Bather, 1961
Marble on black laminate base
19 x 7 3/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Biography
Born in Naples, Italy in 1892, Oronzio Maldarelli was the son of a goldsmith. The family emigrated to the United States in 1900 and studied at the National Academy of Design, with Leon Kroll, Ivan Olinsky, and Hermon Atkins MacNeil, and at Beaux-Arts Institute of Design he studied with Solon Borglum, Jo Davidson, John Gregory and Elie Nadelman.
Maldarelli’s early work, such as Charity and Labor, both located at the Municipal Building in Plainfield, New Jersey, is in a modified classical tradition, stylized and decorative. His later work returns to a fuller treatment of form, as seen in Resignation, a sculpture that won a Fairmont Park Association prize at the Philadelphia Open Air Exhibition in 1930. After studying in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1931-1933, Maldarelli returned to America and produced a group of figures with even less definition of form. In the artist’s words:
I should like those who view my work to learn to look at sculpture for its own formal meaning, to sense the volume, rhythm, the balance of repeated shapes and the play of lights and shadows on the sculpture.
-Oronzio Maldarelli, 1934
Later in his career, Maldarelli returned to a fuller treatment of the form, while maintaining a sense of the solid structure of the subject. Public sculptures and commissions include: a high relief in the Hartford Public Library, Connecticut; Unity of the Family, the façade of the New York State Insurance Fund Building; Spirit of the Youth, James Weldon Johnson Houses, New York; Madonna, Lady’s Chapel, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York; Air Mail, Federal Building (Formerly Federal Post Office Building), Washington, D.C.; and Marble Bird Bath, Central Park Zoo, New York, dedicated in 1942 by the family of Edith Deacon Martin. Maldarelli taught sculpture at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University until he retired, two years before his death in 1963.
