Although he was an accomplished painter, etcher, and draftsman, Mahonri Mackintosh Young is best known for his small bronze genre figures of laborers and boxers. The monument erected in Salt Lake City to his grandfather Brigham Young, 1892, sculpted by Cyrus E. Dallin (1861-1944), inspired Young’s interest in sculpture. In 1899 he studied briefly at the Art Students League in New York and in 1901 settled in Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian, where he studied modeling with Charles Raoul Verlet (1857-1923), and became close friends with Leo Stein and ALFRED MAURER. After painting canvases of French peasant figures, he turned to modeling modern-day men at work - digging, wielding sledges, carrying huge burdens - always stressing the dignity of their labor. When exhibited in the United States during the next decade, these small bronzes were compared with the work of the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831-1905) and considered the sculptural counterpart of Ash Can school painting. In 1905 Young returned to Salt Lake City, where he received commissions from the Mormon Church. In 1910 he settled in New York.
His interest in capturing the human form in motion led Young to create a series of bronzes of boxers in the 1920s. During his career he created many bas-reliefs, including several monumental public projects commissioned by Salt Lake City and the American Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris. Commissions from Winfield R. Sheehan, manager of Fox Studios, brought him to Hollywood in 1929 and included relief panels for the studio’s building and a statue of the boxer Joe Ganz. Young also produced landscape etchings, taught at the Art Students League, and wrote articles on sculpture for the Dictionary of American Biography and Encyclopaedia Britannica.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library Archives, Mahonri Young Papers § J. Lester Lewine, "The Bronzes of Mahonri Young," International Studio 47 (October 1912): LV-LVIII § Andover, Mass., Phillips Academy, Addison Gallery of American Art, Mahonri M. Young: Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., 1940, with essay by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., excerpts from artist’s autobiography, chronology § Wayne K. Hinton, "A Biographical History of Mahonri M. Young: A Western American Artist," Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1974, with bibliography, list of significant sculptures § Thomas E. Toone, "Mahonri Young: His Life and Sculpture," Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1982, with bibliography.
