahonri's big commission, the Sea Gull Monument, came through only after he had moved his family to New York City.

In New York Mahonri concentrated on sculpting laborers, a theme that had brought him the most success in Paris. His work reviewed well and sold well, and Mahonri as a sculptor became associated with the Ashcan school of gritty realistic painters. He spent considerable time on the Hopi, Apache, and Navajo Habitat Groups for the American Museum of Natural History, and made trips to Arizona and New Mexico for research.

Widowed in 1917, Young found a patron and moved with the children to Paris for two years beginning in 1924. He competed for but lost a major commission for the Pioneer Woman Memorial in Ponca City, Oklahoma in 1926. He achieved new success with a series of prize fighters.

His work continued to receive strong reviews during the Depression, but commissions dried up. Now he supported himself by teaching at the Art Students League, where he was popular with the students and where over the years he taught every subject in the curriculum.

In 1931 he married Dorothy Weir, an artist and daughter of the American impressionist J. Alden Weir. Mahonri lobbied hard for the This is the Place Monument, which he completed in 1947, then equally hard for the portrait of his grandfather in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, unveiled in 1950. He died that year at the age of 80.

Toone's biography is a handsome volume, 9" x 12" (which is small for a coffee table book), black-covered, with many prints and photographs, the majority black and white (not a weakness since most are sketches, plaster, or bronze). The photos are well chosen and well situated in the text, so that one finishes the book with a strong visual sense of the progress of Mahonri's oeuvre. (I did notice the image on the front jacket, from the Sea Gull Monument, is backwards—compare the same subject on page 100, which is in the right way.)

From a narrative point of view, Toone's writing is a little thin. One gets the main points, also that Mahonri was a cheerful, friendly man, but one apprehends little of what fires him. This, for example, is Toone's account of Mahonri's courtship of Dorothy Weir: "[In 1929] Young returned to New York and began seeing Dorothy again. From this time on, their relationship became increasingly serious. One night he put his arm around her while riding in a New York cab. Then he kissed her. She protested. She told him she thought they should not see each other. He disagreed. They became engaged on 25 January and married on 17 February 1931" (143). There's a wonderful story here, but the part of it that matters is the part between "He disagreed" and "They became engaged."

The book is full of redundancies. Perhaps some of this is intentional, as if the author assumed that people would mostly be looking at the pictures and reading the page or two surrounding the ones that interested them, rather than straight through. But this is primarily an art book, and in my (non-art-expert) eyes, on that count it succeeds very well. Toone's technique is to interrupt Young's personal history for a column or two of discussion of the historical movements and specific works that influenced Mahonri at a given time, then advance to a paragraph or two describing the completed work, almost always accompanied by a print or photo, then finish with a couple of more paragraphs assessing how well it succeeds.

Here is an excerpt on the Sea Gull Monument:

The monument incorporated and synthesized the two sculptural themes that dominated [Young's] early career—his strong Mormon heritage and the theme of labor. In the sculpture portion of the monument one sees the same influences as in Young's other work, particularly the Rodinesque handling and modeling of the surfaces. The figure of the man in the left-hand corner of The Arrival of the Sea Gulls is reminiscent of Rodin's Thinker. Like Thinker, Young's figure suggests a feeling of resignation and despair. A more specific prototype of this figure can be found in Constantin Meunier's free-standing sculpture, The Miner. Throughout his life Young collected articles and pictures of this artist's work. The Meunier figure symbolizes the exhausted miner, the Young relief the exhausted pioneer. Comparing The First Harvest bronze relief of the Sea Gull Monument with Meunier's harvest relief on his Monument to Labor, both feature strong, stout figures that work the grain fields and share a common monumental feeling. In the sea gull reliefs, Young proved himself a master at creating the illusion of great vistas and depth, which is a quality not found in Meunier's work. In this Young resembles the Renaissance masters, particularly Donatello, who he so admired after discovering him on his trips to Italy. In many ways the Sea Gull Monument became the realization of his dream of a monument to labor, as well as his tribute to his own pioneer heritage, and stands as the culmination of his early career. (102-3)

The text is accompanied by an early sketch and a black and white photo of the completed monument, plus color photos of the three reliefs (77, 99-101), together with the verbal descriptions (98-102).

I've looked at the monument dozens of times, walk by it sometimes now on my way to work, but reading this I realize I never once saw it before. Add to that the account of Young's drawn-out lobbying for the commission and the practicalities of its execution, plus a vital clue in an earlier chapter as to the spiritual meaning seagulls held for Mahonri (2), and as far as I'm concerned Toone tells a gripping story. (The book also includes a chronology, index, and bibliography, all thorough and useful.)

