JOHN HENRY BRADLEY STORRS (1885-1956)

John Storrs began to paint seriously in 1930 at the age of forty-five, building upon his established sculpture practice. Close friendships with fellow painters Marsden Hartley and Fernand Léger during this time likely helped to inspire the shift in medium. Many of Storrs’ earliest paintings, including Portrait of an Aristocrat, resemble depictions of the artist’s own sculptures, cleverly exploring the division between two- and three-dimensional art.

Describing the present work among “his most accomplished and revealing works,” Noel Frackman writes, “Conceptually, these paintings constitute Dada gestes. Whereas once, in early terra-cotta figures…Storrs had painted his sculptures, now he made paintings of sculptural forms, even approximating the materials of sculpture. In Portrait of an Aristocrat, the gray, mottled surface presents a simulacrum of grained marble…These paintings thus become a kind of punning on the entire subject of sculpture.” (John Storrs, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1986, pp. 91, 93)

Adding to the intellectual play, Storrs also incorporates anthropomorphism into his sculptural abstraction, as underscored by the title Portrait of an Aristocrat. Frackman explains of “the humorous Portrait of an Aristocrat,” “It is possible to see profile faces, both snobbish and totemic, deployed like sculptural relief forms.” (Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927-1944, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1983, p. 228)