Haig Patigian

Haig Patigian was born on January 22, 1876, in Van, Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), to parents of Armenian heritage. His father Avedis was a photographer, and he was accused by the Turkish government of acts of espionage and religious treason, resulting in the family needing to flee.{{Cite news |last=Keraghosian |first=Greg |date=October 3, 2023 |title=His work is everywhere in SF. But this secret society head is now largely forgotten. |url=https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/sf-secret-society-president-work-forgotten-18379283.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231008060725/https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/sf-secret-society-president-work-forgotten-18379283.php |archive-date=October 8, 2023 |work=SFGate}} Around 1891, Avedis left first, and settled in Fresno, California.{{Cite news |date=September 20, 1950 |title=Haig Patigian, 74, Famed Sculptor, ExFresnan, Dies |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-fresno-bee-haig-patigian-74-famed/164805892/ |access-date=2025-02-06 |work=The Fresno Bee |pages=1 |via=Newspapers.com |issn=0889-6070}} A year or so later the rest of the family joined him. Around 1899, the Patigian family moved to San Francisco, California.

He was largely self-taught as a sculptor. Patigian spent most of his career in San Francisco,{{Cite news |last=Grippi |first=Tamara |date=March 18, 2005 |title=Tudor was home of famed sculptor |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-san-francisco-examiner-tudor-was-hom/164807579/ |access-date=2025-02-06 |work=The San Francisco Examiner |pages=23}}{{Cite news |date=1989-09-20 |title=Couple lends 'dream house' to fight AIDS |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-san-francisco-examiner-couple-lends/164808329/ |access-date=2025-02-06 |work=The San Francisco Examiner |pages=25}} and most of his works are located in California. The Oakland Museum of California in Oakland, California, includes a large number of his works in its collection, and more can be seen in and around San Francisco City Hall.

Patigian was an active member of the Bohemian Club, serving two terms as club president. He designed the Owl Shrine, a 40-foot high hollow concrete and steel structure which was built in the 1920s to have the appearance of a natural rock outcropping which happened to resemble an owl.{{cite book |title=The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s |last=Starr |first=Kevin |year=2002 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-515797-4 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9HnIh_auw9MC }} The Owl Shrine became the centerpiece of the Cremation of Care ceremony at the Bohemian Grove in 1929.{{cite book |title=The Annals of the Bohemian Club for the years 1907-1972, Centennial Edition, volume V |last=Cross |first=Francis L. |year=1972 |publisher=Bohemian Club and Recorder-Sunset Press |location=San Francisco }}

Patigian married Blanche Hollister of Courtland, California, in 1908.Herringshaw, Thomas William. [https://books.google.com/books?id=kykEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA387 American Elite and Sociologist Bluebook, p. 387.] American Blue Book Publishers, 1922. They lived in a house in at the corner of Hyde and Francisco Streets in the Russian Hill neighborhood. Blanche died on September 10, 1950, only nine days before her husband.

Patigian died at age 74 on September 19, 1950, at Stanford University Hospital in San Francisco, California. He is buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.

File:Pflueger-MetLife-Patigian.jpg hotel. Visible behind a decorated Christmas tree are the Ionic columns surmounted by a pediment containing a tableau created in 1920 by Patigian for his client Timothy L. Pflueger of Miller and Pflueger, architects]]

File:Haig Patigian - Vanity 1915.jpg]]

• McKinley statue (1906) Arcata, California (removed February 28, 2019)
• Monument to Dr. Chester Rowell (1914), Fresno, California{{Cite news |date=2004-05-27 |title=Dr. Chester Rowell |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-fresno-bee-dr-chester-rowell/164807758/ |access-date=2025-02-06 |work=The Fresno Bee |pages=Z3}}{{Cite web |title=Chester Rowell Memorial 1914 - Haig Patigian |url=https://www.gofresnocounty.com/Courthouse/s12.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141021002016/https://www.gofresnocounty.com/Courthouse/s12.htm |archive-date=October 21, 2014 |access-date=2025-02-06 |website=GoFresnoCounty.com}}
• Electricity, Imagination, Invention and Steam (c. 1915); four repeated sculptures at the Machinery Palace, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, California (destroyed){{cite book |title=The Story of the Exposition (Volume Two of Five) |last=Todd |first=Frank Morton |year=1921 |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons, The Knickerbocker Press |location=New York, London |url=https://archive.org/details/storyexposition00unkngoog }}
• Statue of Gen. John Pershing (1922), San Francisco, California
• Statue of Abraham Lincoln (1926), San Francisco, California
• Statue of Thomas Starr King (1931), Sacramento, California; this work resided in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. as one of California's contributions to the National Statuary Hall Collection until being replaced by a statue of Ronald Reagan in 2009.
• Bronze death mask of George Sterling (1926), library of the Bohemian Club, San Francisco. A second copy is in the Henry Meade Williams Local History Room of the Harrison Memorial Library, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
• Volunteer Firemen Memorial (1933), San Francisco, California

• M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, tympanum, San Francisco, California, circa 1895 (removed)
• San Francisco Savings Union Bank building, pediment, San Francisco, California, 1911
• Palace of Fine Art & the Machinery Palace, (now destroyed) Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, California, 1915
• Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, (now the Ritz Carlton Hotel) pediment, San Francisco, California, 1920
• Navigation, Aviation, and Industry, Richfield Tower, Los Angeles, California, allegorical figures, 1928; when the building was demolished in 1968 the figures were moved to the Art Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara

• Department of Commerce Building, pediment, Washington D.C., 1934

{{reflist}}

• Kvaran, Einar Einarsson, Architectural Sculpture in America, unpublished manuscript
• National Sculpture Society, Contemporary American Sculpture 1929, National Sculpture Society, New York, NY 1929
• Opitz, Glenn B, Editor, Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986
• Proske, Beatrice Gilman, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture, Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina, 1968

• [http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/tf7x0nb8m1/?brand=oac4 Painted portrait of Haig Patigian with Bohemian Owl in background], by Peter Ilyin (1927). Online Archive of California.
• [https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/sf-secret-society-president-work-forgotten-18379283.php His work is everywhere in SF. But this secret society head is now largely forgotten.], by Greg Keraghosian, San Francisco Chronicle, Octocer 3, 2023.

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Category:1876 births

Category:1950 deaths

Category:20th-century American sculptors

Category:20th-century American male artists

Category:20th-century Armenian sculptors

Category:American male sculptors

Category:American people of Armenian descent

Category:Armenians from the Ottoman Empire

Category:Artists from San Francisco

Category:Burials at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park

Category:Emigrants from the Ottoman Empire to the United States

Category:National Sculpture Society members

Category:People from Van, Turkey

Category:Sculptors from California