1. Robert Laurent was a French-American modernist figurative sculptor, printmaker and teacher.
14 Facts About Robert Laurent
1. 2.
Best known for his virtuoso mastery of the figure, Robert Laurent sculpted in multiple media, including wood, alabaster, bronze, marble and aluminum.
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Robert Laurent's expertise earned him major commissions for public sculpture, most famously for the Goose Girl for New York City's Radio City Music Hall, as well as for Spanning the Continent for Philadelphia's Fairmount Park.
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Robert Laurent was born the son of French peasants in Concarneau, Brittany, France in 1890.
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In Europe, Robert Laurent traveled to his native Brittany where he met Mimi Caraes, who became his wife.
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Field taught drawing and painting until his death, and Robert Laurent taught sculpture and wood carving there for the next 50 years.
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Field and Robert Laurent were, conversely, committed modernists, and appealed to more experimental students and colleagues, such as Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Niles Spencer, gallery owner Edith Gregor Halpert and curator Holger Cahill, among others.
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Public collections across the United States hold Robert Laurent's work, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Addison Gallery, Indiana University and the Terra Foundation for Art, among others.
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In 1938, Robert Laurent won the second of two Logan Prizes at the Art Institute of Chicago's annual American art exhibition.
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Robert Laurent received high distinction in 1954 when was named sculptor in residence at the American Academy in Rome for a year.
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Robert Laurent was one of 23 American sculptors whose works were selected for the controversial American National Exhibition in Moscow, in 1959.
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Robert Laurent was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters shortly before his death at the age of seventy-nine.
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Robert Laurent taught at the Art Students League in New York City, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Vassar College, and Goucher College.
14.
Robert Laurent's son, John, was a prominent painter in Maine, known for his landscapes and seascapes.