- 154
Naum Aronson Russian, 1872-1943
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Description
- Naum Aronson
- Les Amoureux (The Lovers)
- signed and dated: Aronson 20
- white marble, on a sculptor's wooden modelling stand
Catalogue Note
Paul Léon, the Directeur Général des Beaux-Arts, wrote for the introduction of the Galerie Decour’s retrospective in 1926 that ‘Aronson is a Frenchman by adoption and vocation’. Today he could be claimed by many countries as their own, for despite his long stay in Paris he was essentially itinerant, ending his days in New York. Of Russian-Jewish origin, Aronson first moved to Germany where he aligned himself with the ideas of the central European Secessionists, exhibiting at the Berlin Secession of 1901. A few years later, presumably while living in Bonn, he completed the Monument to Beethoven for the Beethoven Haus, casts of which are inscribed ‘Bonn 1905’ (see Sothebys 26th Nov. 98, Lot 54). The bust that surmounts the monument was awarded the gold medal at Liège in 1905 and constituted Aronson’s inaugural Salon exhibit in Paris the following year. Fresh to the city where he would settle for most of his life, Aronson still found time to send over to London’s Goupil Gallery, in June 1906, a selection of works including a bust of Tolstoi and works entitled Bretonne and Marseillaise. He was nonethless reclusive by nature, never having entered the atelier of an established master – as might have been expected - and refusing to join any group. This isolation has contributed to the mystique he has enjoyed to the present day.
Kineton Parkes wrote that Aronson reached his maturity in the 1920’s, to when the present marble dates, and indeed by this time he had exhibited a large corpus of works with such titles as Enigme, Les Épaves, L’Appaisement and Aux Innocents. They are similarly carved with forms emerging from a marble matrix left rough-hewn, anthropomorphically coming to life. The subjects he chose to depict could be far-ranging, for he carved groups of an intensely personal nature such as Pogrom, Bar-Mitzve and Exode as well as busts of Wagner, Chopin, Berlioz and Lenin (exhibited in the Soviet Pavillion in 1937).
Kineton Parkes wrote that Aronson reached his maturity in the 1920’s, to when the present marble dates, and indeed by this time he had exhibited a large corpus of works with such titles as Enigme, Les Épaves, L’Appaisement and Aux Innocents. They are similarly carved with forms emerging from a marble matrix left rough-hewn, anthropomorphically coming to life. The subjects he chose to depict could be far-ranging, for he carved groups of an intensely personal nature such as Pogrom, Bar-Mitzve and Exode as well as busts of Wagner, Chopin, Berlioz and Lenin (exhibited in the Soviet Pavillion in 1937).
RELATED LITERATURE
The Art of Carved Sculpture p.166; Sculpture of To-Day p.258; Naoum Aronson, statuaire, exh.cat., Galerie Decour, Paris 1926; Summer Exhibition, exh.cat., Goupil Gallery 1906, p.8