BACCHANTE
BY F. W. MacMONNIES
As not every day is fit for verse, so not every artist is gifted with the happy hand for designing garden forms. It is a temperamental matter; generally the note should be that of joy, or at least of serenity. Mr. MacMonnies’s Bacchante and his Boy with Heron long ago set the perfect pace of gayety for American gardens. And today, what gladder creature this side of Arcady can you find than the MacMonnies Duck Baby? Unless it is Edith Barretto Parsons’s laughing Child with Turtle, or else one of Miss Scudder’s engaging imps of Frogland. Some of our most accomplished sculptors have delighted us with their garden art. How exquisite is the graciousness of John Gregory’s kneeling Philomela, a statue lately designed for the bird-garden of Mrs. Payne Whitney! No figure in recent years has seemed more original and alluring than this “blithe spirit” considering the wonder of her pinions.
FOUNTAIN FIGURE
BY JANET SCUDDER
The garden sculptor should have above all a true dramatic instinct for the rôle his work is to play in the garden ensemble—a fine relation-sense which will by no means clip the wings of his design. You can not make pleasure-sculpture out of accurate letter-of-the-law nature-copying alone. In a fountain figure, for example, with its silhouette seen under varying conditions, today drenched with sun and tomorrow dripping with water, all according to wind and weather, surely the artist has much to consider aside from inch-by-inch anatomical modeling. Sculptors know this, but sometimes forget it, when once launched out on the simple joy of “copying a morceau.”
Here we touch a great difficulty in our art education. In spite of all the chattered tomfoolishness of the hour, the fact remains that for most artists, the school training is the beginning of wisdom. It is not a goal, but a starting-point; it gives firm ground for future creative flights. Yet no house can be well built of foundation-stuff alone. The school provides a foundation, and something of a ground-floor besides, but the artist himself must build his own upper stories. He must create his own personal syntheses in art, with the help of the repeated analyses practised by him in school. And now comes his perilous moment; to survive, he needs time and opportunity. The most advanced type of artistic training, that offered by our American Academy in Rome, does not begin and end with Houdon’s “Copiez toujours,” but allows for contemplation, for self-communion, for the personal synthesis, and for the exchange of thought between sculptor, painter and architect, so that each may understand the other’s aims. American art today needs all the mellowing and broadening influences that both the contemplative and the communicative spirit can bestow. Mr. Manship’s figures and groups, with their rich inventions of rainbow-winged fancy, are here to prove that the Academy is not an ogre, whose chief delight is to crush personal genius. But human frailty does not easily part with its incurably romantic ideas of a fabulous monster; the public demands a scape-goat; it would rather than not believe in the Evil Eye; and the mood of the moment, with the injudicious, is to charge all untoward influences in art to some Gryphon of an Academy, of which little is known, and everything suspected.
II
Meanwhile, Mr. Manship from Rome and Mr. McCartan in New York have both proved in their work that they not only know how to model the nude and compose a statue, but, what is far more rare, that they can “handle ornament.” Now ornament is often regarded as beneath the notice of the new-fledged sculptor, while as a matter of sad fact, it is more likely to be quite beyond his powers; and this is partly because he lacks invention, and partly because he is without knowledge of the rhythms of design; not hearing the music, his mind cannot march. Garden sculpture as well as severe monumental form calls constantly for the light touch or the strong arm of ornament. Noting our American lack in this direction, the Society of Beaux Arts Architects, in coöperation with the National Sculpture Society, has been at pains to install in New York ateliers in which the ornament-modeler, as distinct from the sculptor, may seriously study his art. And when an artist like Mr. McCartan designs and models the exquisite ornament seen upon his Barnett Prize Fountain, a new hope is breathed into the efforts of those who would improve our American standards in artistic craftsmanship, and break down the stupid barrier between artist and artisan. Somewhere in the unknown lies a vast continent of design-forms not yet touched by any Columbus—a wealth of fauna and flora not of the Acropolis or the Roman Forum or the Gothic cathedral, but akin to Greek and Gothic in beauty and power; and the world is waiting for these new good things.