Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
Best known for his sculptural sprites in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Midway Gardens project, Alfonso Iannelli was instrumental in bringing about the modernist design movement in Chicago. One of the masterpieces that emerged from his Park Ridge studio was a plaster bust of Abraham Lincoln that has charted a curious course in recent decades.
After Iannelli’s death in 1965, the Kelmscott Gallery in Chicago acquired much of his estate. The bust then made its way from the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago and back to Iannelli’s studio, which was bought and transformed into the Iannelli Studios Heritage Center by the Kalo Foundation of Park Ridge.
In 2016, the French consul general expressed an interest in putting the bust on display in Paris, but the cost of shipping it was prohibitive. Thinking caps were donned, a mold was made and shipped, and a bronze replica is now on display near the Champs-Elysees.
“Chicago and Paris are sister cities,” says foundation President Maria Hrycelak. “Because French policies and Abraham Lincoln’s ideas were very similar and because Illinois is Lincoln’s home state, the consulate thought this would be a very appropriate project to undertake.”
On June 15, the foundation celebrated Lincoln’s journey across the Atlantic with a presentation by Dr. Carla Knorowski, former CEO of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation.
“There are several busts of American presidents on public property in Paris, but none of Abraham Lincoln,” Knorowski pointed out. “The location of this bust in the center of Paris will live in perpetuity.”
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