John Flannagan

John Flannagan (1895-1942), American sculptor, whose simplified human figures carved in stone and wood reflect the influence of diverse sources. These include Gothic and early Christian art (see Gothic Art and Architecture; Early Christian Art and Architecture), as well as modern art movements in Europe, especially German expressionism. Although Flannagan was never identified with a particular movement in art, his work helped to introduce modernist ideas of abstraction and an emphasis on the artist's materials to American sculptors.

Born John Bernard Flannagan in Fargo, North Dakota, he studied art at Saint John's University in Minnesota, and at the Minneapolis School of Art. Flannagan suffered a series of tragedies in his life—the death of his father at age six; a childhood spent in an orphanage; the death of a younger brother when Flannagan was twenty-one; two seriously disabling car accidents; and an attempted suicide, after which he was abandoned by his wife and child. These traumas seem to have fueled Flannagan's work with some of its most powerful themes: cycles of birth and growth and repeated images of mother and child. Animals were also favorite subjects, symbols for Flannagan of an integrated community of living things.

Flannagan began his career as a painter, but shortly after moving to New York City in 1924, he decided to become a sculptor and burned all of his early oil paintings. Early sculptures, such as Oak Chest (1924-1925, private collection), shown at the Whitney Studio Club in 1925, demonstrate Flannagan's interest in Celtic decorative work (see Celts), with interlocking patterns carved into the surface of the wood. For much of his stone work Flannagan used fieldstone, which he collected free of charge from the farm of his friend, American artist Arthur B. Davies. The natural rounded shape of each stone is often evident, as in Nude Woman (1927, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio), in which the figure arches backward like the ancient symbol of a serpent biting its tail, or Elephant (1929-1930, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City), in which the animal's trunk, feet, and tail join to complete a circle.

Flannagan insisted that he did not carve his forms in response to the stone, but that he chose each stone to accommodate the image that he wanted to carve. Nevertheless, Flannagan left his surfaces largely rough in a way that celebrated the inherent qualities of his materials. These concerns with the material, and Flannagan's interest in ancient and non-Western art forms, characterized his work as part of a developing modernist sensibility that stood in sharp contrast to the refined, academic, and classical European tradition of sculpture that prevailed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.

Flannagan committed suicide in 1942, at age 47, a few months before a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.