Robert Cook

Robert Cook (1921-2017) was an American sculptor whose long and distinguished career unfolded largely in Italy, where he became one of the most respected expatriate American artists of the postwar era. Born in Massachusetts, Cook came of age in the wartime generation that reshaped American art in the years following the Second World War. He served in the war before pursuing formal artistic training, and his early studies gave him the classical grounding that would remain the foundation of his mature practice.

Cook received the Prix de Rome, one of the most prestigious honors available to a young American artist, which brought him to the American Academy in Rome and initiated the long relationship with Italy that would shape the rest of his life. Over the course of his career he also received grants from the Tiffany Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Fulbright Commission. He established a studio in Rome and spent the majority of his career working within the deep sculptural traditions of the Italian peninsula, drawing on Etruscan, Roman, and Renaissance sources while developing his own confident personal voice. The Italian foundries, the marble yards of Carrara, and the historic sculptural inheritance of Rome all became part of his daily working environment.

Fluid, dynamic, and energetic best describe the work of Robert Cook. His mature sculpture is known for its refined figurative treatment of the human body in movement, and his impressive ability to capture motion in his bronze forms is created through lost wax casting, or cire perdue. This distinctive and intricate technique is translated into aesthetically captivating and mind-provoking sculptures, giving each piece the crisp, immediate quality that only the lost wax method can produce. Dancers, athletes, riders, and figures in graceful motion populate his most characteristic pieces, often modeled at intimate scale but occasionally realized at monumental size for public commissions.

Cook's work has been widely exhibited across the globe, both in solo shows and in public spaces. Dinoceras, for example, was first installed in 1971 in a Park Avenue plaza in New York City. Striking and massive, the twenty-foot-long sculpture has a commanding presence and demonstrates Cook's signature forms, which are enveloped in a flowing movement that is both sophisticated and primitive. His sculptures are held in significant public and private collections around the world, and he remained a productive and dignified presence within the international sculptural community until the end of his life.

The New York Times critic Stuart Preston once claimed,

“Cleverness and absolute assurance of technique and overall design identify Robert Cook’s new semi-abstract metal sculpture. He tackles the kind of subject matter, massed figures and animals in motion, that would seem to be intractable to a sculptural treatment. He succeeds in this attempt by re-introducing subjects to skeletal lines of force, somewhat in the manner of futurism.”