Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Artist of the Day, January 29, 2025: Paul Maximilien Landowski, a French sculptor/ monument (#2204)

 Paul Maximilien Landowski (1875 – 1961) was a French monument sculptor of Polish descent. His best-known work is Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Landowski was born in Paris, France, of a Polish refugee father of the January Uprising, and a French mother Julie Vieuxtemps. He studied at the Académie Julian, before graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, he won the Prix de Rome in 1900 with his statue of David, and went on to a fifty-five-year career. He produced over thirty five monuments in the city of Paris and twelve more in the surrounding area. Among those is the Art Deco figure of St. Genevieve on the 1928 Pont de la Tournelle.

He also created Les Fantomes, the French Memorial to the Second Battle of the Marne which stands upon the Butte de Chalmont in Northern France, and the two major Monuments aux Morts in French North Africa, respectively known as Le Pavois in Algiers and the monument à la victoire et à la paix in Casablanca.

Landowski is widely known for the 1931 Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a collaboration with civil engineer Heitor da Silva Costa and architect and sculptor Gheorghe Leonida. Some sources indicate Landowski designed Christ's head and hands, but it was Leonida who created the head when asked by Landowski.

He won a gold medal at the art competitions at the 1928 Summer Olympics for Sculpture, an event held from 1912 to 1952. From 1933 through 1937 he was Director of the French Academy in Rome. He also served as an art–juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal, a grant given between 1919–1954 to young French painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers and musicians.

Landowski was the father of artists: painter Nadine Landowski (1908–1943), agricultural engineer and Legion d’Honneur, fallen in the Debarquement de Provence (Jean Maximilian Landowski) (1911-1944), composer Marcel Landowski (1915–1999), and pianist and painter Françoise Landowski-Caillet (1917–2007).

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Paul Maximilien Landowski
Le voleur d'oranges, circa 1903
Le fakir aux serpents, circa 1903

Water carrier, circa 1905-10
 Les fils de Caïn, circa 1906
 L'hymne à l'aurore, circa 1908
Les fils de Caïn: le berger, circa 1910
Aux artistes dont le nom s'est perdu, circa 1913
Statue équestre d'Édouard VII, circa 1914
 Le Pugiliste Modèle, circa 1920
Héraclès et la biche aux pieds d’Airain Modèle, circa 1921
Concert champêtre et La Becquée, circa 1925
Project basic, circa 1925  noncarried out
Monument en hommage à Paul Déroulède, circa 1927
Head and hands in the workshop of Boulogne
Building site in Rio
Christ the Redeemer, circa 1931
Christ the Redeemer, circa 1931
Monument à la mémoire de l'amiral de Grasse, circa 1931
Montaigne, circa 1933
Les Fantômes de Landowski, French WWI Memorial, circa 1936
Les Fantômes de Landowski, French WWI Memorial, circa 1936
Les sources de la Seine, circa 1936
Place du Trocadéro, circa 1936
Le tombeau du maréchal Foch, circa 1937
La ronde des sirènes, circa 1947
Pandore, circa 1947
Porte de la faculté de médecine, 1951
Le retour éternel, circa 1954
Gre Edmond, circa 1972
Algiers Monument
Portrait de femme Buste en bronze

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