Bruno Lucchesi

Lucchesi, who studied at the Institute of Art in Lucca and later in Florence, is a writer on sculptural techniques as well as a sculptor. In 1957, he moved to New York and has since become known for genre sculpture in terra cotta and bronze. Although frequently compared with John Rogers, the creator of the well-known Rogers groups, Lucchesi seldom incorporates the narrative elements typical of the nineteenth-century American. Instead he shows people waiting, sleeping, bathing, or otherwise going about the business of their daily lives, and portrays the mannerisms characteristic of their activities. Catching a brief expression of boredom, the momentary gesture of a yawn, or the fluid movement of a woman hanging out wash, Lucchesi achieves a balance between sympathy and caricature that is at once poetic and immediate, and often humorous.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)