A Note on "Sawing Wood"

The little ink sketch “Sawing Wood” by Mahonri Young displays “the animation, the movement, the vibration of life,” which Alice Merrill Horne, the art patron, described in writing about Young’s work.

Famous as a sculptor, painter, printmaker, and teacher, Mahonri Young (1877–1957) felt drawing to be the crux of art. He carried pencil and pad, or copper plate and etching needle wherever he went, making thousands of drawings. It was his way of life. A reviewer for Art News described him as “one of the most gifted and diversely practiced draftsmen in the United States.” Behind his drawings there is a sharp eye for the “life” in a subject, an indefatigable hand, and a vital knowledge of what to do and how to do it. Such a prodigious record of one artist’s imagination and observation probably does not exist elsewhere in the annals of American art.

In 1959 Brigham Young University purchased the major part of a collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and books from the Mahonri Young estate. The remainder of the collection was then donated to the Univeristy.

B. F. Larsen, who helped complete the arrangements, wrote, “The purchase of the Mahonri Young Collection is much more than the buying of a few printings and pieces of sculpture. We hav brought an important man, a sensitive artist here, not to bury him with pomp and ceremony, but to abide with us and speak to us through his live creations.”