VII
Our twentieth century admits that the latter years of the nineteenth century were spacious years in our sculpture, and that there are as yet no leaders who overtop these three. With these will always be associated, in the minds of those who know things as they are, that distinguished artist Olin Warner, whose death cut short a career splendidly ready for its zenith. For some unknown reason, his work has missed something of its due praise among us; time will perhaps readjust this. The delightful caryatids of his fountain at Portland, Oregon, are indeed greatly prized; his portrait statues are truly sculptural in their ensemble, and fine in their characterization; and with the passing of years, his spirited yet beautifully classic portrait busts of Alden Weir, of Cottier, and of Maud Morgan gain rather than lose in the esteem of the student.
A much later leader, also lost before winning the heights to which he aspired, was Karl Bitter, that sensitive, swift-minded, deft-handed sculptor whose ardent intellectual curiosity kept him still the seeker for newer and more vital ways of sculptural expression. His tragic death was not unlike Warner’s; Warner was thrown from his bicycle in Central Park, Bitter was struck down by an automobile in front of the Opera House. Both men were of those êtres d’ élite that Art needs as her interpreters. But what a contrast in their lives, their characters, their sculptural interpretations! Warner was of the highest type of New Englander of Puritan descent, a courageous worshipper of beauty, and at his best in revealing beauty in classic guise; he has been called the Pilgrim homesick for Hellas; Bitter was of the highest type of the foreign-born, a Viennese eagerly assuming the duties of American citizenship. A gallant figure, already before his coming among us he was imbued with various Old World ideals in art, many of which he afterward rejected as flamboyant, frivolous. No sculptor of our time has made a swifter and steadier advance in sculptural power throughout a busy and varied career. Warner and Bitter; the deep-minded and the quick-minded; the spirit of American sculpture needed both these men, and felt their loss.