Paul Manship

Indian Hunter with Dog, 1926

bronze

H: 21 ½ in.

Gift of Miss Mary C. Trees in memory of her father Clyde H. Trees

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Paul Manship was born in Minnesota and began studying art at St. Paul School of Art.  At nineteen he moved to Philadelphia to continue his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Manship then went to New York where he enrolled at the Art Students League and later served as an assistant to the sculptor of Western themes Solon Borglum from whom he gained knowledge of animal anatomy.  Manship won the coveted Prix de Rome and a fellowship to study for three years at the American Academy of Rome.  While there he developed an interest in classical and archaic Greek art.  Upon returning to America these combined influences resulted in a style that attracted both modernists and conservatives in its simplification of line and detail making Manship a successful sculptor.  While working in Paris he created a number of sculptures which embodied a stylized form that was uniquely his own.  During his career, Manship produced over 700 works.

Manship energized the static, ideal forms he derived from antiquity with the controlled power and rhythmic patterns of the machine age.  In the Indian Hunter his enthusiasm for archaic Greek sculpture appears in the articulation of shapes, emphasis on profile and linearity.  Sculptures such as this one broke with the exuberant naturalism of the Beaux-Arts tradition practiced by Frederick MacMonnies and others.

Reference

Susan Rathner.  Archaism, Modernism, and the Art of Paul Manship, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. ISBN-13: 978-0292760356