He urged reforms in art education—reforms that have since come about. On this subject he wrote:
The art schools of this country turn out young men and women by the thousands every year, and mostly they aren’t worth fifty cents a day to any artist or sculptor. It is a very sad fact.
The economic independence of every human being who feels that he or she wants to study art is something that we should not lose a moment to assure. I think the sweetness of life is not so much affected by any other dozen causes as by the present inability of the race to express its emotions in a creative way. If sociologists and humanitarians could help this great body of youths to put their little heartaches into some beautiful, individual expression by creating some article in daily use, this pent-up tension, everywhere at the breaking point, would be used up at its source, as are springs of living water. And their work, their contentment and their power would be felt in every home.
The message seems important because so patently the truth. Gutzon Borglum was certainly a master craftsman, from the design of tools to the art that was his profession. It is significant that while he always preached a doctrine of change and modernity and was soundly berated by the academicians, he never produced anything cabalistic. Down deep in him was the understanding of what people were thinking about and what they could understand.
They understood him best, perhaps, when he was denouncing something. He had a keen eye, a vibrant voice, and, undoubtedly, a fine vocabulary with which to do the denouncing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
VARIETY OF LIFE IN A STUDIO
Gutzon’s first studio in New York was originally a barn that extended across the rear of some ancient brownstone-front houses in Thirty-eighth Street near Third Avenue. He transformed it into one large room with a high skylight and a narrow balcony across the end opposite the entrance. Under this, behind the spiral stairway, was a dressing room, then a door leading to a little fountain and a storage place for clay and coal, and finally an inglenook with built-in seats on both sides of the fireplace and shelves above them for books and bric-a-brac.
To enter the studio you passed through a green door opening from Thirty-eighth Street, along the old driveway bordered by geraniums to the proper entrance which led into a small anteroom. On the street door was a sign gruffly announcing that visitors were received “By appointment only.” But it was easy to get to the anteroom; and no matter how hard a secretary might try to carry out orders, Gutzon would certainly call out a welcome to anybody who owned a voice he recognized. His studio was only a step from Grand Central Station; so many of his friends dropped in just to watch him work. And because he had decided to love all mankind and knew that many of these people had come from a long distance, he would never let them be turned away.
There was always something going on in this place until the day he moved to Stamford—politics, social reform, park improvements, drama, and sometimes sculpture. And in the background was a phalanx of New York’s clever people, studio helpers, secretaries, models, friends and acquaintances. They flowed in and out at all hours of the day and night, and there seemed never to be any end to them.