Paul Howard Manship

Paul Manship (1885-1966) stands as one of America's most important sculptors of the early twentieth century, and his significance lay in his ability to combine a modernist approach to form within the bounds of figurative art. The variety of his subjects, the infinite beauty of his lines, and the pure delight he found in the human figure all contribute to his outstanding reputation.

Manship has been credited with revitalizing the classical tradition, and others have countered that he freed the ties that bound American sculpture to realism. It has been argued whether it was he or Augustus Saint-Gaudens who ushered in the "national style." The answer lies perhaps in the extraordinary number of students and artists who were to be so greatly shaped by Manship's approach, an influence that extended across a generation of American sculpture. Manship pursued his early training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked briefly with Isidore Konti before winning the Prix de Rome, which took him to the American Academy in Rome. His years in Italy proved decisive, and his direct study of archaic Greek, Etruscan, and Roman sculpture provided the visual vocabulary that would define his mature style.

Manship stands as one of America's most important sculptors and certainly as the champion of the Art Deco style and the "modern aesthetic." France experienced a golden era in the nineteenth century in the collaboration between architecture and sculpture, and this same phenomenon occurred in America between 1910 and 1935, with Manship a prominent part of it. Some of New York City's most celebrated spots are Manship commissions, such as the Prometheus fountain at Rockefeller Center, the reliefs on the AT&T Building, the Rainey Memorial Gates at the Bronx Zoo, and many others. His sculptures are held in the Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and other major American collections, where they remain among the defining images of American Art Deco sculpture.