American National Biography Online




Davidson, Jo (30 Mar. 1883-2 Jan. 1952), sculptor, was born Joseph
Davidson in New York City, the son of Jacob S. Davidson and Haya
Getzoff, Russian Jewish immigrants. During his childhood Davidson
lived in tenement housing on the Lower East Side. Through the
combined industry of family members, the children were fed and
educated. Davidson began to study art at the Art Students League,
where he attended evening classes with George de Forest Brush,
George Bridgman, and Bryson Burroughs. Around 1902 Davidson moved
to New Haven, Connecticut, ostensibly to attend medical school
at Yale University. More interested in art classes than medicine,
however, Davidson soon discovered clay. By 1903 he had returned
to New York City, where he worked as an assistant in the studio
of sculptor Hermon Atkins MacNeil. Davidson continued to take
classes at the Art Students League, and in 1906 he first exhibited
a sculpture in the winter exhibition at the National Academy
of Design. Davidson traveled to Paris in 1907 for further study.
After three weeks in the atelier of academic sculptor Jean-Antoine
Injalbert at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Davidson left for the
more bohemian world of his fellow American expatriate artists.
It was during this time that he sculpted one of his most daring
works, a bust of painter John Marin (1908, National Portrait
Gallery, Smithsonian Institution), but for the most part, his
style was traditional, formed on that of nineteenth-century French
sculptors (such as Auguste Rodin) working in terra-cotta and bronze.

  By 1910 Davidson had gained the patronage and friendship of
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. While Davidson was still in France,
Whitney purchased his Head of a Swiss Girl (1909) and later found
working space for him in New York near her own studio at 23 Macdougal
Alley. Whitney remained a supporter of Davidson's work through
commissions for portraits, purchases, and opportunities for exhibition.
During these years Davidson established a lifelong pattern of
peripatetic travel, most often in France, England, and the United States.

  Davidson married Yvonne de Kerstrat, whom he met in France,
in 1909; they had two sons. The family maintained a residence
in Paris, where Yvonne became a fashionable dress designer. In
1926 Davidson purchased "Becheron," an estate near Tours, which
would be his primary studio and home until his death (with the
exception of 1940-1945, years he spent at Stone Court Farm in
Lahaska, Pennsylvania).

  Davidson was given his first one-man show in 1910 at the New
York Cooperative Society. This exhibition was followed by several
others in New York and Chicago. By the time of his participation
in the Armory Show in 1913, Davidson's work was well known. Although
portrait sculpture was to become the most important and lucrative
aspect of Davidson's oeuvre, his initial success was founded
on a number of evocative bronze, marble, and terra-cotta male
and female torsos. He continued for many years to make nude figures
in the style of Rodin, but they received little critical attention.

  In 1914 Davidson made a number of portrait busts in London,
including a likeness of Joseph Conrad. In 1916 he persuaded President
Woodrow Wilson to sit for a bust, and after the close of the
First World War, Davidson created a group of sculptures of men
associated with the Paris Peace Conference. These busts, which
included portraits of General John J. Pershing, Marshal Ferdinand
Foch, and Georges Clemenceau, were exhibited in 1920 in New York
City as A Plastic History of the War. In 1923 he also made one
of his best-known sculptures, a large seated statue of Gertrude
Stein (National Portrait Gallery).

  Davidson increasingly sought out subjects for his burgeoning
"plastic history," although he worked on commission as well.
Those who knew him admired his immense vitality and ability to
befriend and sculpt the leading celebrities of any place he happened
to be. Fellow artist Waldo Peirce characterized Davidson's Paris
studio in 1923 as a "menagerie of busts of all the limelighters
of the world." Davidson did not require lengthy sittings from
his subjects. As he noted in his 1951 autobiography, "My approach
to my subjects was very simple. I never had them pose but we
just talked about everything in the world. . . . Sometimes [they]
talked as if I was their confessor. As they talked I got an immediate
insight" (pp. 86-87).

