Mahonri Young

 

Mahonri was born August 9, 1877 in Salt Lake City, Utah. At a young age, Mahonri

fell very ill and his father gave him a lump of clay to help him through a long recuperation. He

began modeling birds and other animals and his mother immediately recognized his natural

ability. Of himself he said, “I cannot remember when I did not want to be a sculptor.” Although

an accomplished sculptor, Young also found artistic expression in watercolor and oil paintings,

etchings, and drawings. He was a prolific artist, never far from his studio and always with a

sketchbook and pencil close at hand. Mahonri stressed the importance of “seeing,” and

was himself a careful, lifelong observer. This, combined with his love of reading, contributed to a

vast knowledge that provided fertile ground for his art. He lived a rich and varied life. As a child

he lived in Salt Lake City at the Deseret Woolen Mills, owned and run by his father. He

remembers,

 

I was thrown into the company of a number of workmen of many occupations and

trades, . . . besides men and women working in the mill itself there was a complete farm

with all the animals, horses, cows, chickens, that go with a working farm and besides an

orchard. I was exposed to the influence of all these different and varied activities and

occupations from my most impressionable years. How could I not help but be

impressed[?]

 

After leaving the woolen mills, Mahonri studied for a time under JT Harwood, a prominent Utah

artist of the day, and worked as an illustrator for the local newspaper. He travelled to New York

City, back to Salt Lake and then, as early as he could afford, across the Atlantic to Paris where he

studied and rubbed shoulders with many prominent artists of the day. He would make repeated

trips to France and view them as some of the most valuable years in his development as an

artist. On three different occasions, he travelled to the desert southwest for the American

Museum of Natural History to document the Hopi, Navajo and Apache people. In all of his

varied experiences, Mahonri never tired of representing the working men and women that he had

observed as a young child, whether they were farmers in the French countryside, sheepherders

in the Navajo country or boxers in New York City. He wanted to represent them truthfully,

without artifice or unnecessary elaboration. As his skills developed and he matured as an artist

he never abandoned this initial interest in the everyday. Consequently, there is a genuine, solid

quality to Young’s art, despite its diversity in both medium and place. The rounded, powerful

forms have a grace and fluidity that give quiet beauty to Mahonri’s work. Of his life and work he

wrote,

 

The challenge to everyman’s conscience is to choose for his life’s work the thing he loves

to do, and once he has decided upon a course, he must work conscientiously to learn all

about it. There is in the heart of an ambitious, sincere man–to do well–that which in his

honest opinion he knows to be right.