IV
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 the give-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 fitted for 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.”