.::GIUGNO 2006::.

A Sculptor who Put Women on a Pedestal

"Oronzio Maldarelli was an Italian, a classicist at heart," recalled his friend and colleague William Zorach in his memoir. "Oronzio loved the particular grace and sensuousness of the human figure. He felt no need to go into the world of abstraction — or delve into the morbid and unhealthy crevices of life.  There was too much joy and magnificence in the world for him to express."  Zorach added, "To Oronzio, the female figure was the most wondrous thing in the world.  His work is a paean to the warm, luscious, sensitive, and tender half of humanity that is woman."

In 1948, at the height of his career, Maldarelli explained his mission to Time Magazine: "I'm trying to create form, beautiful harmonies of shapes." Though the body of work this talented man left behind is impressive, and though he enjoyed considerable acclaim during his lifetime, unfortunately, the artist no longer has much of a fan club.  Since few Italians recognize his name or know where to find his award-winning statuary, here's a brief retrospective.

Born in Naples , Italy in 1892, Oronzio was the son of Rosina and Michael Maldarelli, a goldsmith.  During the 1890s, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York .  When he was fourteen years old, Oronzio began taking lessons in drawing and clay modeling; after two years he started studying at the National Academy of Design with Leon Kroll, Ivan Olinsky, and Hermon McNeil. Oronzio continued his art education by attending evening classes at the National Academy of Design and daytime courses at The Cooper Union (on Astor Place in Greenwich Village), where he studied drawing and painting. By 1912, the 20-year-old man had developed a serious interest in sculpture. He entered the Beaux-Arts Institute, where Jo Davidson and Elie Nadelman became particular influences. 

Described as "a classicist with modern tendencies," Maldarelli produced some early abstract work that reflected a fleeting flirtation with primitivism. During the 1920s, these drawings and pastels were enthusiastically praised at his solo show at Manhattan 's Arden Galleries. In 1935, however, he became dissatisfied with the separation of form and content, and turned to figural work. A Smithsonian Institute catalogue entry noted that the Italian-influenced Oronzio Maldarelli was "best known for sculptures of female forms in which volume, mass, and contour are overriding concerns." A sampling of his statuary is on permanent display in Washington , D.C. inside the Smithsonian's American wing, part of The Sara Roby Foundation Collection.

After a well-received show at the Smithsonian in 1929, he began to win well-paid commissions for cemeteries, churches, and museums. For example, St. Joseph 's Roman Catholic Church in Kingston , NY requested a figure for the front of the sanctuary. His graceful bronze "Flying Angel" was installed there in 1931. 

He became a Guggenheim Fellow for two years [1931-1933], which gilded his reputation and attracted collectors with deep pockets. In 1934, the Rockefellers came calling. Oronzio Maldarelli and his collaborator René Chambellan drew the silhouettes (cut from steel and given a black finish) over the huge doors in the foyer of Radio City Music Hall at Rockefeller Center . Maldarelli and Chambellan also designed the black Formica frieze extending all around Radio City ’s grand outer lobby, work executed by Oscar B. Bach.  

In 1936, when millionaire Archer Milton Huntington created an outdoor art museum in South Carolina , he purchased 94 sculptures from Arden Galleries by the most respected award-winners.  Oronzio Maldarelli's permanent exhibit at Brookgreen Gardens is an eye-catching playful pair angled like an X, "Two Kids," forged in lead. A nude boy leans sidewise, braced against one foot, his hand to the head of a young goat, which rears in the opposite direction, so that their bodies make a pattern of diagonals. 

After being hired for a number of W.P.A. projects in the northeast during the Depression, Oronzio's flair led to his major installation for the 1939 World's Fair on a United States Government Building . Around the same time, William Zorach commissioned him to create one of the twelve postmen for a new Post Office near the Capitol. Maldarelli rendered his "Air Mail" in aluminum.

By 1937, Oronzio Maldarelli was teaching sculpture at Columbia University . He inspired many gifted students including Margot Einstein, daughter of the famous physicist Dr. Albert Einstein.  As his awards and commissions increased, Columbia promoted Prof. Maldarelli to a Department Chairmanship, which gave him a position of enormous influence until he retired at age 69 in April 1961. "His students went in for direct carving and produced some fine work," observed William Zorach in a posthumous tribute. "Now that he is dead, I hear they are all doing welding."

During the war years, the demand for work by Oronzio Maldarelli grew. His sculpture was included in several prestigious exhibitions that featured other acknowledged masters of marble and muscle:  Alexander Calder, Chaim Gross, Gaston Lachaise, Frederick MacMonnies, Paul Manship, and William Zorach. 

The New York Times art critics applauded his statuette “Reclining Woman”, purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art [December 1941], as well as his decorative black marble birdbath crowned by a trio of doves [dedicated in 1942], which sits opposite the Central Park Zoo cafeteria. In April 1942, Maldarelli made world-wide headlines when his white marble statue of the Blessed Virgin was installed in the Lady Chapel, its permanent home inside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue . Dedicated by Archbishop Francis J. Spellman, this figure was rechristened “Our Lady of New York.”  

Happily married to Tillie, an artist who often assisted him, Oronzio Maldarelli experimented with materials such as glass, mahogany, and grey-tinted Tennessee marble. Stylish people collected his work — such as fashion designer Bonnie Cashin — as well as the Minneapolis Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Chicago Institute of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art [SUNY at Purchase, NY], etc.

Maldarelli captured loveliness and subtlety in bronze and stone, giving fresh life to the serene classical tradition set for the Twentieth Century by Renoir and Maillol. On March 29, 1963 , Time Magazine commemorated his achievements: “Not too many sculptors concentrate on the figure today. Of those who do, only a few make it recognizable, and fewer still beautiful. Oronzio Maldarelli, who died in New York City last January [1963], took for his favorite theme the female nude, for he believed it to be nature brought to near perfection.”

IDEA GIUGNO 2006