Georg J. Lober

Georg John Lober
circa 1911
Born	November 7, 1891
Died	December 14, 1961
Nationality	American
Known for	sculptor

Georg John Lober (November 7, 1891 – December 14, 1961) was an American sculptor.

Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1892, Lober moved to Keyport, New Jersey as a teenager. Lober studied sculpture at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and at the National Academy of Design, and was an apprentice of Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum.

His bas reliefs of Robert Fulton and Henry Hudson in 1909 were his first major works. A bronze statue of Eve that he created for the 1939 New York World's Fair in Flushing, Queens was destroyed by vandals. A 1949 sculpture of Thomas Paine is located in Morristown, New Jersey's Burnham Park.

He was appointed to the New York City Municipal Art Commission in 1942, and served as its executive secretary from 1943 to 1960. The Arts Commission was responsible for supervising the artistic quality of all city matters ranging from lamp posts to schools to bridges. He was tasked in 1946 by Mayor of New York City William O'Dwyer to restore portraits in New York City Hall that had deteriorated severely. A June 1950 editorial in The New York Times thanked Lober and the Art Commission, saying that they "deserve a pat on the back for their careful and painstaking work" in preserving the city's heritage for future generations.

Lober created an eight-foot-tall seated figure of Hans Christian Andersen on a granite bench for New York City's Central Park, that was cast in bronze at Long Island City's Modern Art Foundry at a cost of $50,000 that was a gift of schoolchildren from Denmark. The statue was designed to accompany an outdoor center for story-telling, and was placed on a 40-foot square stone platform surrounded by benches, trees and shrubs. The $75,000 cost of the monument was covered in part by contributions from Danish and American schoolchildren.

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