John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist presents approximately 40 works by one of the foremost sculptors to emerge in the early 20th century. Situated at the forefront of the American avant-garde, Storrs (1885–1956) reinvigorated what had become primarily an academic medium with a dynamism and radicality previously unknown in the United States.
Machine-Age Modernist is the first major exhibition of Storrs’s sculpture in over 25 years and focuses on his most innovative phase, the elegant abstractions of New York skyscrapers produced during the 1920s. In its use of a lean, austere language of primary forms, Storrs’s work of this period anticipated the Minimalist movement that surfaced 40 years later. Organized by the Boston Athenaeum with Debra Bricker Balken as guest curator, the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.