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Robert Graham
Contemporary art sculptor, human figure and memorial sculpture
American, (August 19, 1938–December 27, 2008)
Robert Graham, a realist sculptor of the female figure in often stylized poses as well as commemorative portraiture and monuments, was born in Mexico City, Mexico, August 19, 1938. Graham came to Southern California from Mexcio in 1952, becoming a citizen of the United States. He studied in California at San Jose State College, from 1961-1963, and San Francisco Art Institute, 1963-1964. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, New York City, elected Associate in 1983, an Academician in 1994.
He was married to actress, Anjelica Huston.
*Information retrieved from askart.com
Born in Mexico City on August 19, 1938, to Adeline Graham and Roberto Pena, Robert Graham never really knew his father, who died when he was 6. He was raised by three "mothers", his grandmother Ana, his aunt Mercedes, and his mother Adeline; first in Mexico City, then by the age of 11, in San Jose, Califoria. He was educated at San Jose State and the San Francisco Art Institute. His childhood spent in a house of full women led to his love of women.
In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Graham recalled Adeline taking him by the hand to visit Mexico's magnificent public monuments, such as Chapultepec Castle and the pyramids, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros' murals and the cathederals and churches nationwide.
"I dont remember ever going to a gallery," he said. "The things that were important were those murals and what people saw all the time. They were my history books. You could see what the Aztecs looked like, what Cortes looked like. I never looked at it as art- it was part of your experience as a Mexican."
An elegant, gentlemanly artist who maintained a large studio in Venice, California, Fraham was enormously productive throughout his career. A fiercely independent perfectionist with high-tech skills and an enduring fascination with the female figure, he explored almost every conceivable position and attitude of the female nude in his personal work, often working in an intimate scale.
He is best known for large public commissions that pay homage to historical figures or symbolize big ideas in prominent locations. In Los Angeles, Graham designed a set of free-standing bronze doors for the Music Center in 1978 and a sculpture of two headless figures known as the Olympic Gateway at the Memorial Coliseum for the 1984 Olympics. Rising 25 feet above the ground, the 20,000- pound post and lintel structure is surmounted by the muscular bronze torsos of male and female athletes who competed in the Olympiad.
In Monument to Joe Louis (1986), the boxer's 24-foot long arm and fist, weighing approximately 8,000 pounds, is suspended and supported above a major downtown intersection in Detroit. The City of New York was gifted his cast bronze and gold leaf Duke Ellington Memorial (1997) composed of the figure of Ellington, a piano, three columns, and nune muses/ caryatid that togeter stand 30 feet high. It sits at the north east corner of Central Park and Fifth Avenue.
But among his tributes to beloved public figures, his proudest achievement may have been the Franklin Delanor Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. The complex commission, executed in 1997, includes a life-size figure of the president in his wheelchair, a bas-relief depicting a newsrees of his first inauguration and a series of panels illustrating 54 programs initiated by FDR under the New Deal.
His largest and most prominent public work in his hometown of Los Angeles is the Great Bronze Doors, a huge entryway topped by and angel, made for the Cathederal of Our Lady of the Angels in 2002. A massive project, Graham worked nearly five years on it with some 150 artists. The cathederal proudly calls these doors different to those of any other Christian place of worship. Instead of using typical Old and New Testament biblical stories as images, Graham chose to create scenes that are "culturally recognizable." In addition to the 8-foot angel on top of the doors, there are ten Virgin mothers depicted, with various ethnic origins, including Pomata, from the Andes, Guadalupe, from Mexico, and Belen, from Peru.
On a personal scale, Graham dedicated himself to the female nude, intimate, immediate, endless renditions of strong and confident female forms in drawings, enravings, and sculpture over the course of four decades. Art historian and professor Donald Kuspit says in his 2009 Artnet magazine feature article that Graham contributes to the ancient discourse of the nude and the lived body in all its "hereness." Unlike Michelangelo, Graham concentrated on the female figures likely because he wanted to study and emulate women's inner creativity. "Graham wants to become one with the female muse to unite with his better self, as it were, and to assure himself that he will be perpetually creative," argues Kuspit. Graham's many female sculptures are powerful and muscular forms, not romanticized or generalized, but naturalistic. His early sculptures were of women in static positions, but Graham's later work was more dynamic, according to Kusput, with womrn moving "hyperactively."
Although Graham never followed the art world's trends, preferring to work as a relatively old-fashioned statue-maker, he showed his work in mant galleries and museums, including Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, Imago Galleries in Palm Desert and Gagosian Gallery in New York. His work is in the colleciton of such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Detroit Institute of Arts and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
Artist Tony Berlant, who met Graham in London in 1973, said he had great early success "within the established vanguard, here (Los Angeles) and in New York and in Europe. His own muse led him to making work that was very independent. He demanded to do things on his own terms and did them with incredible excellence. And he had everyone's respect for it." Berlant said women were "the obsessive focus of his work," and that Graham was sometimes criticized for those sculptures, which often depicted womrn in the nude and headless. ut those figures, Berland said, "were incredibly naturalistic. People sometimes saw them as being more icons of sexuality. But if you look at them, you see individual personalities, I think. they are portraits- not generic."
"As and artist, he was always on the cutting edge," artist Laddie Dill said at the time of his death in 2008. "He would always push what he was doing further and further. He started with plexiglass boxes, then going to bronze and monumental bronze, and he was starting to work with concrete and galss. His head was obviously way ahead of his hands."
