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, has been 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 quadriga surmounting 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 Fragment from 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.
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.”
CHAPTER V
THE STATUE AND THE BUST AND THE IDEAL FIGURE
I
As originally planned, the title of the following chapter was The Statue and the Bust, and the Wart Well Lost. For I have often felt (and who has not?) that the Cromwellian forthrighteousness in the matter of that wart has been over-estimated. However, on second thought, it would seem wiser to suggest the possibility of occasional ideal presentation rather than to decry the virtues of exact realism in commemorative portraiture. Hence the more dignified heading seen above. And how does that old case of idealism vs. realism stand at present in the field of the portrait statue? Before answering this question, let us consider for a moment the modern sculptor’s preparation for his life-work.
Following hard upon the three leaders who remain central figures in our hundred years of sculpture came the outriders of that large and ever increasing group whose creative genius, fostered by the training enthusiastically received in the French school, now stands four-square among us. The men and women of this group are the present-day nucleus of sculptural activity here. Most of them keep a firm footing in two centuries; they still profit by the light of the later nineteenth century French masters, and they themselves pass on their own clear new light to twentieth century learners. When the names of Falguière and Mercié, Dubois and Chapu, Saint-Marceaux and Frémiet and Rodin are spoken, these men and women are thrilled, just as Heine’s Grenadier was thrilled by an imagined footstep; and these men and women know why Schumann’s song soars up into the Marseillaise. They know that their French masters once gave them something priceless, yet left them free to use the gift according to their own bent and will. The principles taught in the atelier seemed to them necessary and suggestive, not despotic.