Mahonri Macintosh Young was an American sculptor and artist.
Background
Young was born on August 9, 1877 in Salt Lake City, Utah, the son of Mahonri Moriancumer Young and Agnes Mackintosh. His grandfather, Brigham Young, led the Mormons to Salt Lake City in 1847. His father, one of Brigham Young's fifty-six children, owned the Deseret Woolen Mills, and the family lived on a farm near the factory. In 1884 Young's widowed mother sold the family business and moved to Salt Lake City.
Education
Young attended public schools, but quit at the beginning of his freshman year of high school. As a youth in Utah, he learned to whittle from his father, to model clay from the sculptor Cyrus Dallin, and to draw from academician J. T. Harwood. In 1899 he studied at the Art Students League in New York. In 1901 Young went to Paris to study painting and drawing with Jean Paul Laurens and modeling with Charles Raoul Verlet at the Académie Julian. He continued formal study at the Académie Delacluse and with Jean-Antoine Injalbert at the Académie Colarossi.
Career
Young became portrait and sketch artist for the Salt Lake Tribune during the 1890's and worked in its engraving shop. In Chicago and in New York he visited museums for the first time, being especially impressed by paintings by Rembrandt and Jean Millet. He traveled to Florence, Rome, and Venice during the summer in 1901. The quality of Young's small bronze figures of men laboring and at rest, exhibited in 1902 at the American Art Association, was recognized by artists and critics. In Paris in 1903 a thumb injury prevented Young from modeling clay, and he started to experiment with watercolors; two were exhibited at the spring salon (1904). He built an impressive library of books on art and the American West, and clipped and filed periodical articles and photographs. Young employed themes typical of realists. His style was based upon close observation of his subjects. Young was close to Leo and Gertrude Stein during the pivotal years of their support of vanguard artists, but he eschewed modernist primitivism, anatomical distortion for expressive purposes, and abstraction. He also modified the quest for idealized beautiful forms favored by academicians. He stressed actuality, simplification, anatomical study, and compositional structure. Young divided his time between a studio/apartment in New York City and a country studio in Connecticut. Between 1912 and 1918, he traveled three times to the Southwest to observe and sketch Apache, Navajo, and Hopi Indians. His first one-man exhibition of sixty-five works, held at the Berlin Photographic Company, New York City, in 1912, included drawings, watercolors, and sculpture, and was well received by critics. Young's granite and marble Sea Gull Monument was erected in Salt Lake City in 1913. At the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, Young was awarded a silver medal for his bronze figures of laboring men. One-man exhibitions were held at the Macbeth Gallery (1914), the Sculptors' Gallery (1918), Scott and Fowles (1919), and the Whitney Studio Club (1919). Intermittently between 1916 and 1943, Young taught printmaking, painting, illustration, and sculpture at the Art Students League. He worked in Paris in 1923 and from 1925 to 1927. The Rehn Galleries exhibited his bronze sculptures of prizefighters in 1928, and his prints were on view at the Smithsonian Institution in 1930. Young's etchings were lightly scratched landscapes with a deep focal point to render a sense of the wide spaces of the American West. In 1932 he won first prize at the Olympic Games Exhibition, Los Angeles, for his sculpture Knockdown. He had one-man exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. (1932), Kraushaar Galleries in New York City (1935, 1940, and 1948), and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachussets (1940). Young was represented at the 1939 New York World's Fair by two monumental statues, Industry and Agriculture, installed in the Hall of Special Events. A second monumental sculpture inspired by his Mormon heritage, This Is the Place, was erected at the entrance to Emigration Canyon near Great Salt Lake in 1947. Young also did the marble statue of Brigham Young (1950) for Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. Young's writings provide insight into his goals and methods. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1932, 1946, 1952) he expressed biases against excessively vigorous modeling and the technique of direct carving. He died in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Achievements
Membership
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Connections
On February 19, 1907, Young married Cecelia Sharp, daughter of Mormon Bishop John Sharp. They had two children. She died in 1916. Young married Dorothy Weir on February 17, 1931.
Recipient state prizes for painting and sculptor, Utah Arts Institute, 1906. Helen Foster Barnett prize North.A. Doctorate., 1911, prize for portrait, 1931. Silver medal for sculpture Panama Philippine Islands Exposition, 1915.tempSpace1st prize for sculpture Olympic Games, Los Angeles, 1932.
Recipient state prizes for painting and sculptor, Utah Arts Institute, 1906. Helen Foster Barnett prize North.A. Doctorate., 1911, prize for portrait, 1931. Silver medal for sculpture Panama Philippine Islands Exposition, 1915.tempSpace1st prize for sculpture Olympic Games, Los Angeles, 1932.
Olympic Games Exhibition
1932
1932
1911)
Young the Helen Foster Barnett Prize (National Academy of Design