Andrew
Dasburg
Lucifer
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Gallery A
American Sculpture and
Decorative Art
Entering Gallery A, visitors
encountered American Sculpture and Decorative Art. Most likely
Robert Chanler's decorative screens, which contrasted with the
overwhelming amount of sculpture in the gallery, would initially capture their
attention. Chanler's panels featured wildlife scenes influenced by the
subtle figuration of Japanese folding screens, but he also employed minimal linear
perspective. As with many of the sculptures in Gallery A, two of Chanler's works,
Indian and Hopi Snake Dance, focused on Native American subjects. Memorials and studies
of Native Americans
were also represented in the entranceway by Charles Rumsey's Indian
and Buffalos, Myra Musselmann Carr's Indian Grinding Corn,
Edith Yandell's Indian and Fisher, and Nessa Cohen's Sunrise. Cohen and
Mahonri Young were both commissioned
in 1912 by the American Museum
of Natural
History to ethnologize Native American tribes, an attempt to preserve the
"vanishing American."Andrew Dasburg's
Lucifer, shown above, provides an example of direct carving in American sculpture prior
to the Armory Show. The sculpture came from a life-size plaster head by Arthur Lee that Dasburg extensively reworked by carving directly into the plaster (Coke 21). While Dasburg's work escaped commentary,
Ethel Myers' figurative studies of New
Yorkers illustrate a movement toward non-representational form that many
critics accepted as artistic license.
Myers'
work, which has been
compared to the paintings of the Ashcan artists, also bears formal affinities to
the work of Gaston Lachaise. Lachaise, a French-American artist whose works can be seen in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is considered a pioneer of modern American sculpture.
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