Monologue
John Storrs
JOHN STORRS, 1932. OIL ON LINEN.
An architectural sculptor who, late in his career, began to translate three dimensions into two. John Storrs arrived at a style we would now firmly understand as Art Deco almost entirely independently, predating the widespread consolidation of the movement by nearly a decade. Abandoning his family business and forsaking his inheritance to seek new physical forms in Europe, he studied under Rodin, fraternised with Brancusi, Duchamp, and Man Ray. He translated these ideas and education into sculptural forms that incorporated Native American patterns, Gaelic structures, and Babylonian ziggurats. His work has an architectural eye, and uses the material of American industrialism; steel, brass and vulcanite replace stone in small sculptures that seem to speak to the soaring scale of the skyscrapers he grew up around. Though different in medium, his later paintings manage to bring the same philosophies of sculpture to linen. Interlocking forms and sharply defined colors create a sense of depth and scale that elevates them out of flatness and into a modernist world of dimensionality.