The best of artists hath no thought to show
Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
Doth not include:
They look on their work as a building-up in clay, rather than as a cutting-down in stone. Well, why not? If the word plastic keeps its old meaning of something shaped, and glyptic its meaning of something carved, surely the sculptor may without reproach choose his approach; always provided that this approach is the one best suited to the matter in hand.
But even here, changes are already visible. On both sides of the Atlantic a few sculptors are harking back to the fine old Gothic tradition which animated Michelangelo, that spirit who was at once a late fruit of the Gothic and a great flowering of the Renaissance. Perhaps we owe to Rodin this modern return from plastic to glyptic? At any rate, the movement is but lightly sketched, except as seen in some of the enormous monuments of Middle Europe, and in particular in the powerful works of the Serbian Mestrovic, as well as in those of recent insurgent followers of Rodin. An odd fact is, that some of these last, in seeking the titanic, have attained the Teutonic, especially when their theory of deformation has betrayed them. And, of course, any new style, vital or not, will breed new errors.
Criticism has had of late a tendency to scold sculptors for not seeing things as Michelangelo did, or as the artist of “Le Beau Sourire de Reims” did. It is perhaps surprising that the eloquent mediæval craftsmanship suitable for Caen stone or limestone, and beautiful in its place, has not attracted a larger interest and a wider experiment among us. However, Miss Hoffman has just completed an important and unusual War Memorial in Caen stone. Mr. MacMonnies’s great Washington monument at Princeton is of limestone, most thoughtfully carved, and not at all in the impetuous new manner; it may prove to be a forerunner of other ambitious enterprises in this material. But ours is an unkind climate. The sculptured forms of Italy and France have not had to endure the extreme changes of heat and cold well-known here. We have interesting varieties of marble and granite, and have made but a beginning in the exploration of their possibilities as adapted to our weather. A very beautiful tradition in marble-cutting has been built up in our country by the Piccirilli family, six brothers among whom are distinguished sculptors and distinguished craftsmen. Their output, which includes both their own original works and their faithful renderings in stone of the works of other sculptors, is known throughout the country, and has inspired good craftsmanship.
Thus in the major crafts of bronze casting and of marble-cutting, American sculpture is fairly fortunate today. In the one, we have come a long way from that first attempt in 1847; in the other, we have craftsmen who for large work to be seen at a distance can sufficiently well translate into stone the sculptor’s finished models. We have also for our salvation a few sculptors, who, like Chester Beach, are peculiarly gifted in wresting from the marble, and with their own hands, their own visions. But Mr. Beach is different again from most of his contemporaries, in that he is successful in his command over all the final materials in which a sculptor’s work may be presented, whether terra-cotta, stone, or bronze. With a modern and highly interesting vision of beauty, and with an absolute understanding of the principles of sculpture, this artist respects both the art and the craft of sculpture. Sometimes it would seem that the finer the artist, the finer his appreciation of craftsmanship.
Of course if one were to judge by the pictures in the Sunday supplements, all sculptors carve their marbles themselves; they seem to do little else. That is not true, alas. Certainly a busy sculptor may well save himself for other matters besides roughing-out a block of marble. But a serious sculptor will generally wish to give the finishing strokes, few or many, a matter of weeks or of months, to any marble work that leaves his hands. In modern stone-cutting, the pneumatic tool is indeed a miracle-worker; and for that very reason, it bears constant watching from the sculptor whose work it translates. Mr. John Kirchmayer, an artist in the field of wood-carving, has described in a recent article the mischief wrought for this art by too great a dependence on the machine, a dependence that atrophies the native genius of the craftsman. His counsel is the same that all arts and crafts must follow: Use the machine but do not abuse it. When the cheapening of production means the debasing of the product, it is time for art and the machine to part company.
CHAPTER X
THE NATIONAL SCULPTURE SOCIETY
Other gifts besides those commonly acknowledged as the artist’s peculiar possession are needful if the advancement of art and the status of the artist are to be fitly assured. These other gifts belonged to the painter Morse when in defending the interests of art-study he played his important part in founding our National Academy of Design in 1825. They belonged to the artists who, in espousing the cause of the young Saint-Gaudens half a century later, broke away from the Academy to form the Society of American Artists. They belonged also to those later spirits who, perceiving the weakness of that disunion, managed somehow to gather the Society back into the bosom of the Academy, to the chastening of both factions. And they belong in good measure to Mr. F. W. Ruckstull, an American sculptor of widely recognized ability, who in 1893, with the help of Mr. Charles de Kay and others, was foremost in assembling the body since known as the National Sculpture Society. Mr. Ruckstull and the other charter members had no personal tocsin of revolt to sound; they simply saw, as intelligent artists and citizens, that their art and their country needed such an organization, “to spread the knowledge of good sculpture.”