Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon Portland Community College

Fallen Warrior by Frederic Littman

  • Title: Fallen Warrior
  • Artist: Frederic Littman
  • Medium: Bronze
  • Size: 13.25'h x 16.75"w x 4"d
  • Added to collection: 2022
  • Donor: Galen Family
  • Campus: Rock Creek
  • Location: B2/1 Outside Veteran's Resource Center

This figure of a fallen warrior is startling in its violent vision of the human body as a kind of living corpse, its life draining away even as an insistent and muscular arm reaches upwards in a gesture of defiance or farewell.  The clay has been rolled into a slab and then folded and torqued into an abstracted, ruined body, then cast in bronze.

The artist, Frederick Littman, was a Hungarian Jew who came of age during the rise of the Nazis, and fled them first to Paris and later to Oregon. Though no stranger to war and human suffering, Littman made few works so expressionist, stylized and violent as this, an anomaly among his other sculptural subjects, which usually focus on the sensuality of the body, in particular of the mother and child.  Here one might be reminded of the figures of Ossip Zadkine more than those of Aristide Maillol.

The Fallen Warrior is installed outside the Rock Creek Veteran's Resource Center.