A Bust of the Boxer Joe Louis by Mahonri Young

Painted plaster

10 ½ x 8 x 12 in.

Young is known for his monument to the pioneers at This is the Place State Park, the Seagull Monument on Temple Square, and the monumental marble sculpture of his grandfather in the Statuary Hall of the US Capitol. But his work featuring everyday life, from laborers to athletes, is most highly regarded. His estate was donated to BYU in 1959 and Young has remained one of Utah’s most influential and important artists.

Mahonri Young’s biography is remarkable. He was born in Salt Lake City, trained in New York, worked in Paris alongside Picasso, Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and Gertrude & Leo Stein. In 1929, Mahonri Young was among the most sought-after and famous artists in the world. Young was invited to the Twentieth Century Fox studio to collaborate on the film Seven Faces (1929). Over six weeks in Los Angeles, Young worked by day at the film studio and by night sketching amateur and professional boxers at the famed Main Street Club. For decades, the Club had been a favorite hang-out for the likes of Jack Dempsey, John Silver, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Henry Huntington, and Douglas Fairbanks; who met to socialize and spar. These scenes capture Young’s enormous arsenal at the height of his career.

Beyond artistic merit, Young was seen as someone who understood boxing on a practical level. In a period of six months, Vanity Fair reviewed his work twice, each time praising the artist for his ability to capture his subject: “Mahonri Young shows how unrivaled among American [artists] is his mastery over the problem of an athlete’s body and movement.”

This bust is of the heavyweight champion boxer, Joe Louis. He won the U.S. Amateur Athletic Union 175-pound championship in 1934 and also was a Golden Gloves titleholder; of 54 amateur fights, Louis won 50 and lost 4. His first professional fight took place on July 4, 1934, and within 12 months he had knocked out Primo Carnera, the first of six previous or subsequent heavyweight champions who would become his victims.

Louis sustained his first professional loss in 1936 at the hands of Max Schmeling. In 1938, after having beaten Braddock and taken the title, Louis met Schmeling in a rematch that the American media portrayed as a battle between Nazism and democracy (though Schmeling himself was not a Nazi). Louis’s dramatic knockout victory in the first round made him a national hero. He was perhaps the first Black American to be widely admired by whites, a fact attributable not only to his extraordinary pugilistic skills but also to his sportsmanlike behavior in the ring (he did not gloat over his white opponents), his perceived humility and soft-spoken demeanor, and his discretion in his private life.