John L. Lewis (Man of Iron)

The geometrical facial forms—angular rhythms and emphatic ridges of the chin, brow and back-swept hair—of this larger-than-life portrait of the American labor leader, John L. Lewis, suggest superhuman power and capture the inner, psychological dynamism of Lewis at the height of his career in 1940. Drawing upon the long tradition of character studies in Western portraiture, Alfonso Iannelli injected his own abstract and modernist stylistic idiom, which was in part indebted to French Cubist sculpture. Iannelli tinted this plaster model dark brown in emulation of the proposed final bronze version, though the work was never cast in that medium.