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This elegant column can be read as a skyscraper or an abstract arrangement of geometric forms.

The sculpture's rigid geometry is tempered by the juxtaposition of steel, brass and marble.

Storrs was interested in the raw materials of industry, and towering skyscrapers.

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John Henry Bradley Storrs

New York, about 1925

brass and steel on black marble base

H: 21 in.

Discretionary Fund

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John Storrs was the youngest of seven children born to an architect father.  His exposure to sculpture came in his woodworking classes at Chicago Manual Training School.  After he graduated he went to Europe where he traveled to England, Germany, Holland and Belgium.  He spent six months in Hamburg studying sculpture.  Upon his return to America he worked in the family business while studying art at night, then at the School of the Museum of Fine art, Boston, finally transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Storrs returned to Paris and studied under Auguste Rodin, but became interested in Cubism and Futurism.  He eventually took up residence in Mer where he purchased a chateau. During the 1920s Storrs created abstract geometric sculptures influenced by the skyscrapers he saw during his visits to the United States. His sculpture career was interrupted by the depression when materials where scarce.  During this period he created some of his finest paintings. 

New York is from a series of studies of architectural form that Storrs undertook in the 1920s.  The elegant column can be read as an essay in abstract shapes or a small-scale skyscraper.  Its rigid geometry is tempered by the decorative juxtaposition of steel, brass, and marble.  New York stands as an icon, reminiscent of a totem pole, to the towering buildings of the modern urban skyline.  Storrs presents an optimistic view of the technological advances that had produced the skyscraper as well as a spiritual vision of a structure that reaches toward the sky.  The sculpture is an intricately devised creation consisting of 13 brass rods of two different lengths, all having the same shape with a tapered end held together by steel rods with screws in their threaded ends that have recessed heads concealed by diamond-shaped metal plates.

Reference

Noel Frackman. John Storrs, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986. ISBN-13: 978-0874270518