Cecil de Blaquière Howard, known as Cecil Howard 1888-1956

Born in Clifton, Canada, Cecil Howard grew up in Buffalo, in western New York State. He was only seventeen when he left the United States to settle in Paris, where he enrolled at the Académie Julian, intending to devote himself to sculpture. Immediately captivated by the artistic life he encountered in Montparnasse, he would spend half of his life there. Exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français as early as 1906, he subsequently favored the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts as well as the more liberal Salon d’Automne. Rapidly becoming a member of both institutions, he notably presented animal sculptures made at the Antwerp Zoo in the company of his friend Rembrandt Bugatti during the year 1909.

In 1913, Howard took part in the Armory Show in New York, Chicago, and Boston. For this major event, which marked the arrival of modern art in the United States, he exhibited a standing female nude modeled on Lucy Krohg. After experimenting with painted sculpture, particularly in the field of portraiture, Cecil Howard entered the realm of Cubism by incorporating into his very joyful polychrome sculptures the movement of tango dancers, a dance he practiced regularly at the Bal Bullier. These highly personal works, of which only five recorded examples survive today, establish Cecil Howard as one of the pioneers of Cubist sculpture and place him at the forefront of modernism of this period.

Also aligning himself with the vogue for African “primitive arts,” Howard caused a sensation in New York in 1916 with his beautiful Nubienne holding a fluid and stylized amphora. While he extended this aesthetic vein during the interwar years, particularly in response to commissions from Lord Howard de Walden, the sculptor subsequently multiplied works inspired by his passion for sport, continually representing bodies in motion and infusing his art with an irrepressible vital energy.