CHAPTER IVOF EXPOSITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS
Anunpublished satiric drawing of the ’eighties shows a family of American tourists in the Louvre. They contemplate the Melian Venus. With one exception, they are dumb with awe. The exception is Aunt Maria, the masterful old lady in the foreground. Aunt Maria has seen men and cities, but she doesn’t know as there’s much that can beat South Bend. So
“Aunt Maria gazes with distrustUpon the goddess in her bloom perennial.‘Talk about art,—you should have seen the bust,The butter bust we had at our Centennial.’”
“Aunt Maria gazes with distrustUpon the goddess in her bloom perennial.‘Talk about art,—you should have seen the bust,The butter bust we had at our Centennial.’”
“Aunt Maria gazes with distrustUpon the goddess in her bloom perennial.‘Talk about art,—you should have seen the bust,The butter bust we had at our Centennial.’”
“Aunt Maria gazes with distrust
Upon the goddess in her bloom perennial.
‘Talk about art,—you should have seen the bust,
The butter bust we had at our Centennial.’”
The Sleeping Iolanthe in butter! In 1876, her name melted in the American mouth. Though barred from the Fine Arts section, she was believed by many to express the spirit of American art. Shamed by her popularity, certain sensitive American artists did not quite recover a jubilant tone until, long years afterward, a full-sized Melian Venus in chocolate contributed to the gayety of the greatest of French expositions. After that, the butter bust incident weighed less heavily on thoughtful minds.
Just before our Centennial exposition, the scholarly John Fiske, admitting that “the classical picture and the undraped statue” have “a high place in our esteem,” ruefully adds that “it will probably be some time before genuine art ceases to be an exotic among us, and becomes a plant of unhindered native growth.” The Centennial showed us the truth of justthat. The Centennial was a glory, and a profound disturbance. To our sculpture, this disturbance was its great gain. For the first time, the American sculptor saw his work side by side with that of Europeans. He was dismayed. He had had his doubts, his forebodings. He now perceived for a certainty that in spite of half a century spent in the pursuit of all the best that Italian pseudo-classicism could offer, our apprentice days in sculpture, far from being well over, were scarcely begun. Perhaps a fresh start was needed. At a time when Munich, as well as Paris, was calling to the young painter, Paris, rather than Rome or Florence, beckoned to the sculptor. New forces were abroad in art, and American sculpture of the next generation profited eagerly from the vigorous new French school.
The lesson taught by the Columbian exposition of 1893 was just as important as that learned from the Centennial, though far less sobering. A holiday spirit, not without dignity, spoke from those pleasure-domes and lagoons and abounding sculptural forms of the White City. The progress made by our art during seventeen years packed with artistic adventure and endeavor was blown abroad in triumph. On the whole, we were justified in our joy. As the Centennial by its dismaying jolt had enlarged the outlook of our artists, so the Columbian, by its varied harmonies, liberated the imagination of the public, of the art-lover. To a marked extent, it created anew the art-lover, a personage already made possible by the prosperity following the conclusion of the Civil War. In the World’s Fair of 1893,the apparently inexhaustible advantages of a sympathetic collaboration between architect, painter, sculptor, and landscape architect were for the first time sketched out large for the American vision. Our many succeeding expositions have of course emphasized and amplified the suggestions so gallantly given and so eagerly noted in 1893. Not that our whole broad land is to-day the dwelling-place of beauty. Far from it. Great reaches of time and great strivings of the spirit must match our great stretches of space before art is everywhere at home here. And collaboration at its best is jointly and severally a striving of the spirit.
In 1825, when Charles Bulfinch, then architect of the Capitol, receives an inquiry “respecting the ornaments wanted for the pediment of the Capitol,” and writes in answer that “the object of advertising was to obtain designs in various styles, from whichto select one,” an ardent collaboration between sculptor and architect was clearly not the order of the day. The hard fate of Greenough’s Olympian Washington, dragged in 1843 from inner shrine to outdoor platform, shows that in almost twenty years conditions had not changed. For a long time after that, a work of sculpture was seldom considered, during its creation, with special reference to its destined surroundings. Artist and public satisfied themselves with the bland half-truth that a good thing looks well anywhere. There were of course vague gestures of collaboration when the first statues were placed in Central Park; and in the good fellowship existing between students of the different arts in the few schools we had here as well as in the foreign schools there was a basis for later harmonious co-operation. But the Saint-Gaudens Farragut, unveiled in 1881,and showing in detail and ensemble the results of an extraordinarily happy and sympathetic collaboration, roused the minds of all artists. And twelve years afterward, the intelligent public was fully ready to appreciate the happy collaborations it saw on every hand at the Fair.
