Background
Davidson was born on March 30, 1883 in New York City.
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1951
Davidson was born on March 30, 1883 in New York City.
He attended art classes at Yale and at the Art Students League. It was at the School of Fine Arts in New Haven that he discovered his penchant for sculpture.
He served an apprenticeship with the sculptor Herman MacNeill, but left when he felt he was learning nothing. In 1905 he received his first commission, and his statuette of David was exhibited in the Art Students League annual exhibition in 1906. The following year he went to Paris where he enrolled in the EcoledesBeaux-Arts, butaftera few weeks decided to work on his own.
He had a talent for sculpting portrait heads, and soon began receiving commissions. In 1909 his bronze statuette, La lerre, was accepted for the Salon. In 1910 a one-man show of his work was exhibited in New York and was represented in the famous Armory Show of 1913.
During World War I, Davidson served alongside the soldiers as an artist-correspondent. He visited the White House to do his first portrait of a United States president, Woodrow Wilson. Later he sculpted Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
At the end of the war, he made busts of the leading statesmen and generals, including General John J. Pershing and Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Among his many sensitive portraits were those of Albert Einstein, Tomas' Masaryk, Bernard Baruch, the great Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore, and Golda Meir.
He was commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to carve a large marble bust of his father, to be placed in the Standard Oil Company Building in New York, and by George Doran to sculpt a series of writers — James Joyce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, and others. He also did a figure portrait of Gertrude Stein, who read her manuscripts aloud to him during her sittings.
In 1940 he completed a bronze statue of Walt Whitman, which he had been working on forfourteen years; it stands in Bear Mountain State Park in New York. A bronze statue of Will Rogers is in the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D. C. (a second casting is in the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremont, Oklahoma).
When, after World War II, statesmen from around the world gathered in San Francisco for the meeting that led to the creation of the United Nations, Davidson planned to sculpt the delegates, but his work was interrupted by a heart attack. When he recovered, he went to his home in France; where he worked on memorials to the town of Lidice — totally destroyed by the Nazis — and to the Jews, who perished in the Holocaust.
In America, the Academy of Arts and Letters held a large retrospective of Davidson’s work. For the Benefit of the United Nations Children's Appeal, he displayed six hundred sculptures in an exhibition at Rockefeller Center.
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
1951Davidson said that it took two to make a successful portrait bust, and that most important was a rapport between the sculptor and the sitter. He never posed his models, but conversed with them while he worked. These lively conversations gave him the insight into their personalities which is the hallmark of his portraits.
Although many of his contemporaries experimented with cubist, abstract or nonobjective forms in sculpture, Davidson continued to work in his personal, naturalist style. He worked in marble and stone, but his favorite medium was clay, because of its responsiveness to the touch of his hands. The necessity for working quickly on his portraits resulted in a simplification of forms.
Quotes from others about the person
Mahatma Gandhi, observing the bust of himself that Davidson had just completed, commented: “You make heroes out of mud”.