Malin, Millard Fillmore

The Angel Moroni�s Secret

By Ardis E. Parshall, Keepapitchinin, April 30, 2009

He has a secret, you know, a detail not mentioned in any of the many articles descriptive of the Los Angeles Temple, or in J. Michael Hunter�s excellent summary of Angel Moroni statues in the November 2000 Ensign article. It�s a detail revealed by sculptor Millard F. Malin to fellow artist Jack Sears in a 1956 interview regarding the modeling and casting of the angel that now stands atop the Los Angeles Temple.

Millard Fillmore Malin (1891-1974) was born in Salt Lake City. He served a mission to New Zealand commencing when he was only 17 years old. He attended the University of Utah upon his return, studying human anatomy at the medical school and drawing under the Utah artist Edwin Evans, but he dropped out before graduation in order to work and save money for his ambition to study art in New York City. He succeeded in that goal, studying in New York chiefly under the sculptor Herman A. MacNeil. While he was still a student there, he was hired by Gutzon Borglum � best known as sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and born in Idaho to Mormon parents who soon left Mormonism and moved to the Midwest � to assist him in creation of the monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia.

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