By F. G. R. Roth
Henry Kirke Brown, the sculptor of the equestrian statues of Washington and General Scott, is a horseman, and his own equestrian statues display a thorough knowledge, but scarcely that imposing dignity of mass, which the build of the buffalo made possible for this group.
Whereas at the Chicago Exposition the gaiety of the sculptural embellishment, with the exception of the Macmonnies’s fountain, was concentrated on the buildings, and the arrangement of statues and groups about the grounds had been regulated with reserve, one motive of the Pan-American was to demonstrate conspicuously how sculpture could be used in the decoration of open spaces. There must have been many who felt that this feature was overdone; that the dignity of the vistas was disturbed by the multiplicity and variety of forms, and that what had set out to be gay finished by being fidgety. The more so that there was little relief of greenery, the whole scheme being too exclusively architectural without the assuaging influence of landscape gardening. If in lieu of so much sculpture trees had been imported into the scene, its beauty would have been increased, and the discomfort of the visitor, unsheltered from the sun, correspondingly diminished. The value of greenery in displays of this sort is at once an esthetic and a practical consideration.
The sculpture at this exposition was under the supervision of Karl Bitter, and his equestrian “Standard Bearers,” surmounting the pylons of the Triumphal Bridge, were the most arresting features of the scheme. Ten years earlier he had modelled the colossal groups that stood at the base of the dome on the four corners of the Administration Building. They presented a fanfare of form against the sky; and these rearing horses at Buffalo, with their riders holding aloft a draped flag, had the same fling of action, only more controlled by experience. Instead of an explosion of limbs and movement, there was a sustained and concentrated energy, infinitely more impressive. It is in decorative subjects of this sort, which permit a certain heroic exaggeration, that Bitter seems at his best. An Austrian by birth and training, he has the Teutonic exuberance, touched with the gaiety of the French influence, and it is when the occasion warrants the exercise of both qualities that he finds his best chance. When he is deprived of an excuse for festivity he is liable to abandon himself to an excess of force, as in the “Atlantes” of the St. Paul Building in New York, which are uniting their titanic strength with contortion of limbs and muscles to support—one little balcony! Or if, as in a memorial to the dead, he is constrained to moderation and set toward the expression of sentiment, his work is apt to be characterised by sentimentality and ineffectualness. Yet, in the sitting statue of Doctor Pepper, he has made a sincere attempt to render in straightforward fashion the personality of the subject. The figure is realistically treated, even to the adoption of an awkward pose, which, however, fairly corresponds with the meditative suggestion, while the expression of the head unquestionably enlists our interest. Nevertheless, it is in such a group as Bitter furnished for the Naval Arch at the Dewey celebration, full of stirring action and heroic suggestion, that he is to be seen most characteristically.
Isidore Konti’s groups at the Buffalo Exposition proved him to be a decorative artist of unusual versatility. He does not show the same varied familiarity with ornamental forms as Martiny, but his technique is scarcely less facile and sure than the Parisian’s, while touched with much of the Italian naïveté. Gay or serious, according to the subject, his inventiveness of fancy inclines toward that slightly idealised realism which characterises the work of many sculptors of the modern Neapolitan school; a realism that is less the product of any theory of art, than of the natural adaptability to impressions—a quick perception coloured by temperament. Thus Konti seems to me at his best when his fancy moves most simply. A first impression of his group, “The Age of Despotism,” was very satisfactory. Bold and simple in design, it represented a man seated in a chariot, erect and cold, with eyes fixed sternly ahead, and at his side a woman (a courtesan, I took her to be) lashing on the team of human cattle, while women were dragged in chains behind. Amid so much trite symbolism here seemed to be a touch of very naïve and forcible realism. But closer inspection discovered that the realism was impaired by artifice and artfulness; the woman in the chariot had wings, and one of the captives carried a pair of scales, a lapse into abstractions that for myself, at any rate, lessened the value of the group. On the other hand, in the group upon the Temple of Music, while abstractions were introduced, they had no other meaning than a decorative one. The youth with a lyre might represent Apollo, but there was no need to recognise the fact; he was simply one of a joyous band of figures, animated with the grace of gaiety, of music and the dance. These groups were as refined in composition as they were exuberant, exhibiting the genuine creativeness of an artist who has an instinct for decoration and a lively delight in the pure expression of line and form, regulated by an instinct also of artistic propriety. It is eminently a Latin trait, in which the American is as deficient as the Anglo-Saxon or Teuton.
Our tendency is to desire a motive in decoration beyond the decorative one. So we make our statuary expressive of patriotism or what not. Well and good; but we do so without that instinct of propriety which should be as careful of the setting of the statue as of the statue itself. Thus in city squares and public parks we multiply our memorials without adding, as effectively as might be, to the beauty of their environment. It was this fact which, by a display of the opposite, the Buffalo Exposition was designed to enforce. In another chapter I have alluded to our preference for portrait-statues with their prosaic accompaniment of tailor-made trimmings to statues which, while commemorating the individual, would be more essentially decorative. But it is equally to be desired that better use should be made of such statues as we decide to encourage; for a statue set down promiscuously in a public square or thoroughfare, facing in no particular direction, forming the termination of no vista of sight, supported and isolated by no architectonic arrangement, loses the greater part of its impressiveness. Indeed it is very generally forgotten that there is an element of formality in a statue, which necessitates some formality in its placing, and that the accompaniment of wriggling paths and of the haphazard sprinkling of trees, such as we find in our New York smaller parks, is directly opposed to the spirit of the statue. It is equally a violation of propriety and a waste of good material to set a fine statue on the line of a thoroughfare, where it is seldom seen from the front, but continually passed by unnoticed. Yet these and similar incongruities are only too frequent.