The National Sculpture Society’s ideals, to be valuable and enduring, must concern themselves with the ethical as well as the artistic side of various questions brought before the body. On the ethical side, it has, not without inherent difficulties, established its Code governing Competitions, the Code itself being governed by the Society’s avowed principle of fostering art with integrity. Year by year, the good work of this Code is shown by the larger clarity of purpose and of statement, and the larger conscientiousness in endeavor now expected alike from committees, competitors, and juries of award.
Some of the thoughtful idealists of the Society have long wished that it could undertake as part of its work an enterprise that might prove of untold value in the arts. “If instead of wrangling so long and so devotedly over our Code,” said one of these idealists, “we could have given the time to establishing a workshop for scientific experiments with our various materials, what immense practical good might have been accomplished! But it would take money, more money than our Society has ever had at its disposal.”
The field for such experiment is boundless. Science properly applied could help the sculptor at every step.
Think what it would mean to the sculptor if he had a plastic material which by the magic of chemistry could be at once converted into an imperishable material, exactly as it leaves his hands; or if the metallurgist would find him an alloy of metals which would take on, or even hold, a beautiful patine when exposed to our atmosphere; or if the chemist could explain some of the strange antics and prevent the misbehavior of that go-between, common plaster, which plays such a vital part in a sculptor’s work from the clay model to the final marble or bronze. Plaster is indispensable, in spite of its shortcomings; could not this lifeless, chalky stuff be transformed into a substance both durable and interesting? And marble, that sovereign among materials, is there no way by which its fine white crystals could be made to take on other tones than those nature has given? The questions are legion. With the amazing advance of practical chemistry within the last few years, many of them might be definitely settled by scientific experiment. It is to be hoped that in the near future the National Sculpture Society will acquire its needed research workshop, and put out publications of the results obtained, so that science may assist art as generously as in an allegory of mural decoration.
We have spoken of idealists. No member of the Society has proved himself a more practical idealist than Mr. Lorado Taft, long an enthusiastic teacher of the modeling classes at the Chicago Art Institute, and to-day a force for art not only in the Middle West, but throughout the country. Mr. Taft is the sculptor of the Black Hawk monument, the grandiose fountain of Time, and other works well-known indeed, but not because he himself in his thousands of lectures and in his two important books on sculpture has ever taken the opportunity to advertise his own talent. The fact is ironic, even grotesque; by voice and pen Mr. Taft has for years disclosed the merits of all sculpture save his own. Lesser artists than himself have been genially interpreted in his vivid and conscientious expositions. His public service for sculpture, a service now widely welcomed, was begun in the Middle West, a part of our country which because of its early settlement by Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians of enlightened stock, was early interested in artistic endeavor, and which today has some of our strongest art schools and museums. Nowhere else could his work have been begun so usefully. As sculptor, traveler, lecturer, writer, Mr. Taft gives himself with unfailing zest to that first avowed object of the Society, “to spread the knowledge of good sculpture.”
During the World War, and throughout the subsequent period of striving to wrest world betterment out of world bewilderment, the Society has remained active in its chosen work. The Spring of 1918 saw the opening by the Metropolitan Museum of a permanent exhibition of contemporary American sculpture; and to quote from a Bulletin of that time, Mr. French, the honorary president of the Society, “to whose gallant initiative and untiring endeavor the success of the undertaking is largely due, is as truly an American patriot as if he were a very young man with a very new rifle, now gazing eagerly toward the coast of France.” Robert Aitken and Sherry Fry, sculptors already distinguished in their profession before serving abroad with our Army, have doubtless through their military experience gained something of value to them as artists and as citizens. By the death of Harry Thrasher, killed near Rheims, the Society has lost one of its promising members; one who, having richly profited by his advanced studies at the American Academy in Rome, seemed at the outbreak of the War to stand on the threshold of high achievement in art. Those who knew him well have said that in his work as a sculptor, varied though this was, his genius was seen at its best in spacious and heroic conceptions, and that had he been spared, the heroic would have been as fully expressed in his art as it has been expressed in his life and its final sacrifice. The recent untimely death of Solon Borglum, an artist in whom a winning personality was joined to integrity of purpose and originality of outlook, was doubtless hastened by hardships met during his devoted service in France. Such men well illustrate the hope of the National Sculpture Society as to the quality of its membership; as sculptors and as citizens, they gave themselves to their art and to their country.
In the stimulating opportunity for exhibition offered to American sculptors through the courtesy of the group of learned Societies housed in stately fashion in upper Broadway, the National Sculpture Society desires once more to show, in a creditable manner and to a discerning public, the beauty and serviceableness of the art its members practise. Broadway at 156th Street is unlike any other Broadway in the world. The air is finer and clearer there than elsewhere, yet not too fine and good for human nature’s daily breathing. Very hospitable are the terraces and galleries of the Hispanic Society, the Numismatic Society, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Geographical Society, the Heye Foundation. The National Sculpture Society counts on a dignified setting such as it has never before enjoyed, together with a sympathetic collaboration such as it has always appreciated, to achieve a worthy revelation of sculptured form.
CHAPTER XI
INFLUENCES, GOING AND COMING
“Quid quisque vitet, nunquam homini satis cautum est in horas.”