Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

For once the art committee gave him a quick hearing, and presently he was allowed to exercise general supervision over the contractor’s work and accept it or reject it as he saw fit. But that wasn’t the end of the controversy. The contractor, it seems, wasn’t so much interested in the shape of an angel as he was in the price of rock. He began to change the position of arms and legs and wings to suit the contours of his blocks of stone. Borglum declared that these revised figures were caricatures, and he condemned them. The contractor wouldn’t listen to him. The committee gave him no satisfaction; so this time he carried his complaint to the press.

Borglum seems to have been his own best public-relations agent. He demanded that the carving of the stone should be done on the cathedral grounds under his own eye. Inasmuch as this was strictly in keeping with the medieval tradition in church building, he had one faction of the cathedral’s congregation backing him to start off with. The art critics generally thought his point well taken, and thousands of people who knew nothing at all about sculpture wondered what was the use of models if they weren’t to be followed.

Borglum won his point. A working studio was established on the cathedral grounds, and there Gutzon supervised the carving. He shared honors with his assistant sculptors, Price and Gregory, who had come over from England. Their names are signed to the work they shared in. Only the contractor thought that the sculptor was hard to get along with.

Many of the statues which Gutzon had condemned were recut and properly placed. The seventy-odd interior figures were one of the largest collections of images of religious leaders ever gathered under one roof since the beginning of the Christian era. They were also the largest collection ever carved by one artist. And as revised, they began to look somewhat respectable. Every detail of miter, chasuble and coat of arms was perfect. There had been much correspondence to determine the finger on which the pontifical ring should be placed.

By this time Gutzon had worked amicably with the cathedral authorities for two years. His early arguments about machine-cut statues were forgotten. And then came an incident which made people conscious of him again. A bit of newspaper confusion gave him a reputation for bad temper that he carried for the rest of his life.

It began in the meditations of Dr. John Peters, canon of the cathedral, in a bourn far from newspapers and street-corner arguments. Dr. Peters, all of a sudden, had become a little uncertain about the sex of angels. He wasn’t at all controversial about the matter, but he thought that he should convey what he had learned to Gutzon Borglum. So, in an innocent way, he did. In a letter to Borglum he wrote:

Dr. Huntington calls my attention to something that in the execution of the statues I had quite overlooked. He points out that the Angel of the Incarnation is named in the Bible as the Archangel Gabriel.

Now Gabriel is a masculine name, and, in point of fact, unless I am mistaken, the archangels are thought of as masculine—Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, etc. I am perfectly aware that in art one meets frequently a feminine angel type bearing the lily of the Incarnation, but is that really correct? Should not the heads of both these angels and the figures in general be made if not distinctly masculine, at least not distinctly feminine?

There you have all the correspondence on one side of this important controversy. Gutzon’s reply is appended because it is all that was said on the other side. He wrote this to Dr. Peters:

My Dear Dr. Peters, I have your letter referring to the feminine character of the angels. I fully recognize the correctness of your criticism from the standpoint of the Bible, though art and tradition have practically ignored this. I shall change them as you suggest.