John Bradley Storrs
John Bradley Storrs
1885 - 1956
American sculptor, painter and printmaker, active also in France. One of the most inventive sculptors of his generation, Storrs divided his career between the USA and France. His architect father, David W. Storrs, a land developer in Chicago, introduced Storrs to the innovations of the first skyscrapers as they emerged there. Throughout his life Storrs discussed ideas with architects including Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Wellborn Root, John A. Holabird, Barry Byrne and Buckminster Fuller. Storrs studied with John Dewey at the progressive University [of Chicago] High School—the Chicago Manual Training School—where he excelled in woodworking and architectural, mechanical, and freehand drawing (1900–05). He interspersed travel throughout Europe, Turkey and Egypt (1905–7) with studies in Hamburg with sculptor Arthur Bock (1905–6) and in Paris at the académies Julian, Montparnasse and Franklin (1906–7). Storrs studied in Chicago at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the School of the Art Institute (1908–9), with Bela Pratt (1867–1917) at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1909–10) and with Charles Grafly and Thomas Anshutz at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1910–11). In Paris he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1911–15) with Antoine Injalbert and Paul Wayland Bartlett at the Académie Colarossi, and he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne (1913, 1920) and the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (1914). His study with Auguste Rodin (1912–14) is reflected in his early bronze sculptures. Storrs created a deathbed drawing of Rodin (1917).
The geometric order that Storrs imposed on his figurative sculptures relate to the rational classicizing tendencies of Aristide Maillol. Storrs also absorbed the aesthetics of European archaism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism and Vorticism, which he amalgamated with American cultural icons. In 1914, the Aero Club of France commissioned from Storrs the Wilbur Wright Memorial in Le Mans, marking the airfield where Wright made his first European flight. Storrs devised a flat, geometric eagle (granite monument dedicated 1922) inspired by the Tomb of Oscar Wilde (1912) by Jacob Epstein in Père Lachaise Cemetery and the relief sculptures and frescoes (1913) by Emile-Antoine Bourdelle for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, both in Paris. Storrs used this bold Art Deco style for Winged Horse (1917; Albuquerque, U. NM, A. Mus.), a woodcut with rich blacks published on the cover of the new socialist periodical The Liberator (October 1918), which represents the freedom of the world’s workers. Storrs’s similar bronze sculpture (1920; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.) symbolized poet Walt Whitman’s expression of the spirit of modern man, which Storrs also envisioned as the key motif of proposed monuments to the poet and to Theodore Roosevelt. He created Art Deco public figurative monuments for the Board of Trade Building, Chicago (e.g. Ceres, 1928–30), the New Church of Christ the King (Cork, Ireland, 1929–30) and the Century of Progress Exposition (1932–3; Chicago).
Storrs, preoccupied with machine aesthetics and formalist abstraction, was the first American artist who created a consistent body of non-objective sculptures. His signature works are geometric skyscraper-like stone or multi-metal constructions (1918–28) labeled Studies in Form or Forms in Space (New York, Met., and elsewhere), as well as New York (c. 1925; Indianapolis, IN, Mus. A.). He understood that the skyscraper was the archetypal avant-garde product that symbolized to the world, the industrial genius, design innovation, engineering skills and commercial power of the United States.
In 1914 Storrs married the French writer, Marguerite De Ville Chabrol of Orléans, who declared that Storrs had gathered in his sculpture new forces—the persistent forces that had built Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and New York (Folsom Gallery cat., 1920). Storrs claimed correctly that Paris also was his inspiration (P. T. Gilbert, Chicago Post, 20 Jan 1921). He had important solo exhibitions at the Folsom Gallery, New York (1920), Arts Club, Chicago (1921, 1923, 1927), Société Anonyme, New York (1923), Brummer Gallery, New York (1928), Albert Roullier Galleries, Chicago (1929, 1935, 1936, 1938), Downtown Gallery, New York (1931–5, 1965, 1967), Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York (1970, 1972, 1975, 1983, 1987), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1986) and Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago (2003, 2005).
Storrs published poems, prints and sculpture in such avant-garde magazines as The Masses, Playboy and The Little Review. During the 1930s, Storrs created non-representational hard-edged machine and Surrealist forms in paintings and multimedia metal relief sculptures. During Word War II he was incarcerated by the Nazis in France for a year. His only works thereafter are conservative figurative works (Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.). Storrs, internationally prominent during the 1920s and 1930s, was almost completely forgotten from 1940 to 1965. [Roberta K. Tarbell. "Storrs, John." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2087120.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
French, 1864 - 1901
