Joseph Kiselewski

ANA 1936; NA 1944

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Joseph Kiselewski
Joseph Kiselewski
Joseph Kiselewski
1901 - 1988
Kiselewski studied at the Minneapolis (Minnesota) School of Art with Charles Wells, and in New York at the National Academy of Design (1921-23) with Ivan Olinsky and Robert Aitken, and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. During his student days in New York, he was employed as an assistant to sculptor Lee Lawrie, a position he held for four years. In the early 1920s, he won the Paris Prize of $1,000 at the Beaux-Arts Institute which allowed him to go to Europe. In Paris, he studied at the Academie Julian with Paul Landowski and Henri Bouchard. In 1926 he went to Rome as a fellow of the American Academy and, at the end of the decade, established a home and studio in New York.
Among his many public works are religious sculptures for St. Joseph's Church in Browerville, Minnesota, and for Rosary College, River Forest, Illinois; allegorical medallions for the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, Connecticut; the large groups, Victory and Peace for the Bronx County Court House (1932); and a huge sundial for the 1939 New York World's Fair. He has designed relief panels for the House Chamber of the U. S. Capitol Building (1949-50) and for the General Accounting Office Building (1951) in Washington, and for the facade of the City and Municipal Courts Building in New York (1961). His memorial to John Peter Zenger was unveiled at P.S. 18 in the Bronx in 1952. For New York University's Hall of Fame, he modeled a bust of Sylvanus Thayer and a medal bearing the portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
He exhibited at the National Academy beginning in the 1930s and won a number of awards including the Elizabeth N. Watrous Gold Medal, which he won three times: in 1937 for the nude figure Dawn; in 1962 for a bust of Sinclair Lewis; and in 1971 for a bust of Gilmore D. Clarke (see below). In 1961 his model of Peace, a memorial for the Veterans Cemetery in Margraten, Holland, was awarded the Daniel Chester French Medal at the Academy; and in 1978 his bust of his former employer and mentor, Lee Lawrie, won the Proctor Prize.