  Davidson used his charm and joie de vivre not only to gain sitters
and commissions but to promote his own career in the emerging
world of the mass media and celebrity culture. He forged friendships
with a number of journalists, who made sure that his work and
visage were prominently displayed in newspapers and magazines,
particularly in New York City. His massive square face, with
its full beard and twinkling eyes, was to be found in articles
on his work, in photographs that documented his sittings with
famous subjects, in the society pages, and in cartoons published
in the New Yorker; his name was even a clue in crossword puzzles.
>From around 1920 until his death Jo Davidson was a recognized
celebrity in his own right, a designation that had more to do
with his personality and self-promotion than with his gift for
the fine arts. Sometimes other artists complained about Davidson's
success. As George Biddle remarked in his diary in 1937, "All
of us are exhausted by Jo's vitality, his conceit and complete
lack of gray matter." But others understood Davidson's particular
niche in the artistic world. His friend Guy Pene du Bois predicted
as early as 1918 that "some time hence, people may believe that
not to have been in Davidson's gallery of notables is not to
have been a notable" ("Who's Who in Art: J. Davidson," Evening
Post Magazine, 8 June 1918, p. 7).

  Davidson's traditional busts, created in marble, bronze, or
terra-cotta, carried honorific, even classical connotations at
a time when photography, film, and caricature were emerging as
the modern media of choice for celebrity portraiture. During
his long career Davidson sculpted the heads of famous Americans
such as John D. Rockefeller, Charles Lindbergh, Will Rogers,
Ernie Pyle, Frank Sinatra, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and
Dwight D. Eisenhower. He also made busts of liberal politicians
and radical reformers, including Andrew Furuseth, Mother Jones,
Robert La Follette, Lincoln Steffens, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
and Henry Wallace. Davidson sculpted a number of artists and
literary figures, such as George Luks, Georgia O'Keeffe, and
Robinson Jeffers, as well as a series of British authors done
in 1929-1931 for Doubleday, Doran and Company.

  In 1924 Davidson traveled with Robert La Follette to Russia,
where Davidson made a series of busts of prominent Russians,
all duly featured on the front page of the pictorial section
of the Washington Post. He made a group of portraits of Spanish
loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, which were exhibited
at a benefit in New York in 1938 with a catalog written by Dorothy
Parker and Ernest Hemingway. In 1941, to promote inter-American
relations, Nelson Rockefeller arranged for Davidson to travel
to South American nations to sculpt the heads of their presidents.
This collection was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art
in 1942. In the spring of 1941, while in Caracas, Venezuela,
Davidson married a childhood friend, Florence Gertrude Lucius,
whose acquaintance he had renewed after the death of Yvonne Davidson in 1934.

  By the mid-1940s Davidson's humanitarian views and immense popularity
led him to be a figurehead for a group known as the Independent
Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, which
supported the presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace in 1948.
By 1950 Davidson had been branded a Communist, even though the
New York Times commented after his death that "he was no politician
and no profound economic philosopher" (3 Jan. 1952). Rather,
Davidson was, and kept, "the best company in the world." In 1947
he described his great retrospective exhibition at the American
Academy of Arts and Letters as "some 40 odd years of plastic
history." Davidson's last project was to have been a number of
portraits of Israeli leaders, including David Ben-Gurion and
Golda Meir. He visited Israel in 1951 but did not live to complete
the busts. Davidson died at Becheron, in Sache, after a brief illness.


  Bibliography

  Davidson's personal and professional correspondence, clippings,
and files on many of his portrait commissions are contained in
the Jo Davidson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
The largest public collection of Davidson's work is owned by
the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. A thorough
account of Davidson's life and work is Janis Conner and Joel
Rosenkranz, "Jo Davidson," Rediscoveries in American Sculpture:
Studio Works, 1893-1939 (1989), pp. 10-18. Much information may
also be found in Between Sittings: An Informal Autobiography
of Jo Davidson (1951), which is particularly good for understanding
Davidson's gift for self-promotion. A lengthy obituary is in
the New York Times, 3 Jan. 1952.

  Brandon Brame Fortune

    Citation:
  Brandon Brame Fortune. "Davidson, Jo";
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00206.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date:
  Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.  Published
by  Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.



      From American National Biography, published by Oxford University
      Press, Inc., copyright 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.
      Further information is available at http://www.anb.org.

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