LAKELAND, FL.- Polk Museum of Art presents a new exhibition, “C. Paul Jennewein: An Usher for a New American Style,” featuring selections from the Tampa Museum of Art. The exhibition runs April 27-July 20.

C. Paul Jennewein (1890-1978) was a highly regarded, American architectural sculptor of the mid-20th century. He immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1907 and within four years of his arrival began receiving important national and international art commissions that drew upon his skills as an ornamental sculptor and as a painter. He is widely recognized for being among the artists who popularized the Art Deco style in the United States.

Following Jennewein’s death, more than 2,000 works from his studio were donated to the Tampa Bay Art Center, now the Tampa Museum of Art, by his family. This exhibition features some of the pieces from Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Jennewein studied sculpture at the Art Students League in New York and won a three-year scholarship to study at the American Academy in Rome in 1916. He drew heavily from the art he studied during his four years in Italy, particularly mythological subject matter and the classical Greco-Roman tradition. Among Jennewein’s accomplishments include the pedimental sculptures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an installation on the façade of the British Empire Building at Rockefeller Center, N.Y., two statues at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C., and two relief panels installed inside the White House.