Exhibited
New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art; St. Louis, Missouri, City Art Museum of St. Louis; Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Chicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago; Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Decade of the Armory Show: New Directions in American Art 1910-1920, February 1963-February 1964, no. 100, illustrated p. 63
Providence, Rhode Island, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1900 to Now: Modern Art From Rhode Island Collections, January-May 1988, illustrated p. 52 (as Horse)
Notes
We are grateful to Debra Bricker Balken for preparing the following essay. Ms. Balken is an independent curator and writer who works on American modernism. Most recently, she has curated John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist, an exhibition which is currently installed at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University through July 9, 2011.
John Storrs was one of the foremost modernist sculptors to emerge in the United States in the early twentieth century. An artist who divided his time between Chicago, Paris and the Loire Valley during the decade of the 1920s, Storrs was situated at the forefront of an international avant-garde community. While a favored student of Auguste Rodin in 1913, he quickly moved beyond the modeled, textured surfaces that his erstwhile mentor had favored and approached form as a planar affair, while reducing the body to an angular, architectonic structure. Moreover, unlike the heightened emotion associated with Rodin's figures, Storrs dispensed with sentiment and tackled the figure with reserve. His subjects were always rendered with a certain restraint that underscored his more pressing interest in advancing the prevailing languages of modernism.
Storrs had grown up in Chicago, where his father became a prominent real estate developer and landlord. He was home-schooled but later attended the University High School, a division of the University of Chicago whose progressive curriculum had been shaped by John Dewey. In 1908, after extensive travel abroad, he enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. During this period, he worked in his father's office in The Rookery on LaSalle Street where it was anticipated that his considerable talents as a draftsman would eventually be put to use. He soon became bored, however, by the tedium of collecting rents – his assigned responsibility – and bolted for further study at art schools in Boston and Philadelphia, experiences that were equally stifling for him. Yet, The Rookery, which had been designed by Burnham and Root in 1885 - 88, had its lobby reconfigured in 1905 by one of its former tenets, Frank Lloyd Wright, who clothed its once ornate cast iron columns with large sheets of plain white marble, effectively subverting the profusion of textured surfaces on the exterior. The contrast must have striking to Storrs as he walked through these simplified spaces on a daily basis. Later, as he set up practice as an artist in Paris, he began to rethink Wright's spare use of decoration. Eventually, in the early 1920s, he produced a series of white columnar-type sculptures in stone in which the embellishment consists of geometric patterning reminiscent of the localized detail in Wright's signature Prairie Architecture. These vertical shafts, variously titled, Study in Form and Architectural Forms, are among the most radical, modernist statements of early twentieth century art. As lean, free-standing works, they are also elegant abstractions of the American Machine-Age and its quintessential icon: the Skyscraper.
By the early 1920s, Storrs worked in a variety of media. Outside of limestone, marble and bronze, he was also drawn to sleek industrial metals such as stainless steel, copper and brass, the latter of which he fashioned into sculptures around 1925 that represented the new, towering architecture of Manhattan, a place that he visited, along with Chicago, periodically throughout the decade. He soon clustered stacks of contrasting, shiny metals into seemingly recognizable, albeit faux, Art Deco buildings such as New York, c. 1925, in which decoration was constrained and reduced to a minimum. It was in New York that Storrs met artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella, figures with whom he exhibited at Katherine Dreier's Societe Anonyme, one of the first showcases for international vanguard art in the United States, and a venue for Dada activities. But unlike Man Ray, who satirized the streamlined forms of the skyscraper in an assemblage, New York, 1917, which consisted of six chrome-plated bronze and brass strips held together by a C-clamp, Storrs was disaffected with Dada and its provocations and jest. Rather than a condemnation of a burgeoning consumerist culture and industry, his soaring metal towers are an affirmation of American industry. And even though Storrs conceived these architectonic emblems abroad, they emerge as part of his ongoing anticipation that Manhattan could become "the world's art center." He might have chosen France as his base, but he remained identified with American culture and the example of figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright.
Storrs was, in fact, enthralled with Machine-Age technology, and in particular its American expressions. Like numerous contemporaries, including French colleagues such as the architect and painter Le Corbusier, he was intrigued by new materials and utilized them in his work. However, unlike Corbusier, and his notion of formal purity, he aimed to preserve decorative features in his work For all of their overlapping interest, he was continuously drawn, like Wright, to the craft of art, to its core beauty, and stated, "A highly finished craftsmanship or technique is a beautiful tool in the hands of a master. It has never been a hindrance to a real artist." As such, Abstract Sculpture, c. 1930, extends Storrs abiding interest in merging craft with decorative, abstract features. Therein, with its asymmetrical rendering of striated patterns, and fragmented face, he treats the image as a robust Art Deco entity. As a subject, Storrs had been drawn to the horse since the early 1910s, when he mined Pegasus, a symbol of inspiration, as a theme in numerous prints, drawings and sculptures. Whatever his attraction to the new automated culture of the 1920s, the horse remained a potent, vital emblem for him, in which he situated " horse power" as a precursor to mechanized vehicles such as the car and airplane. He has also used the winged horse to represent Walt Whitman, his favorite American poet, a figure whom he touted as "a sincere and complete expression of our soul of the United States." Abstract Sculpture, then, is part of a vital series of works that both parallel and amplify his attraction to new modernist forms such as the skyscraper.
