Mahonri Young
1887-1957

Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Mahonri Young is best known as a sculptor and painter of religious subjects and in New York City for sculpture and paintings of of boxers and laboring people. In America he was one of the early sculptors of genre figures, that is everyday people going about their everyday lives. He introduced these social realist subjects in 1904, and this focus on non-lofty subjects has been perceived as a threat to the Beaux Arts style that had been prevalent because of the European academic training of the dominant sculptors such as Augustus Saint Gaudens. However, this new realism of Young’s, inspired by his exposure to the French peasants in the paintings of Jean-Francois Millet, did not have wide-spread popularity until the 1930s.

In 1899, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York and then studied in Paris at the Julian, Colarossi, and Delecluse academies and traveled extensively in Europe. Returning to the United States, he lived primarily in the East in New York City where he had a studio on 59th Street and a country home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He returned to Paris in 1923 to work with well-known architect, Bertram Goodhue, on a monument for the American Pro Cathedral. Young liked Paris so well, that two years later he returned with his family to spend another two and one-half years.

It was said that during this time, away from pressures of teaching at the Art Students League which he had done from 1916, his realistic style matured. Upon his return to New York, his exhibition at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York was reportedly one of the most successful shows of his career.

He continued his teaching at the Art Students League through the Depression years and was increasingly fascinated by the energy of boxing matches and construction laborers, which he reflected in his sculpted energetic figures of factory workers.