Major Works
De Vasconcellos' first commissioned work was in 1924 for the Church of Saint Valéry in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, which included a life-sized reclining figure of Saint Valéry under the stone altar.
After the Second World War, she created several war memorials, including the Prince of Peace (1950) in Aldershot (repaired in 1998); The Last Chimera (1950), for the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh; and The Hand (1955) for the St. Bees' School in Cumbria. In 1955, with the help of students from St. Paul's School, she created Mary and Child, a work that appears in the crypt of St. Paul's. Beginning in 1959, she was commissioned by the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields to construct an annual Nativity scene made of life-sized figures, which became a regular fixture of the Christmas display in Trafalgar Square in London.
In 1977, the faculty of peace studies at Bradford University commissioned a sculpture that de Vasconcellos entitled Reunion. After its restoration in 1994 it was renamed Reconciliation. In 1995, to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, bronze casts of this sculpture were placed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and in the Hiroshima Peace Park in Japan. An additional cast can be found on the grounds of Stormont Castle in Belfast. To mark the opening of the rebuilt German Reichstag (parliament building) in 1999, another cast was placed as part of the Berlin Wall memorial.
Read more about this topic: Josefina De Vasconcellos
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or works:
“Staff has a genius for sitting on its brains and coming up with perfect hindsight.”
—Leo V. Gordon, U.S. screenwriter, and Arthur Hiller. Major Craig (Rock Hudson)
“Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)