Paul Howard Manship (December 24, 1885 – January 28, 1966) was an American
sculptor. He consistently created mythological pieces in a classical style, and was a major force in the
Art Deco movement. He is well known for his large public commissions, including the iconic Prometheus in Rockefeller Center[1] and the Celestial Sphere Woodrow Wilson Memorial in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also credited for designing the modern rendition of
New York City's official seal.[2]
Manship gained notice early in his career for rejecting the
Beaux-Arts architecture movement and preferring linear compositions with a flowing simplicity. Additionally, he shared a summer home in
Plainfield, New Hampshire, part of the
Cornish Art Colony, with
William Zorach for a number of years. Other members of the highly social colony were also contemporary artists.[3] Manship created his own artist retreat on Cape Ann, developing a 15-acre site on two former granite quarries in Lanesville, a village of Gloucester, MA. A local nonprofit, the Manship Artists Residency + Studios was established in 2015 to preserve this estate as an artist residency program.[4]
Life
Early life and education
Paul Howard Manship was born in
St. Paul, Minnesota, on December 24, 1885, the son of Charles H. and Mary Etta (Friend) Manship. His father, born in Mississippi, was a clerk for the St. Paul gas company, and with his wife, who was born in Pennsylvania, were parents of seven children. Charles and Mary were married in St. Paul, on July 14, 1870, and raised their family in a home they owned at 304 Nelson (later Marshall) Avenue. Paul H. Manship began his art studies at the St. Paul School of Art in
Minnesota. From there he moved to Philadelphia and continued his education at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Following that he migrated to New York City where he enrolled in the
Art Students League of New York, studying anatomy with
George Bridgman and modeling under
Hermon Atkins MacNeil. From 1905 to 1907 he served as an assistant to sculptor
Solon Borglum and spent the two years after that studying with
Charles Grafly and assisting
Isidore Konti.
In 1909, at Konti's urging, he entered the competition for, and won, the
Rome Prize and shortly thereafter decamped for Rome where he attended the
American Academy from 1909 until 1912. While in Europe he became increasingly interested in Archaic art, his own work began to take on some archaic features, and he became more and more attracted to classical subjects. He also developed an interest in classical sculpture of
India, and traces of that influence can be observed in his work (see Dancer and Gazelles in
Gallery). Manship was one of the first artists to become aware of the vast scope of art history being newly excavated at the time and became intensely interested in Egyptian, Assyrian and pre-classical Greek sculpture.
Career
When he returned to the United States from his European sojourn, Manship found that his style was attractive to both modernists and conservatives. His simplification of line and detail appealed to those who wished to move beyond the Beaux-Arts classical realism prevalent in the day. Also, his view of and use of a more traditional "beauty" as well as an avoidance of the more radical and abstract trends in art made his works attractive to more conservative art collectors. Manship's work is often considered to be a major precursor to
Art Deco.
Manship produced over 700 works and always employed assistants of the highest quality. At least two of them,
Gaston Lachaise and
Leo Friedlander, went on to create significant places for themselves in the history of American sculpture.
Although not known as a portraitist, he did produce statues and busts of
Theodore Roosevelt,
Samuel Osgood,
John D. Rockefeller,
Robert Frost,
Gifford Beal, and
Henry L. Stimson. Manship was very adept at low relief and used these skills to produce a large number of coins and medals. Among his more prominent are the Dionysus medal, the second issue of the long running
Society of Medalists; the first term inaugural medal for
Franklin D. Roosevelt; and the
John F. Kennedy inaugural medal. Additionally, during WW II he designed the U. S. Merchant Marine's Distinguished Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal and Mariner's Medal.
For a number of summers early in his career, Manship found social and artistic companionship in
Plainfield, New Hampshire, then part of the
Cornish Art Colony, which attracted sculptors such as
Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
Herbert Adams,
Daniel Chester French, and
William Zorach. He visited first in 1915, returned the next three years, and then returned again a decade later. This period in his life has been recognized as significant, and Harry Rand observed that "Manship recognized 1916 as the year of his artistic maturity...[he] seemed to express modern ideas in terms of the primitive.[6]
^Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica.
"Paul Manship". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. {{
cite web}}: |last= has generic name (
help)
^Hall, Edward Hagaman (1915).
"Appendix H– Seal and Flag of the City of New York". Twentieth Annual Report of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society to the Legislature of the State of New York. Albany: J. B. Lyon Company, Printers. p. 819.
^Thomas E. Luebke, ed., Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 2013): Appendix B, p. 548.
Conner, Janis and Joel Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture, Studio Works 1893–1939, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 1989
Greenthal, Kozol, Rameirez & Fairbanks, American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1986
Manship, John, Paul Manship, (New York, Abbeville Press, 1989,
ISBN1-55859-002-1)
Murtha, Edwin, Paul Manship, (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1957)
Nishiura, Elizabeth, editor, American Battle Monuments: A Guide to Military Cemeteries and Monuments Maintained By the American Battle Monuments Commission, Omnigraphics Inc., Detroit, Michigan 1989
Opitz, Glenn B., editor, Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986