Oronzio Maldarelli

Oronzio Maldarelli was an American sculptor and painter (1892–1963) born in Naples, Italy.

Education

He was born on September 9, 1892, and immigrated with his parents, Michael Maldarelli, a goldsmith, and mother, Louisa Rizzo Maldarelli, to the United States in 1901. About 1906, he began taking modeling lessons at the Cooper Union, and after two years began to study at the National Academy of Design with Leon Kroll, Ivan Olinsky, and Hermon Atkins MacNeil. In 1912 he entered the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied under Jo Davidson, Elie Nadelman, John Gregory and others.

Career

Maldarelli's classical training allowed him to obtain commissions for both garden decorations and architectural sculpture. However as he grew older his work became more and more abstracted, though it would remain basically figurative.

He taught at both Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. One known student, Mario Cooper, would go on to considerable fame as an illustrator and also would teach at Columbia.^[1]

While working at Columbia University in early 1950, Maldarelli met and taught a young Canadian police officer named John Reginald Abbott, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Abbott had received authorization and funding to study sculpture in New York City in order to develop a new system of criminal identification for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that relied on sculpted composites of suspected criminals.^[2]

Maldarelli died in New York City in 1963 at the age of 70 from a heart attack.

Like many other sculptors of his day, Maldarelli produced both architectural and funerary sculpture.

He was a member of the National Sculpture Society^{[citation needed]} and the National Academy of Design,Board of Governors. "National Academicians". The National Academy. Archived from the original on 2016-03-14. Retrieved 2014-01-25. and was awarded the Widener Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Collections

Bianca No. 2, 1951, by Oronzio Maldarelli, displayed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia.

• St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri
• Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
• Smithsonian Institution Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
• Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
• Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey
• St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City

References

1. Watson, Ernest (1946). Forty Illustrators and How They Work. Watson Guptill Publishers.
2. Jelinski, Jamie (2023-09-16). "'This sculptor is a cop': John Reginald Abbott, murder in Montreal and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's criminal identification masks". Sculpture Journal. 32 (3): 355–382. doi:10.3828/sj.2023.32.3.05. ISSN 1366-2724.

• Contemporary American Sculpture, The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, San Francisco, The National Sculpture Society 1929
• Opitz, Glenn B, Editor, Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986
• Proske, Beatrice Gilman, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture, Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina, 1968