Robert Graham died after a short illness in late December 2008, just a few days prior, he had been inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
- Abigail Hartmann Associates, 2018
Contemporary art sculptor, human figure and memorial sculpture
American, (August 19, 1938–December 27, 2008)
Robert Graham, a realist sculptor of the female figure in often stylized poses as well as commemorative portraiture and monuments, was born in Mexico City, Mexico, August 19, 1938. Graham came to Southern California from Mexcio in 1952, becoming a citizen of the United States. He studied in California at San Jose State College, from 1961-1963, and San Francisco Art Institute, 1963-1964. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, New York City, elected Associate in 1983, an Academician in 1994.
He was married to actress, Anjelica Huston.
*Information retrieved from askart.com
Born in Mexico City on August 19, 1938, to Adeline Graham and Roberto Pena, Robert Graham never really knew his father, who died when he was 6. He was raised by three "mothers", his grandmother Ana, his aunt Mercedes, and his mother Adeline; first in Mexico City, then by the age of 11, in San Jose, Califoria. He was educated at San Jose State and the San Francisco Art Institute. His childhood spent in a house of full women led to his love of women.
In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Graham recalled Adeline taking him by the hand to visit Mexico's magnificent public monuments, such as Chapultepec Castle and the pyramids, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros' murals and the cathederals and churches nationwide.
"I dont remember ever going to a gallery," he said. "The things that were important were those murals and what people saw all the time. They were my history books. You could see what the Aztecs looked like, what Cortes looked like. I never looked at it as art- it was part of your experience as a Mexican."
An elegant, gentlemanly artist who maintained a large studio in Venice, California, Fraham was enormously productive throughout his career. A fiercely independent perfectionist with high-tech skills and an enduring fascination with the female figure, he explored almost every conceivable position and attitude of the female nude in his personal work, often working in an intimate scale.
He is best known for large public commissions that pay homage to historical figures or symbolize big ideas in prominent locations. In Los Angeles, Graham designed a set of free-standing bronze doors for the Music Center in 1978 and a sculpture of two headless figures known as the Olympic Gateway at the Memorial Coliseum for the 1984 Olympics. Rising 25 feet above the ground, the 20,000- pound post and lintel structure is surmounted by the muscular bronze torsos of male and female athletes who competed in the Olympiad.
In Monument to Joe Louis (1986), the boxer's 24-foot long arm and fist, weighing approximately 8,000 pounds, is suspended and supported above a major downtown intersection in Detroit. The City of New York was gifted his cast bronze and gold leaf Duke Ellington Memorial (1997) composed of the figure of Ellington, a piano, three columns, and nune muses/ caryatid that togeter stand 30 feet high. It sits at the north east corner of Central Park and Fifth Avenue.
But among his tributes to beloved public figures, his proudest achievement may have been the Franklin Delanor Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. The complex commission, executed in 1997, includes a life-size figure of the president in his wheelchair, a bas-relief depicting a newsrees of his first inauguration and a series of panels illustrating 54 programs initiated by FDR under the New Deal.
His largest and most prominent public work in his hometown of Los Angeles is the Great Bronze Doors, a huge entryway topped by and angel, made for the Cathederal of Our Lady of the Angels in 2002. A massive project, Graham worked nearly five years on it with some 150 artists. The cathederal proudly calls these doors different to those of any other Christian place of worship. Instead of using typical Old and New Testament biblical stories as images, Graham chose to create scenes that are "culturally recognizable." In addition to the 8-foot angel on top of the doors, there are ten Virgin mothers depicted, with various ethnic origins, including Pomata, from the Andes, Guadalupe, from Mexico, and Belen, from Peru.
On a personal scale, Graham dedicated himself to the female nude, intimate, immediate, endless renditions of strong and confident female forms in drawings, enravings, and sculpture over the course of four decades. Art historian and professor Donald Kuspit says in his 2009 Artnet magazine feature article that Graham contributes to the ancient discourse of the nude and the lived body in all its "hereness." Unlike Michelangelo, Graham concentrated on the female figures likely because he wanted to study and emulate women's inner creativity. "Graham wants to become one with the female muse to unite with his better self, as it were, and to assure himself that he will be perpetually creative," argues Kuspit. Graham's many female sculptures are powerful and muscular forms, not romanticized or generalized, but naturalistic. His early sculptures were of women in static positions, but Graham's later work was more dynamic, according to Kusput, with womrn moving "hyperactively."
Although Graham never followed the art world's trends, preferring to work as a relatively old-fashioned statue-maker, he showed his work in mant galleries and museums, including Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, Imago Galleries in Palm Desert and Gagosian Gallery in New York. His work is in the colleciton of such institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Detroit Institute of Arts and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
Artist Tony Berlant, who met Graham in London in 1973, said he had great early success "within the established vanguard, here (Los Angeles) and in New York and in Europe. His own muse led him to making work that was very independent. He demanded to do things on his own terms and did them with incredible excellence. And he had everyone's respect for it." Berlant said women were "the obsessive focus of his work," and that Graham was sometimes criticized for those sculptures, which often depicted womrn in the nude and headless. ut those figures, Berland said, "were incredibly naturalistic. People sometimes saw them as being more icons of sexuality. But if you look at them, you see individual personalities, I think. they are portraits- not generic."
"As and artist, he was always on the cutting edge," artist Laddie Dill said at the time of his death in 2008. "He would always push what he was doing further and further. He started with plexiglass boxes, then going to bronze and monumental bronze, and he was starting to work with concrete and galss. His head was obviously way ahead of his hands."
Robert Graham died after a short illness in late December 2008, just a few days prior, he had been inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
- Abigail Hartmann Associates, 2018
Artist Objects
Moca Torso 2018.54