American Art

Literature:

D. Roger Howlett, The Sculpture of Donald De Lue: Gods, Prophets, and Heroes, Boston, 1990, p. 79 (another cast illustrated)

With a career spanning sixty years, the artist Donald De Lue is considered one of 20th century America’s greatest monumental sculptors in the Realist style. Born in 1897 in Boston, at the age of 12 he apprenticed with Boston sculptor Richard Recchia, and later studied with Bela Pratt at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as Robert Baker. After World War I, De Lue spent five years in France, where he worked for several sculptors, including Alfredo Pena. It was under these sculptors’ influence that he learned to sculpt the human body accurately and from memory and began to break away from literal interpretations of his subjects. After he returned to the United States, the artist served from 1923-1938 as chief assistant to the portrait sculptor Bryant Baker in New York City. With Baker, he honed his skills and became known as a “sculptor’s sculptor” for his mastery of anatomy. By the late 1930's, De Lue had developed his mature style, and his own career began to flourish.

“His sculpture demonstrates artistic links to both Greco-Roman and late Renaissance sculptors,” writes Jonathan L. Fairbanks, Emeritus Curator of American Figurative Sculpture Catalogue, Museum of Fine

Arts, Boston. “He emulated the exuberant gestures and energetic composition such as those found at Pergamum. The mature Michelangelo especially inspired De Lue to compose his figures with mannerist proportions, emphasized with highly articulated musculature. However, by combining these older influences with the

ideas and techniques acquired during his stay in Europe… De Lue developed his own synthesis. As he admitted, 'Although my work is traditional, it is a tradition of my own’.”

The artist first won recognition in 1938 as runner-up in a competition for the Federal Trade Commission Building in Washington, DC. Several government commissions followed, the first of which were reliefs for the Philadelphia courthouse, completed in 1940. In the next almost fifty years, De Lue probably executed more monumental commissions than anyone else of his generation. Most notable are his works Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves and a pair of nine-foot tall marble sculptures, titled America and France, for the Omaha Beach Memorial in France. The present pair, executed in 1986 at the Tallix Foundry in Beacon, New York, are part of the series of casts the artist originally conceived in 1955. America holds a sword surmounted by an eagle and is draped with stars and stripes; France is an interpretation of “Marianne” and holds the cockerel of France. The marble figures stand guard over the graves at the far end of the Normandy-American Cemetery and Memorial. De Lue’s monuments for the St. Laurent cemetery were the most extensive of any sculptor’s work for the American Battle Monuments Commission after World War II.