Frederick William MacMonnies
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Frederick William MacMonnies (September 28, 1863 – March 22, 1937) was the best known expatriate American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts school, as successful and lauded in France as he was in the United States. He was also a highly accomplished painter and portraitist.
He was born in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York and died in New York City
Three of MacMonnies' best-known sculptures are Nathan Hale, Dancing Bacchante with Infant Faun and Diana.
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[edit] Nathan Hale
The life-size Nathan Hale was the first major commission gained by MacMonnies. Erected in 1890 in City Hall Park, New York, it stands near where the actual Nathan Hale was thought to have been executed. Copies are scattered in museums across the United States, since MacMonnies was one of the earliest American sculptors to supplement his fees from major commissions by selling reduced-size reproductions to the public. The Metropolitan Museum has a copy, as do the Art Museum at Princeton University and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.
[edit] Dancing Bacchante with an Infant Faun
Dancing Bacchante is MacMonnies' second best-known sculpture. The life-size nude was offered as a gift to the Boston Public Library by the building's architect Charles Follen McKim in 1896, to be placed in the garden court of the library. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union caused such a public outcry citing its "drunken indecency" that the gift had to be refused by the library.
McKim gave the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York instead. The spectacle that was made regarding this gift, a salvo in the American Culture Wars, gave MacMonnies and this sculpture a great deal of notoriety in the United States: there is an example of the Bacchante in the permanent collections of most of the large museums in the United States and France. A copy (illustration, above right) has now taken its place in its intended original location in the Boston Public Library.
[edit] Life
In 1880 young MacMonnies was taken on by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and soon promoted to studio assistant. This began a lifelong friendship with the acclaimed sculptor. MacMonnies studied at nights at the National Academy of Design and The Art Students League of New York. In 1884 he left for Paris to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, twice winning the highest award given to foreign students.
In 1888 MacMonnies opened a studio in Paris and began to create some of his most famous sculptures, which he submitted annually to the Paris Salon. In his atelier he mentored such notable artists as Janet Scudder and Mary Foote. He married a fellow artist, Mary Louise Fairchild. (They were divorced in 1908, and he married his former student Alice Jones in 1910.)
In 1889 an Honorable Mention at the Paris Salon for his Diana led to important American commissions, including the Nathan Hale memorial and the decorative Pan fountain sculpture for Rohallion, the New Jersey mansion of banker Edward Adams, who opened for him a social circle of art-appreciating New Yorkers. Until the outbreak of World War I, when he gave up his grand household establishment in Paris, MacMonnies travelled annually to the United States to see dealers and patrons, returning to Paris to work on his commissions.
In 1891 he was awarded the commission for the centerpiece of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: the sculpture of Columbia in her Grand Barge of State, in the vast central fountain of the Court of Honor, was truly the iconic figure at the heart of the American Beaux-Arts movement. This large decorative fountain piece became the focal point at the Exposition and established MacMonnies as one of the important sculptors of the time.
At the Paris Salon, he was awarded the first Gold Medal ever given to an American sculptor. Elected to the rank of Chevalier in the French Légion d'honneur in 1896 MacMonnies was awarded grand prize at the Paris Exposition of 1900. This was a decade of enormous productivity and personal satisfaction. A second career as a painter got a good public start in 1901, when he received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon for the first painting he entered.
Returning to New York after 1915, he continued his stylish career. He executed the colossal group, Civic Virtue, at the City Hall Fountains in New York (1919). It was the subject of considerable controversy ([1]).
When a medal was commissioned to celebrate Charles Lindbergh's solo Trans-Atlantic flight in 1931, MacMonnies was the obvious choice.
Frederick William MacMonnies died of pneumonia in 1937, aged 73.
[edit] Publications
- Greer, in Brush and Pencil (Chicago, 1902)
- Lorado Taft, History of American Sculpture (New York, 1903)
- Pettie, in the International Studio, volume xxix (New York, 1906)
[edit] References
- Conner, Janis and Joel Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture 1989. (Contains photographs of three of MacMonnies' best works, the Nathan Hale, Bacchante and Infant Faun, and Diana, along with some brief biographical information)
- Durante, Dianne, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide (New York University Press, 2007): description of the Nathan Hale at City Hall Park, Manhattan.
- Smart, Mary , A Flight With Fame: The Life & Art of Frederick MacMonnies . Biography and a catalogue raisonné; (Sound View Press, Madison, CT, 1996)
