3rd Sculpture International was a 1949 exhibition of contemporary sculpture held inside and outside the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...

, in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...

, USA. It featured works by 250 sculptors from around the world, and ran from May 15 to September 11, 1949. The exhibition was organized by the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) under the terms of a bequest made to the Association by the late Ellen Phillips Samuel. Ellen Phillips Samuel was a member of the Fairmount Park Art Association and a supporter of many cultural activities in Philadelphia. When she died in 1913, she left the bulk of her estate in trust to the Art Association, specifying that the income be used to create a series of sculptural monuments “emblematic of the history of America.” When these funds became available upon the death of her husband in 1929, the Art Association appointed a planning committee, which decided that the Samuel Memorial should express major ideas and spiritual forces as well as chronological developments in American history. To identify sculptors, the committee organized three international exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These Sculpture Internationals, in 1933, 1940, and 1949, brought together the works of hundreds of sculptors from the United States and abroad. The exhibitions contributed not only to the Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial but also to the general awareness of contemporary sculpture throughout the Philadelphia area.

Sculptors

Among the sculptors who exhibited were: *Humbert Albrizio * Connor Barrett * Richmond Barthé * Gladys Edgerly Bates *

Alexander Calder Alexander "Sandy" Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobile (sculpture), mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, hi ...

* Cornellia Van A. Chapin * Robert Cronbach *

Jo Davidson Jo Davidson (March 30, 1883 – January 2, 1952) was an American sculptor. Although he specialized in realistic, intense portrait busts, Davidson did not require his subjects to formally pose for him; rather, he observed and spoke with them. ...

Jacob Epstein Sir Jacob Epstein (10 November 1880 – 21 August 1959) was an American and British sculptor who helped pioneer modern sculpture. He was born in the United States, and moved to Europe in 1902, becoming a British subject in 1910. Early in his ...

* Mitchell Fields * Minna Harkavy * Vincent Glinsky * Chaim Gross * Nathaniel Kaz *

Jacques Lipchitz Jacques Lipchitz (26 May 1973) was a Lithuanian-born French-American Cubist sculptor. Lipchitz retained highly figurative and legible components in his work leading up to 1915–16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, domi ...

Pablo Picasso Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...

* Bernard Reder * Marion Sanford * Concetta Scaravaglione * Mitzi Solomon *

William Steig William Steig ( ; November 14, 1907 – October 3, 2003) was an American cartoonist, illustrator and writer of children's books, best known for the picture book ''Shrek!'', which inspired the Shrek (franchise), film series of the same name, as we ...

* Marion Walton * A.A. Weinman * Robert Weinman * William Zorach

The photograph

The June 20, 1949, issue of ''Life'' magazine featured the photograph '' 70 Sculptors'' by Herbert Gehr. It showed 70 of the sculptors seated on the staircase of the museum's Great Hall and surrounded by a number of their works. Gehr took the photograph on May 14, 1949, the day before the exhibition's opening. An intensive search has been underway since 2002 to identify all 70 sculptors in the photograph.

References

*3rd Sculpture International checklist. *Bach, Penny Balkin, ''Public Art in Philadelphia'', Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1992 *Fairmount Park Art Association ''3rd Sculpture International, Press Report'', 1949 *Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, ''Who Are These People?'' unpublished research into the 70 sculptors photographed by LIFE Magazine *''LIFE'' magazine, June 20, 1949 {{commonscat Sculpture exhibitions American contemporary art

Sculpture Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

Contemporary art exhibitions Art exhibitions in the United States Philadelphia Museum of Art