In the “Hoyt Memorial” two angels, floating in the air, support a tablet with inscription. Emphasis is given to the heads and arms and, in a less degree, to the wings; but the rest of the form is indicated little more than is necessary to explain the arrangement of the streaming folds of light drapery. The result is a delicate pattern of light and shade, a decoration of sweetly refined imagination, corresponding with the gracious refinement of the expression in the faces. A similar appreciation fits the “Pratt Memorial Angel” which he modelled for the Baptist Emmanuel Church in Brooklyn, although the figure is in the round. In the “Pratt Memorial” tablet, executed some years later, Adams reveals how exquisitely he can use flower forms as motive for decoration. The design forms the border of a long, narrow panel. At the top is a winged head, symbolising the Angel of the Resurrection, and at the foot a head without wings, representing the Sleep of Death. The latter is enfolded with poppy-flowers and leaves, these forms being carried up the sides of the panel, until at the middle distance they become interspersed with lily-forms which finally assert themselves at the top. The modelling is in very low relief with the exception of the heads, to the lower of which a modest emphasis is given, while to the upper a much stronger one. Both these faces are very beautiful, the expression being chiefly centred in the eyes. The lids in the one case are half-raised, as in the act of awakening before consciousness has fully dawned; in the other lying as softly over the eyeballs as folded petals. The exquisite chastity and serenity of these ripe, rounded faces are echoed in the floral borders; so richly patterned, yet with such reserve and tender piquancy. And, in contrast with the usual tedious reiteration of time-wearied ornamental motives, how refreshing the novelty and imagination in these borders! The artist has gone to nature for his models, and, while reproducing the character of Renaissance ornaments, has used the natural forms with so delicate an exuberance of fancy that no motive is repeated, the whole being quick with fragrant and fresh appeal. Indeed, so far as my knowledge goes, no plastic decoration has been produced in this country which can approach it in beauty; perhaps not even in the actual beauty of the ornamental forms, certainly not in the sentiment of pure and holy calm which it exhales.
Nor even in other decorations by Adams shall we find, I think, such perfect harmony between the form and feeling, for in his other examples he was working with divided mind. While the floral borders upon the pair of bronze doors which he executed for the Library of Congress are intrinsically as beautiful as these, displaying the same freshness of invention and loving insight into the decorative suggestion of flowers, they have not the same perfectly balanced relation to the character and feeling of the whole design. The artist was dragged from his own poise by two outside influences. The doors had been commenced by Olin Warner, and before his death the figures in the panels had been planned and partly executed. Adams was called upon to complete the work and strove loyally to preserve as much as possible of the dead artist’s intention. Consequently, the figures are neither his nor Warner’s. Moreover, the planning of the doors had been originally the architect’s, and he, too, made his influence felt in the direction of a predilection for the profuse exuberance of Roman ornament. With this Adams has absolutely no sympathy, his own tendency being toward an ardent nature-study purified by the influence of the antique which prevailed among Florentines of the fifteenth century. Therefore, again he was twisted from what he would have done instinctively. Compared with his independent work in the “Pratt Memorial” tablet, these doors are overloaded and lacking in singleness and unity of motive. Yet with what devotion Adams worked! The process of casting in the bronze could only reproduce the front surface of his decoration; the undercutting of the leaves and tendrils had to be executed afterward with a graving tool, and for weeks he superintended the work. Viewed in detail, the borders in these doors are unusually alive with beauty, but, as I have said, the ensemble is lacking in the crowning beauty of harmony of form and feeling.
He has recently completed a tympanum in marble and two bronze doors for the Vanderbilt Memorial Entrance, which has been added to St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York. Here, again, he coöperated with the architect. Such coöperation necessarily imposes certain conditions upon the sculptor’s imagination; I had almost written limitations or restrictions, except that the necessity of having to conform to an architectonic plan need be no bar to the freedom of imagination, but merely directs it into a certain channel. It permits, indeed, a liberty within the law; but this is not the sort of coöperation that has existed between the sculptor and architect on the present occasion. The latter has not only established the architectural plan of the design—a geometrical arrangement of bands and spaces which presents a very agreeable ensemble and nice apportionment of graduated emphasis—but has also imposed upon the sculptor the character of his decoration. The church is a modern rendering of the Romanesque style;
BUST OF THE ARTIST’S WIFE
By Herbert Adams
therefore, the architect has sought the models for the decoration in medieval sculpture of the eleventh or early twelfth century. It is a characteristic example of the way in which the American architectural mind frequently works. Such a course is so obvious and reasonable, yet what a meagerness of imagination it displays! It has mastered the “styles” and lives up to its tables of laws and formulas as rigidly, as literally and with as little regard for their spirit as the Jews of old clung to their Decalogue. It dare not, or cannot, rekindle the spirit of the past with an infusion of the present, as has been done in all living periods of architecture, but to commemorate a New Yorker of the nineteenth century, reproduces the ungainly types of figures, fashioned at a time when architecture was better understood than sculpture. So in the principal panels of the doors the architect has arranged four apostles—rude, formalistic figures, too short in the leg—and filled the subordinate ovals with dry little rigid groups; succeeding in his desire to remind us of the past and failing utterly to affect us in the present. For what possible appeal, religious, emotional or esthetic, can these groups make to the modern imagination? Yet, from the point of view of the subject we are discussing, the saddest thing is that a sculptor of “delicately imagined sensations” should be so distorted from the true bent of his genius and compelled to exert ingenuity in lieu of imagination. It is an incredible waste, for only in the borders can we discover Adams’s real self; yet, if he had been permitted to work in a reasonable liberty of imagination, he might have made the groups conformable to the style of the building and possessed also of some vital elements of beauty and of beautiful appeal.
One effect, however, of this unequal coöperation with the architect which may bring some compensating benefit to Adams’s art has been that his mind has been directed more than previously to the architectonics of decoration and to the sculptural value of form. For, while the figures in these doors have no individual interest, the sum total of the whole decoration has a very marked structural dignity, which arouses one’s respect, if it does not warm one to enthusiasm. And this enforcement of the structural quality reappears even more conspicuously in the tympanum, both in the increased sense of force which the figures convey, and in the organic relation of the forms to the shape of the space and to its architectural function.