Wednesday, July 31, 2019

RIP Neil Estern

American sculptor (1926-2019) who despised abstraction; he told an interviewer, "Art wasn’t meant to be a mystery." He got his start designing dolls. He had his biggest success late in life, winning major commissions like the FDR Memorial.

His bronzes had the intentional roughness of much 20th-century bronze work, which I always found a little offputting; for some reason many sculptors of that era were determined not to be too classical, or too much like Renaissance masters.

But this portrait of Fala might actually be the most widely loved American sculpture of the century. Really. You should see all the people taking photographs of it.

1 comment:

JustPeachy said...

The dog is cute. Not a fan of the "rough" bronzes, though. I remember seeing a big bust of Kennedy in that style, at the Kennedy Center in DC. It looked like it had been sculpted out of leftover oatmeal.

Maybe the artist didn't like JFK?