Joseph Erhardy (1928–May 1, 2012) was an American sculptor.
Biography:
Joseph Erhardy was born in Welch, West Virginia (USA) in 1928. In 1949, in full vogue of the American abstract movement, he left his native country and went to Florence (Italy) and studied classical sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti. In Rome, he became the assistant of Mirko Basaldella, who was himself the assistant of Arturo Martini, much admired by Joseph Erhardy. In January 1952, he came to Paris, where he has been living ever since. After an abstract period, he returned to the figure at the end of the sixties. Artistically speaking, he feels close to an international group of friends, painters and sculptors of his generation, who have been living in Paris since the 50s, including Sam Szafran, Raymond Masson, Roseline Granet, Philippe Roman and Francois Jousselin.
Clair , author, Director of the National Musée Picasso, Paris, and General Director of the National Trust, said of his work: I imagine that in three or four hundred years' time and perhaps in some remote place, such as the Mahdian bronzes extracted from the sea so far away from the workshops that had created them, a bronze by Erhardy will be accidentally unearthed. Those that discover it will wonder at its solid forms, at the perfect fullness of its volume, at the modeling akin to an egg's which is found only in high periods of statuary. The girl perched on a strange contraption will be seen as the officiant of an outlandish cult. She will be compared with all those figures that, from the Scythian solar hearses to Giacometti's Woman on a Chariot have solemnized the wheel. And even if an historian of techniques is there to remind that the contraption in question was called a bicycle, invented at the close of the 19th century and which, near the close of the following century, once again enjoyed widespread popularity, these data will interest less than the form used by the sculptor, contrived or rather rediscovered, thus testifying to the perfect unity of an art which, for millennia, will have scarcely varied its canons or even its themes
Museums:
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Smithsonian Institution: 7th Street & Independence Ave. SW Mail to: PO Box 37012/HMSG MRC 350 Washington, DC 20013-7012
The National Portrait Gallery (United States) 750 Ninth St., NW, Suite 8300 Washington, DC 20560-0213 (Portrait bust of John Kenneth Galbraith)
The Corcoran Gallery of Art 500 17th Street, NW Washington, DC 20006-4804
The Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave, SE Washington, DC 20540 (Portrait bust of Daniel Boorstin)
MIT Museum 265 Massachusetts Avenue, MIT Bldg N52 Cambridge, MA 02139 (Low relief of Sir Robert Jackson)
Vatican Museum The Vatican Rome, ITALY
Pompidou Centre/Beaubourg, Paris, FRANCE
Downing College, University of Cambridge, UK
museum Beelden aan Zee, the Netherlands (L'Été aux Tuileries)(1955)(bronze)

Source: wikipedia.org