Isadore Konti (1862 – 1938)
Reclining Man
7 1/2 w x 4 1/2 d x 7 high inches
Bronze
Signed and dated 1914

BIO
Isadore Konti, a sculptor working in the Beaux Arts* tradition of classically-inspired subject matter, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1862. He studied there with Karl Kundmann and Edmund Von Hellmer. He also studied in Rome. Konti came to New York City in 1892, and eventually settled in Yonkers, New York, where he lived until his death in 1938. Sculptor Paul Manship was a studio assistant of Konti’s in New York City. Konti was a friend of many significant 20th Century sculptors.

Konti created sculpture for several expositions, including the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago. He was working at that time with Philip Martiny, a former student of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who sent Konti to Chicago to work on decorative models. For the 1901, Pan-American Exposition*, in Buffalo, New York, Konti sculpted his allegorical Chariot of State as part of the Age of Despotism, which depicted a despot pulled in a chariot by humanity, with Justice and Truth chained behind. Konti also created sculptural groups for the Exposition representing Sacred, Lyric, Heroic, and Gay Music for The Temple of Music.

In 1904, Konti sculpted fountains representing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition* in St. Louis. He created sculpture for the Palaces and Courts of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition* in San Francisco, including reliefs for the Column of Progress.

The sculptor was given a retrospective exhibition in 1974 by The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York. Titled The Sculpture of Isidore Konti, 1862-1938, it included two small bookend allegorical figures of Poetry and Thought.

Isidore Konti was a member of the National Academy of Design*, New York City, elected an Associate in 1906, an Academician in 1909.

Konti has a fifteen-inch bronze figure of Orpheus, and a bronze coin, in the Peabody Art Collection of Maryland State Archives, Annapolis; as well as work in the collection of the Mint Museums, Charlotte, North Carolina. His eleven-foot-high marble figures of King Alfred the Great and the Roman Emperor Justinian, sculpted in 1910 and 1912, respectively, stand above the front entrance of the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, in Cleveland, Ohio.

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