John Bernard Flannagan

John Bernard Flannagan , 1895-1942, American sculptor, b. Fargo, N.Dak., studied at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. His early life was a bitter struggle against poverty. Too poor to buy quarried stone, he picked up field stones for carving. His sculptures, often of animals, range from profound to humorous in conception and are simple and direct in execution. In 1930 and again in 1932 he lived for a year in Ireland. He is well represented in the museums of various colleges including Vassar, Oberlin, Harvard, and the Univ. of Nebraska. A mountain goat, Figure of Dignity, is in the Metropolitan Museum. He committed suicide in 1942.

Bibliography: See his letters (with an introduction by W. R. Valentiner, 1942).

Flannagan, John B. (1895–1942). American sculptor, an isolated figure whose career was blighted by illness and poverty and ended in suicide. He was born at Fargo, North Dakota, and studied painting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1914–17. In 1922 he was rescued from near destitution by Arthur B. Davies, at whose suggestion he took up woodcarving. About five years later he was attracted to the natural beauty of stone and he became a highly original exponent of direct carving in this medium. He preferred natural to quarried material, and for him part of the creative process lay in ‘seeing’ the image within the raw stone (in 1930–1 and 1932 he visited Ireland and drew special inspiration from some of the stones he found in remote areas there). He made a few portraits, but most of his subjects were taken from the animal world. His early work was rather tortured in style, fusing elements from Germanic Expressionism and medieval art. During the 1930s, however, his style broadened and became increasingly abstract, as he pared his work down to an intense, primordial simplicity (Triumph of the Egg, 1, MOMA, New York, 1937).