Paul Manship
Manship, Paul (Howard)
(b St Paul, MN, 25 Dec 1885; d New York, 1 Feb 1966).
American sculptor. He grew up in St Paul, MN, where he attended evening classes at the St Paul Institute of Art from 1892 to 1903. In 1905 he went to New York and studied at the Art Students League, before becoming an assistant to the sculptor Solon Borglum (1868–1922). The following year Manship moved to Philadelphia to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1909 he won the Prix de Rome and attended the American Academy in Rome (1909–12). During this period he not only received rigorous technical training but also toured Italy, Greece and Egypt, where he became the first of many modern American sculptors who were attracted to the abstract qualities of Etruscan, ancient Greek and Egyptian art.
Manship returned to the USA in 1912 and, once established in New York, developed a style of simplified contours and bold asymmetrical design, favouring bronze as a medium. His work was highly praised, and he received many commissions for public monuments, architectural sculpture, small bronze figures and medals. One of his best-known works, the fountain sculpture Prometheus (bronze, h. 5.5 m, 1933–8), serves as the focal point of Rockefeller Plaza, New York. Like many of his sculptures, it depicts a sleek, streamlined figure moving through space, and the void is treated with as much importance as the solid.
Writings
Paul Manship (New York, 1947)
Bibliography
E. Murtha: Paul Manship (New York, 1957)
Paul Howard Manship, an Intimate View: Sculpture and Drawings from the Permanent Collection of the Minnesota Museum of Art (exh. cat. by F. Leach, St Paul, MN Mus. A., 1972)
Paul Manship: Changing Taste in America (exh. cat, St. Paul, MN Mus. A., 1985)
S. Rather: The Origins of Archaism and the Early Sculpture of Paul Manship (diss., Newark, U. DE, 1986)
R. Silberman: ‘Thoroughly Modern Manship’, A. America, lxxiv/1 (1986), pp. 111–15
Paul Manship (exh. cat. by H. Rand, Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A., 1989)
Grove Art Online