Expositions bring in their train certain evils. Is superficiality one of these? In theory, sculptural work for exposition buildings and approaches and vistas must often stress too much the gala-day aspect of life; it must sound the hurrah at any cost; the note is gayety and triumph; let no other chord intrude. So much for theory. As a matter of fact, the making of red-letter-day sculpture injures only those sculptors who are already too much enamoured of the “façade and froth” side of human achievement.Nothing could be more serious in matter or in manner than was Mr. French’s stately Republic, a dominant note of the plan of the Columbian Exposition. And no work was more thoroughly appreciated. Some of the very gayest of our exposition sculptures owe their vitality to the very serious studies and the very solid mastery of the artists who have produced them. There was wide-spread regret because the MacMonnies Fountain, that thing of joy for the exposition of 1893, could not sprinkle its dews permanently for our refreshment. And in our later expositions, there have always been temporary works achieved with bravura by the artist, enjoyed without reservation by the public, and (often with a real sadness of farewell) consigned to oblivion by the powers. The story of the Fair of 1893, the exemplar, one might say, for subsequent celebrations, hasbeen exceedingly well told by Mr. Charles Moore, in his recently published Life of Daniel Burnham. Nowhere else will one find so true and inspiring a picture of our American architects, painters, sculptors, and landscape gardeners working together in exalted collaboration. Those men set a great standard and a great stride for artists of the present century. To quote from Mr. Moore’s book a paragraph concerning the sculptors:
“Marshalled by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptors for the first time in America took their rightful place in co-operation with the architects. And what a troop they were. There was Daniel French, embodying the spirit of permanence and clear-sightedness in the serene figure of the Republic that graciously presided over the Court of Honor; and again, in conjunction with Edward Potter, manifesting sustained ability in the quadrigasurmounting the Peristyle; Frederick MacMonnies, giving vent to the exuberance of America in the joyous fountain that lent gayety to the great central motive of the Fair; Olin Warner, whose early death lost to the country an artist on the way to the heights; Paul Bartlett, then a promise which opportunity has fulfilled; Edwin Kemeys, with his animal sculpture that came to attract all the money Theodore Roosevelt could spare for art; and Louis Saint-Gaudens, wanting only the intellectual element to put him in the same class with his brother; and Karl Bitter, capable and conscientious, whose accidental death brought grief to a host of admirers; and Lorado Taft, who has put the ethereal, haunting spirit of the Great Lakes into his Chicago fountain; Larkin Mead, sculptor of the old school; Phimister Proctor, lover of American animals; besides Bela Pratt, Rohl-Smith, Bush-Brown,Rideout, Boyle, Waagen, Bauer, Martiny, Blenkenship, and the satisfactory Partridge.”
Later Fairs have but exemplified what was well suggested by the White City. The Exposition at San Francisco, most recent of all, and taking place in bright evanescence while Europe was already in the bitter throes of the World War, brought forward, under the vigorous direction of Mr. Calder, sculptor of the Pioneer Mother and of the Triumph of Energy, much that was stimulating and fresh in our sculpture, even though none of these American exhibits labelled themselves as Dynamic Decompositions, and few attempted the earnest sort of modernism found in French works such as Bernard’s Maiden with Water Jar. The fountain in particular was delightfully renewed in Mr. Aitken’s Fountain of the Earth, Mrs. Burroughs’s Fountain of Youth, Mr. Taft’s Fragmentfrom the Fountain of Time, Mrs. Whitney’s Fountain with Pristine Motives from Aztec Civilization, Mr. Putnam’s Fountain with Mermaids, and Miss Longman’s Fountain of Ceres. Individual pieces such as William Sergeant Kendall’s half-length portrait of a peasant girl, carved in wood and realistically colored, attracted attention for successful originality.
By and large, our expositions have done three good things for sculpture. They have managed to dislodge, even from the most painstaking of workers, a fearless immediacy of expression in their art. They have introduced to the public, in a large way on the terrace and in an intimate way within the gallery, the most interesting sculptors of the time. Above all, they have fostered and amazingly developed thegive-and-take of collaboration in the arts. This last is their best gift to the spirit of American sculpture; it is the gift of the broader mind.
Our American Academy in Rome, with its stirring legend, “Not merely fellowships, but fellowship,” is the direct outcome of the World’s Fair of 1893. Burnham, McKim, Mead, La Farge, Millet, Saint-Gaudens, and other artists who by collaboration made that Fair a thing of beauty resolved then and there that younger men should have such advantages as these that they themselves had gained by working together. Through their efforts, the project took shape. Though a National institution, our American Academy in Rome is endowed and maintained by private citizens. Its beneficiaries are young sculptors, painters, architects, classical scholars, landscape architects, and musicians who have already shown themselves signally fittedfor their chosen work, and who, for the sake of our country’s art, ought to have the benefit of the three years of intensive and inter-related study in Rome. To-day, our Academy in Rome is regarded as the most important modern influence in American sculpture. “My reason for thinking it admirable,” writes Saint-Gaudens, “is my belief that the strenuous competition required to gain access to the Villa Medici, as well as the three years of study in that wonderful spot, tend to a more earnest and thorough training than could elsewhere be gained under the present conditions of life in our times.”