Mahonri Mackintosh Young

American, 1877 - 1957

(not assigned)New York, New York, USA

SchoolSocial Realism

BiographyMahonri MacIntosh Young was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1877. He was the grandson of Brigham Young, the second leader of the Church of Latter Day Saints and former Governor of Utah. Earning his tuition and travel expenses as an illustrator, Young attended the Art Students League, returning to Utah in 1901. With a modest inheritance from his grandfather, Young was afforded further study at the Academie Julian in Paris, where he changed his focus from painting to sculpture. Young returned to the states, settling in New York where he was very much in demand for his works. He was made an associate of the National Academy of design in 1912. (Source: Karges Fine Arts Gallery website, Accessed August 10, 2004, )

Mahonri Young was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, just prior to the death of his famous grandfather, Brigham Young. The first seven years of his life were spent in the Deseret Woolen Mills, a factory operated by his father. The artist would later recall the impact that growing up in an atmosphere of work had on his art. Of further impact was witnessing in his youth the backbreaking toil endured by workers on the transcontinental railroads.

After studying in Salt Lake City with James T. Harwood, Young went to New York City to attend the Art Students League from 1899 to 1900, working under academicians George Bridgman (1864-1943) and Kenyon Cox (1856-1919). His initial ideas on the theme of work as an artistic subject came during his enrollment at that institution. Next door to the school the Vanderbilt Building was under construction, and during rest periods in figure-drawing class the students watched the work in progress out the window.

In 1901 the artist left for Paris, studying at the Academie Julian for two years. After a brief return home, Young settled in New York City. The theme of labor appeared as early as 1901 in his student works in Paris and continued to permeate both Young's paintings and sculpture throughout his career. He returned to Paris several times and in 1925 spent two and a half years in France. The Pavers is a European scene and was probably executed during this time, when he did numerous sketches, paintings, and sculpture dealing with the theme of workmen he observed while walking the streets of Paris.

As in many of his bronze sculptures of workers of this period, the subject in The Pavers is not the men themselves but their physical action. The workers are anonymous, with no suggestion of personality, only generalized features. Their solidly delineated, rounded forms connect them, in fact, to the artist's affnity for the sculpture that dominated his artistic output. The background's sketchiness and minimal sense of depth are almost conceived as a backdrop.

In The Pavers we are shown three phases of road paving in the three bent figures, each engaged in a different facet of the project. Earlier in his career, Young had stated that literal representation was not suffcient in art. "The artist...must wait for, and search for, and discover the rhythm and moments; then he must synthesize these into a harmonious living unit of force."1 There is a rhythm to the workers' movement that is echoed in the pose of the man at rest--in the angle of his hip and the curved lines of his shovel, overall straps, and undershirt.

It is tempting to compare The Pavers to Gustave Courbet's (1819-1877) The Stonebreakers of 1850, in which faceless workers are bent in heavy labor breaking rocks for road building. Young certainly had been exposed to Courbet in France. He also openly admired Jean Francoise Millet (1814-1875), yet another French realist concerned with social reform and the plight of the working class. As a boy in Utah, he had admired reproductions of Millet's paintings in magazines. Young's realism derives from Courbet's and Millet's depictions of common laborers; however, he did not share their concerns with social/political issues.

Young was primarily interested in the grace and power of human movement and the use of the human form as a vehicle for artistic expression. Art critic Charles Caffn remarked, "I seem to remember his telling me that labor, except as a motive for studying its structural possibilities, did not interest him."2 Young romanticized the worker, declaring, "I like their stance...their poise and balance and gesture....I find them tremendously inspiring in my art."3

The artist's interest in the subject of workers did, however, go beyond purely a formal one. In 1924, the approximate year of this painting, Young explained that his many depictions of workmen represented his "tribute to honest toil," derived from twenty-five years of sympathetically observing "the long procession of unskilled labor that has been the means of changing the face of the earth in the first quarter of the twentieth century."4

from website: http://www.byu.edu/moa/exhibits/Current%20Exhibits/150years/832000074.html

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