Portrait of Madame Curie
Artist
Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman
(American)
Date2018
MediumBronze
Dimensions14 × 16 × 14 in. (35.6 × 40.6 × 35.6 cm)
ClassificationsSculpture
Object numberUAC6642
DescriptionThe Polish Room in Wayne State’s Manoogian Hall boasts a number of artistic tributes to notable Poles, including a stone mural displaying a gathering of Polish kings; a copper relief celebrating astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus; and a framed 45 RPM record of There’s A City Called Hamtramck, by big band trumpeter Ted Gomulka. A stained glass window and portraits on the ceiling depict other Polish luminaries. What the room lacked until recently, however, was a tribute to any famous Polish women, a problem finally remedied in 2018 with the unveiling of Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman’s bronze bust of physicist and chemist Marie Skłodowska Curie, whose scientific work helped lay the foundation for the field of atomic physics. Born in Warsaw in 1867, the future Madame Curie moved at age 24 to Paris, where she earned degrees in mathematics and physics at the Sorbonne. There, she met and married physics professor Pierre Curie; their collaborative research in the then-new field of radioactivity — a term Marie coined — led to the discoveries of radium and polonium (Marie named the latter element for her home country). For their efforts, the Curies were awarded a joint Nobel Prize in physics in 1903; Marie was the first woman to receive the prize. She was also the first woman in France to receive a PhD, and became the first female professor at the Sorbonne when she took over Pierre’s seat following his sudden death in 1906. Marie’s further research into isolating pure radium netted her a second Nobel in 1911, making her the first of only four individuals to have won the prize twice. She devoted much of her later life to exploring the medical applications of radioactivity, such as portable x-ray machines and cancer treatments, with the assistance of her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, who won her own Nobel Prize just a year after her mother’s death. Marie Skłodowska Curie died in 1934.
In 1967, 100 years after her birth, the Nobel Foundation described Curie as “quiet, dignified, and unassuming.” Though she was celebrated during her lifetime, it’s said that she was averse to the limelight into which she was sometimes thrust while on fundraising or lecture tours. Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman’s portrait of an alert, purposeful Curie, then, seems to find the famous physicist in her element — in the laboratory, engaged in her work. She doesn’t pose formally, but turns her head as if captured in motion. The bronze face has an expression of concentration, the eyes wide and attentive. “My goal was to convey Marie Skłodowska Curie as the confident, intelligent, determined woman I researched and read about,” the sculptor says in an email. Bachorski-Bowman particularly admired that Curie had worked to pay for her sister Bronia’s education (Bronia Dłuska became a physician and the first director of what is now the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Institute of Oncology in Warsaw), and how she saw to her daughters’ educations while continuing her research and heading up the Paris-based Radium Institute. “I was impressed about Curie’s tenacity, brilliance and heart,” Bachorski-Bowman says.
The bust is a gift from Linda and Steven Plochocki. Steven is a long-time health care industry executive, a Wayne State journalism alumnus (BA 1973), the recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Alumni Award, and founder of the Steven T. Plochocki Endowed Scholarship in Communication. Linda is a collector of historical fashions, and an active supporter of museums and the arts.
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Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman has put her sculptural talents to use in diverse ways over the course of her career. She received her MA from Wayne State University in 1981, and her MFA in ’83, and for a time taught figurative sculpture at WSU before being hired as a medical sculptor at Henry Ford Hospital. There, she created “aesthetically pleasing prosthetics with anatomic integrity” for patients who had suffered traumatic injuries or were undergoing cancer treatments. Later, she was a clay modeler and designer at Ford Motor, and a sculpture teacher for special needs students at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. Today, Bachorski-Bowman is a full-time artist. While much of her work is representational and done in traditional materials such bronze and clay, one of her most striking and personal series, Portraits of a Soul, consists of rough-hewn, marionette-like figures built of encaustic wax and straw, that sensitively contemplate the emotional life of her mentally disabled brother. She lives with her husband, a symphony clarinetist, in southeast Michigan.
Written by Sean Bieri
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