Mahonri Young ( 1877-1957 )
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Organ Grinder - 1911 Bronze 10 ⅜ x 5 ⅜ x 4 ¼ inches
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This example of the Organ Grinder is one of only two bronze casts known to exist. The other resides in the permanent collection of the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah.
Provenance:
Godel & Co., New York
F. B. Horowitz Fine Art, Ltd., Hopkins, Minnesota
Private Collection, Massachusetts
Exhibited:
This cast or the other cast of the same work has been included in the following exhibitions:
Sculptures, Drawings and Paintings by Mahonri Young, the Sculptor’s Gallery, New York, February 25 – March 18, 1918, no. 21.
Mahonri Young, Kraushaar Galleries, New York, November 25 – December 19, 1940, no. 85.
A grandson of the Mormon leader Brigham Young, Mahonri Mackintosh Young was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1877. He spent the early years of his childhood enjoying the outdoors and fraternizing with the workers at his father’s mill outside the city; however, his life changed drastically at the age of six when his father passed away unexpectedly and his mother was forced to relocate the family to town. Though he displayed a marked dislike for scholastic pursuits, Young demonstrated great artistic inclination and talent at an early age, taking to modeling animals in clay and busts in relief. He quit high school in the ninth grade and soon after joined an informal drawing class taught by the Beaux-Arts trained painter James T. Harwood.
Earning a living as an illustrator for a local paper, Young saved enough money for a year-long sojourn in New York, where he studied at the Art Students League, and later on for extended trips to Paris and Italy. Initially taking drawing and painting classes at the Académie Julian, the artist switched his focus to modeling and sculpture in 1902. Uninspired by the artistic traditions that his teachers promoted, Young found his most interesting and moving subject matter in the daily activities of Parisian workers. One of his first sculptures, which garnered the artist much attention when exhibited at the American Art Association in Paris, portrayed the frequent sight of a muscular laborer shoveling coal. Though a prolific painter, watercolorist and etcher, Young achieved his fame as a sculptor and is remembered primarily for his realistic depictions of the working class, the American Southwest, and sparring boxers.1
Returning to the United States in 1905, Young continued to look, as he had done as a student in Paris, to the streets and the quotidian aspects of ordinary life for artistic inspiration. Organ Grinder, completed soon after his move to New York in 1910, epitomizes the artist’s sympathetic yet unsentimental approach to the grittier elements of existence in the city. In opposition to the teachings he received at the academies, which advocated heroic subject matter and detailed studies of external physiognomy, Young modeled the figure of the organ grinder quickly and expressionistically, striving instead to capture the atmospheric nuances of the man’s life and character. Cranking the organ with his right hand, the transient street performer precariously steadies the instrument with his left arm while holding out a tattered hat for donations. The sculpture’s dark patina and roughly modeled surface parallels the aesthetic as well as the social concerns of the Ash Can school whose proponents encouraged the use of a dark palette and rapid brushstrokes in portraying realistic subject matter.
Mahonri Mackintosh Young’s sculptures reside in the permanent collections of many prominent institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., and The Detroit Institute of Arts.
1Janis Connor and Joel Rosenkranz, “Mahonri Mackintosh Young” in Rediscoveries in American Sculpture: Studio Works 1893-1939 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), pp. 177-188.
