Abbott Pattison - sculptor

 

Abbott Pattison, Winged Figure

This small bronze just caught my eye in the catalog of an upcoming  auction.  It has that same cheerful uplift that’s often seen in my father’s work.  Midwestern men of the same generation, both were medaled for combat in WW2 and then came home to begin careers in sculpture.  Both were skilled  in a variety of media, though it does appear that Pattison never carved wood and my father never worked metal.   The  big difference is that Pattison studied art at Yale while my father studied at Olivet - a tiny progressive liberal arts college in Michigan which at that time offered an Oxford style tutorial with a curriculum of great books.  The Jewish mythopoetic sculptor, Milton Horn,  was one of his tutors.

Richard Miller, 1975 

(rather Hellenistic, no ? - with a cast so sharp it looks like the original clay)

Yale encouraged Pattison to become an eclectic modernist sculptor.  Horn introduced my father to earlier practices.  Both would end up making pieces that were buoyant and sometimes goofy.

 

And both appeared in the first (and regrettably last) survey of contemporary American sculpture presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951.

 The jury included Robert Beverly Hale, then the Associate Curator of American Art at the Met and still famous for his lectures in anatomy on videotape. The sculptors on the jury included:  Donal Hord, Cecil Howard, Robert Laurent, Hugo Robus, David Smith, and William Zorach.

Pattison, Striding Man, 1948

Richard Miller, Bull

Pattison's Surrealistic, eviscerated, discombobulated man brings to mind the Chicago Monster Roster.  These post-war artists, some of them veterans,ike Leon Golub, reacted strongly against the upbeat figurative idealism of Fascist, Communist, and American public sculpture.

My father's piece is  more like art-deco.  But it isn't  merely decorative.  It feels cultic enough to belong in the ancient Middle Eastern temple or palace.

Milton Horn, Job, 1947

Horn's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was also included in this exhibit.

Regretfully, this was the high point of my father's career. He was hired but soon fired from the Cincinnati Art Academy. He was too independent  to hold a teaching position at a reputable institution and he would get few commissions.

Pattison, however,soon  became Sculptor in Residence at the University of Georgia - where he produced the  2-ton, twelve foot monument shown below:

Abbott Pattison, Iron Horse, 1954

It caused quite a sensation on that  conservative campus.  Students vandalized it so often, it was eventually moved out to a farm where it stands today
 

Pattison: Fountain of the Great Lakes, Oak Brook

Lorado Taft, Fountain of the Great Lakes, 1913

Taft's version  offered the innocent play of unclothed sorority girls at a stately masque. Pattison has updated it by making them a bit more raucous -- and possibly drunk. Are they at some kind of feminist retreat deep in the woods?

 

Richard Miller, Noli me Tangere

Meanwhile, my father added a bit of whacky irreverence to outdoor festivities in this piece from the 1990's. 

 

It  may not have been possible for an American artist to get all that serious in the late 20th Century.