Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Collection of William Zorach

Thence by descent to Tessim Zorach

Born in Idaho, the son of a Danish immigrant, John Gutzon Borglum began his artistic training as a painter at the San Francisco Association of Artists.  With funds provided by the sale of several paintings, he was able to travel to Paris in 1890 to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he switched his focus to sculpture.  Subsequent trips to Paris in 1892 and 1899 found the artist at the Académie Julian, an alternative to the official French academy that was popular with American and other foreign students.  During one of these three sojourns, Borglum became a friend and frequent visitor to the studio of Auguste Rodin.  The younger sculptor later claimed that Rodin was the single greatest influence on his artistic sensibilities.

Borglum is best known as the creator of the presidential portraits at Mount Rushmore.  This commission, which the artist described as “sculpture with dynamite,” occupied him from 1927 until his death in 1941.  Asserting that he wanted to create an art that was “American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement,” Borglum worked primarily on large-scale public projects.  His other masterpieces include the head of Abraham Lincoln that resides in the rotunda of the Capitol building, the famous portrayal of Lincoln seated on a bench in Newark, New Jersey, as well as an equestrian statue of the Civil war general Phillip Sheridan.  As a result of this focus, few works by Borglum are available for private ownership, and generally they are bronze casts of plaster studies for his public commissions.

Executed in 1912, Female Nude is an extremely rare direct carving that displays the strong influence of Rodin.  In both its sensuality and stylistic tendencies, the work evokes Rodin’s most famous sculpture, The Kiss.  Grounding the figure in a roughly hewn base that seems unfinished and truncating her body at the neck, Borglum highlights the silky smooth surfaces of the nude’s torso. The extreme contrapposto of her stance and the angling of her shoulders endow the sculpture with a dynamic, sinuous composition.  The contortion of the body and the non finito quality of the sculpture also call to mind the series of writhing slave figures created by Michelangelo for the tomb of Julius II.

As a technique that re-emerged in importance in the twentieth century, direct carving emphasized the inherent connection between the selected material and the work that would be “discovered” within it.  This factor is especially notable in Borglum’s masterful choice of his marble. The natural veining of the stone, which runs vertically, accentuates the curves of the figure and the upward thrust of the composition.  A rare and exceptional sculpture, the importance of Borglum’s Female Nude is also underscored by the fact that until recently it resided in the personal collection of William Zorach, one of America’s most prominent practitioners of direct carving.