On display: “John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist”

In the early 1900s, John Storrs, a Chicago sculptor and painter who grew up among the world’s first skyscrapers, traveled to Europe to study, and there fell in with the continent’s avant-garde, befriending Marcel Duchamp and Ezra Pound. By the 1910s, he was making sculptures that, he said, like architecture,...

November 18, 2010

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In the early 1900s, John Storrs, a Chicago sculptor and painter who grew up among the world’s first skyscrapers, traveled to Europe to study, and there fell in with the continent’s avant-garde, befriending Marcel Duchamp and Ezra Pound. By the 1910s, he was making sculptures that, he said, like architecture, spurred “growth toward the sun and sky,” and eerily prefigured art deco. Forms in Space, a sort of model skyscraper from 1927, looks in retrospect like an anticipation of the Empire State Building or the Rockefeller Center, which were built a few years later. Storrs spent WWII in France; his daughter joined the Resistance, and he suffered a grueling stint in Nazi prison. He resides now in the pantheon of American futurists, and the Norton exhibition of his works is the first in 20 years.
Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: Nov. 18. Continues through Jan. 2, 2010

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