Manship, Paul

Manship, Paul (1885–1966). American sculptor. He was born in St Paul, Minnesota, and had his initial training there at the Institute of Art. In 1903 he began working for an engraving company and independently as an illustrator and designer, then in 1905 moved to New York. There he studied at the Art Students League and worked as assistant to Solon Borglum. In 1906 he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but he returned to New York the following year. In 1909 he won a scholarship to the American Academy in Rome, where he worked from 1909 to 1912. After his return to the USA he lived mainly in New York, although from 1922 to 1926 he was based in Paris. Manship worked in an elegant, streamlined style, his beautifully crafted figures (in bronze and stone) characterized by clarity of outline and suave generalized forms. A dedicated student of the history of art, he was influenced by archaic Greek and Indian sculpture, but his work also has a kinship with fashionable Art Deco. He achieved great success as a sculptor of public monuments, one of the best known being the gilded bronze Prometheus (1933) in Rockefeller Center Plaza, New York, and he was also an accomplished portraitist. Because of the sleek stylization of his work, he for a time had a reputation as a pioneer of modern sculpture in America, but his modernism was fairly superficial and by about 1940 he was being labelled an academic artist.