In Mahonri, the young LDS artist in search of his patrimony is faced with the phenomenon of a Mormon artist who was not active in the Church. (Toone wrote an Ensign article [October 1985, pp. 40-45], which gives a good overview of Mahonri's life and work, but while Toone's biography deals with Mahonri's inactivity, the Ensign article fails to mention it at all.) What makes Mahonri Mormon then? An accident of birth? His upbringing? Of course he is best remembered for his works with Mormon themes. Also, he faced all the issues, fought all the fights that Mormon artists and writers do—judging from Toone's account, in that sense he is entirely typical.

Should a Mormon artist train at home or abroad? Mahonri absorbed what he could in Salt Lake but traveled to the art centers of the nation and Europe for his real education. Are artists born to their work? Mahonri sensed at least that he was historically situated, and he was determined to play a role. Does the artist address the saints or the gentiles? Mahonri, capable of both, and in spite of his sense of mission, found he could not make a living in Salt Lake City. How does one get past the guardians? This is the great untold story in Mormon art and literature—writers have to deal with publishers, playwrights with selection committees, artists with curators and institutional patrons, each with its own agenda and frequently little sympathy for the artist's circumstances or vision.

When Willard Young, principal of the LDS high school and Mahonri's uncle, refused to sign the contract for the Deseret Gym commission out of concern for nepotism, Mahonri resorted to trickery to secure his signature. When the LDS Church got Mahonri his studio for the Joseph Smith commission, one condition was that he be closely supervised, which must have been vexing for the artist. Toone shows Mahonri lobbying hard for the "This is the Place" commission, working every civic, church, and family angle, putting up his own money, dealing with the vagaries of committees and contracts (he came away from the experience feeling he had been cheated out of $11,000). An old hand by the time he did the Brigham Young portrait for the Capitol, he appeased both state (who wanted a stern, stalwart Brigham) and family (who remembered a gentle, kindly one) by having one corner of his grandfather's lips turned up and the other pulled down.

That leaves the most fundamental issue in Mormon art—how does one's art relate to one's testimony? Obviously Mahonri was attracted to the Mormon story. Even his "gentile" works stress such Pioneer values as self-sufficiency and the dignity of labor. One might relate his realism to his grandfather's clear-headed practicality, or Mahonri's fascination with motion to the Mormon stress on progress, with each creature striving to fill the measure of it's creation. (The sacralization of labor is a thread common to the Paris art missionaries as well, which I understand is distinctive in all the varied strains of Impressionism.)

Toone notes that Mahonri developed a distaste for polygamy, both because of the religious excesses of a good friend's mother, a first wife who dominated the others, and out of sympathy for boys with fathers on the underground, for all practical purposes as fatherless as he. Toone notes also how Mahonri developed a taste for beer in taverns. Despite Mahonri's inactivity, he remained friendly to the Church, was intimate with its leaders (especially Heber J. Grant), offered it free advice on artistic matters, and showed genuine pride and sympathy for the pioneers' achievement.

One might speculate whether his contribution would be greater if he were more connected, more a part of his birth community. Doubtless not without the artistic vision and technical mastery he combined with the real and obvious connection he did have. Mahonri was a product of Mormonism, and is interesting both as someone who gives expression in the world to many of our deepest values, and as someone with a lot to teach us about how to blend the temporal and spiritual. He got to like his name, and it's one in which all who were born to or embrace Mormonism can take justifiable pride.

The Salt Lake Tribune, Martin Naparsteck
Although Mahonri Young created what are probably the two best-known sculptures in Utah, the Sea Gull Monument on TempleSquare and the This Is the Place Monument, most Utahns, even aficionados of art, seem to know little about his life or accomplishments. Thomas E. Toone, a professor of art at Utah State University, has admirably filled the gap with Mahonri Young, His Life and Art, an excellent overview of the artist's youth, travels, successes, failures, attitudes, and, most of all, his work.

Young inherited his unusual first name from his father, who was reluctant to pass it on because it had led to a good deal of teasing and fights in his own youth, but his wife was insistent. The younger Young, a grandson of Brigham, also had fights as a result of his name, but as an adult he took pride in its unusualness. It may even have been helpful in his art career. "Do you know Michelangelo's last name or Raphael's or Rembrandt's?" he once asked.

Although as an adult he did not practice the religion he inherited, he always considered himself a child of the West in general, of Latter-day Saint traditions in particular. And he was not above using his connections and family name late in life to help politic for the This is the Place Monument commission. He wrote letters to church leaders, met with state officials, and finally signed a contract for the monument in 1941.

