Biography from AskART:
| Painter-sculptor Hugo Robus was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1885. He studied from 1904 to 1908 (1903-07 says Wichita State U) at the Cleveland School of Art, where he also was employed manufacturing jewelry, tableware and ivories. He continued his studies at the National Academy of Design in 1910-11 (1907-09: Wichita) under Emil Carlsen (1853-1932), and with Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, Paris, from 1912 to 1914.
After completion of his studies, Robus returned to the United States in 1914. He began teaching painting at the Modern Art School in New York shortly thereafter. After leaving the school in 1918, he painted briefly, but by 1920 devoted his time almost exclusively to sculpture, working primarily in isolation and supporting his family through the sale of crafts. He did not show his work publicly until the 1930s, when his work achieved "the sweeping contours and highly polished sleekness of his mature style" (Falk).
As a painter, he had created sophisticated Cubist studies of interiors, nudes and back yard scenes but dissatisfaction with his work had caused him to turn to sculpture. Rather than transpose Cubism into three dimensions, he developed a lyrical, expressionist style. People were his preferred subject matter, the parts of their bodies made round and bulbous so that the perimeters seemed bounded by continuous arcs, as in "Woman Combing Her Hair," 1927, now in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
The flow of volumes always lay at the base of his designs. Only briefly, in the late 1940s, did he investigate three-dimensional Cubism, using chunky, hollowed out forms.
Robus chose not to emphasize the properties of materials, believing that "they distort or destroy pure form optically much more frequently than they enhance it." Hugo Robus's abstract figurative sculpture, "Invocation" is a large work on the campus of Wichita State University in Kansas. It was originally crafted in plaster (location unknown) in 1928-29. The plaster was first exhibited in the Sculptors Guild exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Robus's decision to create the figure in polished bronze was necessary to secure the structural integrity of the work and also because he "considered ours an age of metal."
The androgynous figure of "Invocation" lifts its head to the sky, calling to a higher power. The streamlined, stylized anatomy conveys a plastic energy, an indication of what Roberta K. Tarbell called the "universal life force."
Former Fairleigh Dickinson University president Peter Sammartino and his wife, Sylvia donated "Girl Washing Her Hair," by Hugo Robus, to the University in 1981 in honor of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Muscarelle. The sculpture now stands in the lobby of the Muscarelle Center for Building Construction Studies on the Teaneck-Hackensack campus in New Jersey. The piece is one of four original bronze castings and was acquired from the artist in 1961. Originally made in plaster and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s, the sculpture was said to have embodied the essence of modern art.
Robus was also a teacher at the Modern Art School in New York City, Columbia University, the Brooklyn Museum School, and Hunter College.
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Peter Hastings Falk (Editor), Who Was Who in American Art
http://webs.wichita.edu/depttools/user_home/?view=mark2&page=invocation
http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/00su/sculp.html
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