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Lot Essay
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, best known as 'The Sculptor of Mount Rushmore', studied painting in San Francisco at the School of Design under Virgil Williams, William Keith and Elizabeth Putnam. He married Putnam in 1889 and the couple traveled to France for further study at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In France, Borglum turned to sculpture and first experienced the work of Rodin, who would remain a major influence in his career.
Nude (Angna Enters) is a dynamic leaping torso, cast circa 1916. In a recent Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition on American Sculpture Ilene Susan Fort writes about Nude (Angna Enters): "In leaping nude, Borglum combined Rodin's fascination with movement with a belief in the expressive potential of amputated figures to create a dancer who conveys an unbridled sense of energy despite her missing limbs. The fragment type Americans employed most often was the torso." (Ilene Susan Fort, American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1995, p. 48)
Nude (Angna Enters) is a dynamic leaping torso, cast circa 1916. In a recent Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition on American Sculpture Ilene Susan Fort writes about Nude (Angna Enters): "In leaping nude, Borglum combined Rodin's fascination with movement with a belief in the expressive potential of amputated figures to create a dancer who conveys an unbridled sense of energy despite her missing limbs. The fragment type Americans employed most often was the torso." (Ilene Susan Fort, American Sculpture: A Question of Modernity, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1995, p. 48)