Robert Jay Wolff's formal art training began in the night school of the Chicago Art Institute in 1928 and ended with a few months in the sculpture atelier of the French academician Henri Bouchard at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1930.

Remaining in Paris, Wolff worked independently: "My masters were the stone cutters of archaic Greece. The bronze sculptures of Charles Despiau seemed to me the only contemporary works that could approach the purity and grandeur of the stone figures of the Sixth Century B.C.," he recalled. "Much of my time, when not working, was spent in the far corner of the basement of the Louvre surrounded by ancient Greece."

Paris in 1929 and 1930 was alive with the new art of the School of Pa...