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Sculpture

The Bomb Thrower, or Pasquale

Type
Sculpture(Opens in new tab)
Date
1910
Accession number
96.14
Maker
Maurice Sterne(Opens in new tab) (American, 1877–1957)
Dimensions
height: 12 in. (30.5 cm.)
Medium
bronze
Description
Maurice Sterne is better known for his paintings than his sculpture, but like many other painters, he turned to sculpture as an outlet for his preoccupation with three-dimensional form. Born in Russia in 1878, Sterne emigrated to New York in 1889 and studied at the National Academy of Design from 1894 to 1899. Winning the first Mooney Traveling Scholarship from the National Academy in 1903, he went to Europe, living first in France and then in Italy for almost ten years. In Paris, Sterne came in contact with avant-garde artists, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Constantin Brancusi. As a member of the circle around Gertrude and Leo Stein, Sterne was particularly drawn to the work of the French Post-Impressionist, Paul Cézanne. The Bomb Thrower, Sterne's first sculpture, is an unembellished portrayal of a youthful anarchist. The sculpture combines political statement with contemporary European avant-garde simplicity and directness. Anarchism had become a significant factor in European and American political life at the turn of the century. Sterne created the sculpture in Italy, where a group of young artists known as the Futurists had just begun to issue a series of manifestos with a pronounced social and political agenda. The Futurists focused on the dynamic, energetic, and violent character of modern life and especially emphasized the power, force, and motion of machinery combined with the contemporary fascination with speed. The Bomb Thrower, however, does not exhibit these Futurist preoccupations and is not as abstract as works by Brancusi and Pablo Picasso of the same period. Reducing natural shapes to simple planes and silhouettes, Sterne stressed form rather than content in this work. The Bomb Thrower shares a simplification of forms with the works by Aristide Maillol and seems to have been inspired by archaic Greek sculpture, such as the Charioteer of Delphi, a work Sterne particularly admired. The ultimate source for the simplification and power of The Bomb Thrower is probably Cézanne, whose paintings in the Salon d'Automne in Paris, in October 1907, had a profound impact upon Sterne. This bronze, which retains its original base, is one of four variants and is thought to be the version made in Rome in 1910. The other casts are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Worcester Art Museum.
Credit
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Ahmanson Foundation, Associated Foundations, Inc., William Berger, Mrs. Sidney F. Brody, Margery and Maurice Katz, and Peter Paanakker
Department
American Art
Find out more
View in the Art Museum catalog(Opens in new tab)
In The Bomb Thrower, Maurice Sterne synthesizes influences from ancient Greece and European modernism. The restrained expression of the bust resembles Early Classical period Greek sculpture from the 5th Century BCE. Sterne's reduction of facial features into planes, shapes, and volumes is derived from his experience of the work of Paul Cézanne as well as of European sculptors such as Aristide Maillol, who also rendered the human form with geometric simplicity. Sterne lived in Rome when he created The Bomb Thrower. Its title suggests the artist's familiarity with the revolutionary politics of some European artists, particularly the Italian Futurists who advocated violent anarchism as a way of ushering in a modern age.

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