John Storrs

John Henry Bradley Storrs, generally known as John Storrs and also recorded as John Bradley Storrs and John H. Storrs, was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1885. He should not be confused with the architect John W. Storrs, a distinct twentieth century figure who shares his surname. He graduated from the Chicago Manual Training School in 1905 after a progressive education that emphasized woodworking and mechanical drawing, and pursued voice training in Berlin before turning fully to sculpture.

His art education was deliberately unsettled. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under Bela Pratt, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia under Charles Grafly, where he won the Edmund Stewardson Prize in 1911. He then settled in Paris, enrolling at the Academie Julian, and around 1912 to 1913 studied with Auguste Rodin. He divided his career between Chicago, New York, and Paris through the 1920s and 1930s, exhibiting steadily at galleries including the Arts Club of Chicago, the Societe Anonyme, the Brummer Gallery, and the Downtown Gallery, while developing the streamlined, columnar abstraction for which he is best known.

After the Second World War, Storrs returned to his studio near Mer, in the Loir-et-Cher region of France, where he continued to live and work. He died there on April 26, 1956, at the age of seventy-one.

Institutional writing on Storrs consistently frames him as an early and important American sculptor of the machine age. The Whitney Museum describes him as an American modernist sculptor "best remembered for his art deco sculptures." Richard Gray Gallery, which represents his estate, similarly emphasizes his columnar, architecture-inspired stone and metal sculpture of the early 1920s. Longer critical treatments, including an Artforum feature and a New Republic essay on his machine-age modernity, have reinforced the reading of his work as a bridge between European Cubist-derived abstraction and the emerging vocabulary of American Art Deco and skyscraper design.

Storrs's auction market is sparse compared to his museum standing. Available research points to a Heritage Auctions artist index for the market, but could not confirm a specific price, work title, house, or date for a top auction result from the sources reviewed; auction databases also reference annual "record price" sales for recent years without disclosing the underlying figures. Given how thin the documented public sales record is, collectors should treat any individual auction figure for Storrs as provisional rather than as an established benchmark.

Storrs's importance rests on museum holdings and art-historical standing rather than a deep or active auction record, so provenance and estate documentation matter more than they would for an artist with a dense sales history. No published catalogue raisonne has been identified, which places added weight on verification through the estate, currently represented by Richard Gray Gallery, and through the institutions that hold his work. Because so few auction results are publicly documented, any single sale price should be read with caution rather than treated as an established benchmark.