The Art of Paul Manship

Abstract

At the peak of his fame, between the world wars, Paul Manship was one of America's most productive, materially successful, and popular sculptors. He had first attracted attention in 1913, when the work from his just completed three-year fellowship at the American Academy in Rome was exhibited in New York. Critics, struck by the linear stylization of hair and drapery on his statuettes, labeled Manship's style “archaistic” in recognition of his debt to archaic Greek art. By the 1930s Manship had become the country's most visible sculptor through his Prometheus Fountain at Rockefeller Center, the Bronx Zoo Gates, and five large sculpture groups adjacent to the central Trylon and Perisphere at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Still later, as a leader of the National Sculpture Society, National Academy of Design, and American Academy of Arts and Letters, he was a guardian of conservative values. Paul Manship was, in short, everything that modernists love to hate, and his professional decline accelerated with the rise of the American avant-garde in the 1940s. But now, after nearly four decades, Manship is enjoying something of a revival.