He considered the massive monument, near the western mouth of Emigration Canyon, his crowning achievement, although outside of Utah he was better known and admired for the much smaller statues he did of working men and women and of boxers. One of the delights of the book are the photos of these smaller statues, some only 8-inches high. He lived much of his adult lifein Paris and New York, and the laborers he met in those cities intrigued him. His "Stevedore," "Man Tired," "The Shoveler," "Man Sawing" and dozens of other works reflect an admiration of the common man absent in the larger Utah works.

The absence of that quality in the This is the Place Monument seems largely to have been a result of the influence of church leaders on what was mostly a state-funded project. For example, his original plans for Wilford Woodruff, one of the three figures on top of the monument (along with Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball) was to have him dressed in everyday clothing, with suspenders holding up breeches. Woodruff's descendants thought that was not dignified and church leaders pressured Young to dress him in a Prince Albert coat "even though he knew," writes Toone, "that no one in their right mind would wear such a heavy overcoat in Utah in July."

The book also contains dozens of sketches done by Young, some of them of friends, many preparatory works for his sculptures. Only 26 of the 140 photos are in color, and thus many of the works are not seen as the artist intended (although with the book's price already at $75, any additional cost would frighten off many potential buyers, perhaps even libraries). Fans of Young's works will be delighted to see some sketches he did as a teen-age sketch artist first for the old Salt Lake Herald and for four years for The Salt Lake Tribune. His years with The Tribune, however, were not happy ones. "Young was demoted to the engraving department," Toone writes, "when the newspaper hired an artist from Indiana. Instead of drawing, Young now copied the other artist's works to an engraving plate."

Works for which Young once earned a national reputation but which are now largely forgotten or ignored are included. Among theseare a 26-inch tall bronze, "The Prospector," that was used by a railroad on its posters; statues of Hopi, Apache, and Navajo"habitat groups" that for decades were displayed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; a relief of a young woman (known as "The Lady of the Legs") for a hosiery company; reliefs for Twentieth Century Fox's music building in Hollywood of Mozart, Verdi, Liszt, Grieg, Debussy, Beethoven, Sullivan and Tchaikovsky (the photos of these are disappointedly small); and a statue of a farmer sharpening a blade that stood at the entranceto the 1939 New York World's Fair. The writing is sometimes stilted and Toone doesn't offer much psychological insight into his subject, but overall MahonriYoung, His Life and Art is a book worthy of its subject, rich in wonderful photos, thorough in its outline of the artist's life, delightful to peruse.

Logan Herald Journal, Patrick Williams
Winner of the 1997 Evans Biography Award is Thomas Toone for Mahonri Young: His Life and Work (Signature Books). Although awarded in the current year, the award is always for a work published during the previous year.

Toone, the Evans Biography Award winner, is cited by the Evans committee as a gifted historian. Through his biography of Young, he has "successfully and thoroughly described and interpreted Mahonri Young's art and placed it in the context of national and international trends. ...Dr. Toone paints a lively, colorful portrait of an eccentric and influential life without either avoiding or exaggerating the controversies surrounding the artist."

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Jessie L. Embry
Mormons associate Mahonri Young with his LDS sculptures: Seagull Monument and This is the Place Monument in Salt Lake City, and the Brigham Young statue in Washington, D.C. Yet Young was internationally known for his work, and his pictures and sculptures of the Native Americans of the southwest, men at work, and boxers are exquisite.

Thomas E. Toone's biography revolves around Young's art. Toone, a professor of art at Utah State University, explains Young's life based on his work. He describes Young's struggle to receive commissions, his moves, his teaching experiences, and his family life, but the focus is always the painting or sculpting that Young was doing at the time. There are delightful stories such as Young's ability to please the Young family and Utah's congressional delegates by showing his grandfather, Brigham Young, as a gentle father and stern governor. The text is light and a delightful read.

Toone helps us understand more about Young by including brief giographies of other artists—friends and competitors. He shows how Young worked by explaining how he found models and developed his themes. He describes Young's love for the Hopis, Apaches, and Navajos and the love those people had for him as he sketched his way through the southwest.

As with most art books, the illustrations are essential. There are beautiful pictures of Young's art, some in color and most in black and white. I enjoyed the various angles of some of the sculptures such as the backs of the model for Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Wilford Woodruff from This is the Place Monument. The pictures of sculptures, such as the Gossipers, capture the three-dimensional aspects of the works. There are also photographs of Young and his family that illustrate the artist's personality.

As a historian, I would have liked more analysis of the people and events surrounding Young's work. For example, how did Young convince Mormon church leaders to construct the Seagull Monument? Why did the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association insist on a competition for This is the Place Monument? What were the politics in teaching and working in New York and Paris?

But then I realize that there are many types of biographies. While Toone's book is not a complete study of all aspects of Young's life, it does give a clear picture of his art, exactly what Toone set out to do. It is a handsome volume that will liven up any coffee table.