Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/306

firm in Wisconsin and here, for three years, Albin Polášek worked, exciting comment by his unusual methods, for he cut his figures without models, directly in the wood.

The art in him would out, and, being persuaded to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he commenced to work from life, in 1905, under Grafly. Two-years later he won the Stewardson prize. Later he wen the Cresson foreign travelling scholarship and spent three years in Rome, at the American Academy. Here he was awarded the Prix de Rome, in 1910. In 1913 he received honorable mention at the Paris Salon of that year. Shortly after his return from abroad in 1914, the Pennsylvania Academy awarded Mr. Polášek the Widener gold medal. The next year he won the silver medal at the San Francisco Exposition and in 1917 the Logan medal with $1,500, a silver medal at the Panama Exposition, in 1922 the Logan medal with $500—but the list grows long.

Further, Mr. Polášek has works on permanent exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Detroit Museum, Among his public works are the Memorial to J. G. Patterson at Hartford, the Theodore Thomas Memorial in Grant Park, Chicago, and the Governor Yates Memorial in Springfield, Illinois.

Great as are these productions of his own genius, perhaps his self-sacrifice and devotion in his work of teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has been the head of the department of sculpture since 1916, appeal even more to the average man. Here he has quietly gone about his great work of “setting a new seal of beauty athwart this land,” leading countless young men and women to a clearer and truer perception of “the vision.”

These are the facts of Mr. Polášek’s life, interesting enough in themselves to be sure. But there has been a greater inner growth in him, spiritual and deep. This can be gathered from his art, and from it only.

In classifying Mr. Polášek’s art, one might call it realistic, but it is not the realism of the craftsman minute, patient and painstaking, but the sweeping, imaginative realism of the artist. For all its boldness of conception and execution, however, it reveals an almost severe restraint that shows the Greek and Italian influence. “There is,” says Kineton Parks in Sculpture of Today, “a strange, almost a haunting, quality in his work that is not explained until the facts of his artistic life are known. . . . he is a Czech, mystic, contemplative, visionary, according to the true Slav spirit. You see this in all his work. . . .”

As for his individual pieces, his last great work, the Wilson Memorial, to be unveiled in Prague, was reproduced and described in our last issue. “I have tried,” Mr. Polášek told our reporter, “to present President Wilson as a friend and protector of the Czechoslovak people.” How well he has succeeded, let “Chicago Com-