Chicago artist John Storrs spent most of his career in France but retained ties to his native city. His Winged Horse was executed in Paris and demonstrates his adoption of French modernist abstraction and geometric simplification. The design’s impetus, however, was American: Storrs conceived the work as a model for a large-scale monument to honor one of his idols, the poet Walt Whitman. The artist wrote that Whitman “stands practically alone as one who has discovered a national soul and has given it expression in a form that can be called beautiful—that can be called art.” Regrettably, Storrs never found financial backing for his project.