Lot 32
  • 32

Mahonri Mackintosh Young 1877 - 1957

Estimate
70,000 - 90,000 USD
Log in to view results
bidding is closed

Description

  • Mahonri Mackintosh Young
  • The Knockdown
  • signed © Mahonri and numbered No 2 with the Valsuani Foundeur foundry mark on the base; also bears the artist's fingerprint 
  • bronze
  • 23 by 30 inches
  • (58.4 by 76.2 cm)
  • Executed in 1931.

Provenance

Private Collection, New Caanan, Connecticut, by 1937
By descent to the present owners (his grandchildren)

Exhibited

Utica, New York, Museum of Art, Munson-Williams Proctor Institute, The Olympics in Art: An Exhibition of Works of Art Related to Olympic Sports, January-March 1980, no. 38, p. 94, illustration of another example

Literature

Thomas E. Toone, Mahonri Young: His Life and Art, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1997, illustration of another example p. 135
Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture: Studio Works, 1893-1939, Austin, Texas, 1989, pp. 182, 184, 186
Roberta K. Tarbell, "Mahonri Young," The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, ed. Joan M. Marter, New York, 2011, p. 307

Catalogue Note

Born in 1877 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Mahonri Young enjoyed his greatest acclaim for a series of bronze sculptures of boxers. By the 1930s when he created The Knockdown, Young was associated with Social Realism; he strove to depict the everyday lives of the working class. Young always loved sports, boxing in particular, and began his Prizefighter series, of which The Knockdown is one, in 1926. American artists frequently depicted scenes of athletes and sporting events during this period, and Young’s bronzes, which portrayed moments of high drama in boxing, earned him the title “the George Bellows of American sculpture.” In The Knockdown Young captures the moment the standing competitor has secured his victory, having just delivered the devastating blow that has brought his opponent to the mat.

Young submitted The Knockdown to the Olympic Games exhibition in Los Angeles in 1932, where it received a gold medal. Other versions of The Knockdown are now in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Brigham Young University.