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Friday, 22 April 2011 00:25

John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist

John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist at Grey Art Gallery includes his "Study in Pure Form (Forms in Space No. 4)." John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist at Grey Art Gallery includes his "Study in Pure Form (Forms in Space No. 4)." Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, NY

In the decades before World War II, many artists were thrilled by the steel- and fossil-fuel-based technology embodied in trains, planes and automobiles, and edifices like the Eiffel Tower and the Chrysler Building. Few were more inspired by the promises of industrial modernity than the sculptor John Storrs.

The subject of an excellent, taut survey at the Grey Art Gallery that focuses mainly on work from the 1920s, Storrs (1885-1956) compacted utopian, machine-age dreaming into Cubist-Art Deco sculptures resembling pieces of architectural ornament and models of skyscrapers. There is nothing quite like his dense, carefully wrought stone and metal sculptures in early American — or European, for that matter — Modernism.

The exhibition, “John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist,” was organized by Debra Bricker Balken, an independent scholar and curator, for the Boston Athenaeum, where it opened last spring.

Born and reared in Chicago, Storrs studied for short periods at the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He trained in Hamburg with Arthur Bock, a Vienna Secession-style figurative sculptor, and in Paris with Auguste Rodin.

For most of his career he lived in France, but in accordance with a stipulation in his father’s will, he maintained residency in Chicago and thereby stayed informed about developments in art and architecture in the United States. In New York he was acquainted with members of the Société Anonyme, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Charles Demuth. In Europe he met Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder and many other players on the avant-garde scene.

The most conspicuous influences on Storrs’s sculpture, however, were not artists but architects: the American Modernists Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Chicago works Storrs knew well. In the late teens and early 1920s, Storrs created suave, chunky, semi-abstract statues of people. “Le Sergent de Ville (Gendarme)” (modeled in 1919, cast in bronze in 1923) has a square head and a blocky body whose angular, faceted planes are selectively plated in silver. This muscular little fellow projects a heroic manliness, but, at just over 16 inches tall, there is something humorous about him; he is a Cubist RoboCop.

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