Paul Manship’s Ode on a Grecian Urn David Ebony
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, gift of Henry and Walter Keney.
Luckily for Paul Manship and his legacy, “decorative” is no longer a pejorative term in today’s pluralistic art world. The recent revival of interest in the “pattern and decoration” art movement of the 1970s and ’80s, for instance, and the renewed appreciation for craft and craftsmanship among contemporary artists, call for a reassessment of those for whom refinement, elegance, graceful forms, and decorative lines, plus astute allusions to art-historical precedents, are hallmarks of their highly polished productions. As the leading proponent of “archaism,” an international modernist movement that thrived in the first decades of the twentieth century, Manship would find many likeminded artists today, ranging from Carlo Maria Mariani and Audrey Flack to Sarah Peters and Justin Matherly, who have regularly incorporated images appr