Female Torso

The Chicago-born sculptor John Storrs enjoys a special place within early American modernism as one of the first native-born sculptors to develop a completely non-objective style of abstraction. During this period, other Americans—including Gaston Lachaise and Robert Laurent (whose works are included in the Smart Museum permanent collection)—were exploring modernist interpretations but remained committed to the figure. Storrs, too, was creating more conventional figural works, including this standing female nude from around 1927. The bronze displays an interesting mixture of academic and vanguard ideas, and it is at once a traditional statue and a “modern” formalist work devoid of anecdotal or literary elements. While traditional Beaux-Arts standards directed Storrs’ choice of the female nude and the figure’s classicizing pose, subtle modernist tendencies are introduced in the compositional format of the sculptural fragment, the simplified, self-contained elements of the figure’s anatomy, and the relative smoothness of body surfaces that further invest the figure with the modernist sensibility of reductive shapes.