Isidore Konti

Isidore Konti (1862-1938) is a key figure in the realm of turn-of-the-century American sculpture. He taught and influenced sculptors including Paul Manship and Max Kalish, was highly regarded by Daniel Chester French, and worked on commissions alongside Gutzon Borglum. He did not cast works in high numbers, and often all that collectors are able to come by are casts of his bookends. His work also precedes his well-known Genius of Immortality, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by almost ten years.

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1862, Konti pursued his early artistic training at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Edmund Hellmer and Karl Kundmann, receiving the rigorous Central European academic education that would define his mature practice. In 1886 he won the Rome Prize from the Vienna Academy, which allowed him to spend several formative years in Rome studying the great masterpieces of the classical and Renaissance sculptural traditions. This deep grounding in the European sculptural inheritance gave him the technical range and refined sense of composition that would set him apart when he emigrated to the United States in 1892.

Konti settled first in Chicago, where he worked on decorative sculpture for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, one of the great American cultural events of the late nineteenth century. He then moved to New York and quickly established himself as one of the leading American Beaux-Arts sculptors of his generation. He received important commissions for numerous American expositions, including the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo of 1901, the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, the Jamestown Exposition of 1907, and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915.

Konti was elected to the National Academy of Design and served as a founding member of the National Sculpture Society. Alongside his commissioned work he taught at Cooper Union and other important American institutions, mentoring the generation of American sculptors who would carry his refined Beaux-Arts tradition into the Art Deco era of the twentieth century. His sculptures are held in significant public and private collections across the United States.