The prominent American sculptor Walker Kirtland Hancock was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 28, 1901. He spent a year studying at the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis before transferring to study with the sculptor Charles Grafly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in fall 1920. Hancock was awarded the Prix de Rome fellowship and studied at the American Academy in Rome from 1925 to 1928. Upon Grafly’s recommendation, Hancock was appointed head of the sculpture department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1929.

 

In October 1942, Hancock was inducted into the US Army where he joined the Medical Corps and trained as a medic at Camp Livingston in Louisiana. He was then transferred to Washington, DC, for temporary duty at the Army War College to design the model for the Air Medal. Hancock had previously won the competition to design this medal and only after he was drafted and had spent time with the Medical Corps did the Army finally catch up with him. Upon the completion of the Air Medal design, Hancock accepted a commission as a first lieutenant with the US Army Air Forces and was transferred into military intelligence. While serving seven months at the Pentagon, Hancock was quickly promoted to captain. During this time, he learned of the Roberts Commission and transferred to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program in late 1943.

 

In early 1944, Captain Hancock arrived in England and alongside other Monuments officers under the direction of British Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Webb, assisted in framing the directives to be signed by General Eisenhower that would give the authority to protect certain cultural monuments and objects in the theater. That March, Hancock was assigned to the French Country Section, where he worked alongside the American architect Captain L. Bancel LaFarge preparing the “French Handbook”—revised sections of the Civil Affairs Field Handbook for France. The pair vetted the information transmitted from civilian expert groups to create the “Official Lists of Protected Monuments” to be exempt from military use and considered for protection in the planning of future military operations in Europe.

 

After the Normandy invasions in June 1944, Hancock was sent to Paris with the First US Army as one of only ten MFAA officers attached to the British and American armies in western Europe at that time. As part of this small group of MFAA officers in the field before war’s end, Hancock located numerous depositories of works of art, arranged for their safeguarding during combat, and evacuated their contents to collecting points run by the US Army’s military governments. In October 1944, he entered the devastated city of Aachen and inspected the severely damaged cathedral that previously housed Charlemagne’s relics. Hancock wrote, “For more than eleven centuries these massive walls had stood intact. That I should have arrived just in time to be the sole witness of their destruction was reassuringly inconceivable.”

 

As American troops crossed into Germany en route to Berlin, hundreds of repositories were discovered. Hancock and fellow Monuments Man George Stout inspected a vast repository in a copper mine at Siegen in early April 1945 containing the relics of Charlemagne from Aachen Cathedral. Later that month, an American ordnance unit discovered the Bernterode salt mine, a munitions dump in Thuringia which was also being used as a major repository. More than 500 meters down the main corridor and behind a brick wall, Monuments officers found a shrine to Germany’s former leaders including the coffin of Frederick the Great. Following this amazing discovery, Hancock and fellow Monuments officer Lieutenant Lamont Moore spent the summer of 1945 coordinating the evacuation of art objects from the Siegen mine for transfer to the Marburg Central Collecting Point, established under the direction of Hancock himself.

 

Following his honorable discharge from the US Army in March 1946, Hancock published an account of his MFAA duties in the article “Experiences of A Monuments Officer in Germany” in the May 1946 issue of the College Art Journal. Also in 1946, he returned to his post as head of the sculpture department at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he remained until 1967. A year after his separation from military service, he was promoted to major for his contributions during the war, especially as an MFAA officer. Hancock also served as sculptor in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1956 and 1957.

 

One of his most important commissions was the Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial in Philadelphia. Completed in 1952 and depicting a soldier lifted by the archangel of resurrection, Michael, it was built as a tribute to the 1,307 railroad employees who died during World War II. Other commissions included the US Air Mail Flyers Medal and the Army and Navy Air Medals. Hancock’s numerous portrait sculptures include a statue of General Douglas MacArthur at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, and a bust of President George H. W. Bush for the rotunda of the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. He also sculpted the Angel Relief at the Battle Monument Chapel in St. Avold, France, and the Flight Memorial at West Point.

 

For his contributions during the war, Hancock was awarded the American Service Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, and the European, African, Middle Eastern Service Medal. For his artwork, he received the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1925, the Herbert Adams Medal of Honor from the National Sculpture Society in 1954, the National Medal of Art conferred by the president in 1989, and the Medal of Freedom in 1990.

 

Hancock lived and worked in Gloucester, Massachusetts, until his death on December 30, 1998.