Albin Polášek
Polášek the sculptor is kown to all lovers of art in America. His works are the pride of many a public collection and private residence, and pupils from all parts of the country seek his instruction at the Chicago Art Institute.
In order to understand his work one must realize that Polášek is a Czech, even though he has lived more years in America than in his native Moravia. All th at he has created bears the sign of a Slav spirit, contemplative and fundamentally idealistic, of great delicacy of feeling, keen observation and a tendency to mysticism.
Even though the forms i nwhich he expresses himself are modern, his roots are the Carpathian Mountains of Moravia, where as a boy he absorbed the naive beauty of folk art and folk poetry in the hilly villages of the Moravian Valachs. There, too, his creative instinct first manifested itself, when as a boy of thirteen he carved wooden figures of shepherds of Bethlehem, for the church of his native town.
Albín Polášek was born February 14th, 1879, in Frenštát in Moravia. There he spent his childhood, and when he was fourteen years old, he was sent to Vienna to learn the trade of wood-carver. As a young man he came to America and lived at first in Wisconsin, earning his living by making statues of wood and stone for Catholic churches. Later he decided to enter the Pennsylvania Academy of Art in order to become a sculptor, and in 1905 he began to model from life under Charles Grafly. His progress was rapid; in 1906 he received the Stewardson prize, and the following three years he spent in Rome, having been awarded the Cresson foreign travelling scholarship. In 1910 the American Academy in Rome awarded to him the Prix de Rome. From 1914 he had a studio in New York, and in the fall of 1916 he became head of the sculpture department of the Art Institute of Chicago. Many distinctions have been conferred upon him since: In 1913 he received honorable mention at the Paris Salon, in 1914 the Widener gold medal at the annual exhibition in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in 1915 the silver medal at the Panama Exposition. His work is represented at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Chicago Art Institute. He is a member of the National Sculpture Societ yand the Architectural League of New York, and serves on the Board of Art Advisers for the State of Illinois.
Polášek’s art does not aim at producing an effect ,but rather at expressing an idea; he has something to say, when he brings out a statue. One might call him a philosopher who thinks in stone and metal. That is the impression one gets by gazing at his “Sower”, his “Eternal Moment” or his busts.
The best illustration is his “Sower”, the statue that created so much discussion a few years ago and even gave opportunity to censors of morals and silly critics to air their views. One of these wise critics of art argued that the sower should have at least overalls, since a sower is an agriculturist and farmers do not work naked. Polášek tried to create and did create the sower of great and noble ideas, a symbol of the human spirit marching along the highway of ages and sowing truth, life, beauty, strength, progress, love. Such were the great men of history, and from their scattered seeds came forth never-ending fruits that changed the face of the world.
Simplicity and intensity characterize Polášek’s work, and in this he follows the great masters of the Renaissance. Their simple, but classical lines are seen in his relief “Music.” The seriousness and sincerity of his art is best seen in his “Man Carving his Destiny”, There is something of Rodin in this torso of human body, full of energy and primitive, though not coarse, strength, shaping its own fate, emancipating itself by great effort from the hardness of adversity and struggling with painful determination to achieve character and great destiny.
Polášek’s sculptural portraits are known all over the United States. The artist does not seek merely to reproduce physical likeness, but to bring out traits and mental qualities, to seize the character. This we see in his bust of F. D. Millet, J. Pierpont Morgan, W. M. Chase, Charles McKim, Theodore N. Early, and in the wonderful sitting portrait of James Butterson in Memorial Hall at Hartford, Conn.
