OF EXPOSITIONS AND COLLABORATIONS
I
An unpublished satiric drawing of the ’eighties shows a family of
American tourists in the Louvre. They contemplate the Melian Venus.
With one exception, they are dumb with awe. The exception is Aunt
Maria, the masterful old lady in the foreground. Aunt Maria has seen
men and cities, but she doesn’t know as there’s much that can beat
South Bend. So
“Aunt Maria gazes with distrust
Upon the goddess in her bloom perennial.
‘Talk about art,--you should have seen the bust,
The butter bust we had at our Centennial.’”
The Sleeping Iolanthe in butter! In 1876, her name melted in the
American mouth. Though barred from the Fine Arts section, she was
believed by many to express the spirit of American art. Shamed by her
popularity, certain sensitive American artists did not quite recover a
jubilant tone until, long years afterward, a full-sized Melian Venus
in chocolate contributed to the gayety of the greatest of French
expositions. After that, the butter bust incident weighed less heavily
on thoughtful minds.
Just before our Centennial exposition, the scholarly John Fiske,
admitting that “the classical picture and the undraped statue” have “a
high place in our esteem,” ruefully adds that “it will probably be some
time before genuine art ceases to be an exotic among us, and becomes a
plant of unhindered native growth.” The Centennial showed us the truth
of just that. The Centennial was a glory, and a profound disturbance.
To our sculpture, this disturbance was its great gain. For the first
time, the American sculptor saw his work side by side with that of
Europeans. He was dismayed. He had had his doubts, his forebodings. He
now perceived for a certainty that in spite of half a century spent
in the pursuit of all the best that Italian pseudo-classicism could
offer, our apprentice days in sculpture, far from being well over,
were scarcely begun. Perhaps a fresh start was needed. At a time when
Munich, as well as Paris, was calling to the young painter, Paris,
rather than Rome or Florence, beckoned to the sculptor. New forces were
abroad in art, and American sculpture of the next generation profited
eagerly from the vigorous new French school.
II
The lesson taught by the Columbian exposition of 1893 was just as
important as that learned from the Centennial, though far less
sobering. A holiday spirit, not without dignity, spoke from those
pleasure-domes and lagoons and abounding sculptural forms of the White
City. The progress made by our art during seventeen years packed with
artistic adventure and endeavor was blown abroad in triumph. On the
whole, we were justified in our joy. As the Centennial by its dismaying
jolt had enlarged the outlook of our artists, so the Columbian, by
its varied harmonies, liberated the imagination of the public, of
the art-lover. To a marked extent, it created anew the art-lover,
a personage already made possible by the prosperity following the
conclusion of the Civil War. In the World’s Fair of 1893, the
apparently inexhaustible advantages of a sympathetic collaboration
between architect, painter, sculptor, and landscape architect were for
the first time sketched out large for the American vision. Our many
succeeding expositions have of course emphasized and amplified the
suggestions so gallantly given and so eagerly noted in 1893. Not that
our whole broad land is to-day the dwelling-place of beauty. Far from
it. Great reaches of time and great strivings of the spirit must match
our great stretches of space before art is everywhere at home here. And
collaboration at its best is jointly and severally a striving of the
spirit.
In 1825, when Charles Bulfinch, then architect of the Capitol, receives
an inquiry “respecting the ornaments wanted for the pediment of the
Capitol,” and writes in answer that “the object of advertising was
to obtain designs in various styles, from which to select one,” an
ardent collaboration between sculptor and architect was clearly not the
order of the day. The hard fate of Greenough’s Olympian Washington,
dragged in 1843 from inner shrine to outdoor platform, shows that in
almost twenty years conditions had not changed. For a long time after
that, a work of sculpture was seldom considered, during its creation,
with special reference to its destined surroundings. Artist and public
satisfied themselves with the bland half-truth that a good thing looks
well anywhere. There were of course vague gestures of collaboration
when the first statues were placed in Central Park; and in the good
fellowship existing between students of the different arts in the few
schools we had here as well as in the foreign schools there was a basis
for later harmonious co-operation. But the Saint-Gaudens Farragut,
unveiled in 1881, and showing in detail and ensemble the results of an
extraordinarily happy and sympathetic collaboration, roused the minds
of all artists. And twelve years afterward, the intelligent public was
fully ready to appreciate the happy collaborations it saw on every hand
at the Fair.
III
Expositions bring in their train certain evils. Is superficiality one
of these? In theory, sculptural work for exposition buildings and
approaches and vistas must often stress too much the gala-day aspect
of life; it must sound the hurrah at any cost; the note is gayety and
triumph; let no other chord intrude. So much for theory. As a matter
of fact, the making of red-letter-day sculpture injures only those
sculptors who are already too much enamoured of the “façade and froth”
side of human achievement. Nothing could be more serious in matter or
in manner than was Mr. French’s stately Republic, a dominant note of
the plan of the Columbian Exposition. And no work was more thoroughly
appreciated. Some of the very gayest of our exposition sculptures owe
their vitality to the very serious studies and the very solid mastery
of the artists who have produced them. There was wide-spread regret
because the MacMonnies Fountain, that thing of joy for the exposition
of 1893, could not sprinkle its dews permanently for our refreshment.
And in our later expositions, there have always been temporary works
achieved with bravura by the artist, enjoyed without reservation by
the public, and (often with a real sadness of farewell) consigned to
oblivion by the powers. The story of the Fair of 1893, the exemplar,
one might say, for subsequent celebrations, has been exceedingly well
told by Mr. Charles Moore, in his recently published Life of Daniel
Burnham. Nowhere else will one find so true and inspiring a picture of
our American architects, painters, sculptors, and landscape gardeners
working together in exalted collaboration. Those men set a great
standard and a great stride for artists of the present century. To
quote from Mr. Moore’s book a paragraph concerning the sculptors:
“Marshalled by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the sculptors for the first
time in America took their rightful place in co-operation with the
architects. And what a troop they were. There was Daniel French,
embodying the spirit of permanence and clear-sightedness in the
serene figure of the Republic that graciously presided over the Court
of Honor; and again, in conjunction with Edward Potter, manifesting
sustained ability in the quadriga surmounting the Peristyle; Frederick
MacMonnies, giving vent to the exuberance of America in the joyous
fountain that lent gayety to the great central motive of the Fair;
Olin Warner, whose early death lost to the country an artist on the
way to the heights; Paul Bartlett, then a promise which opportunity
has fulfilled; Edwin Kemeys, with his animal sculpture that came to
attract all the money Theodore Roosevelt could spare for art; and
Louis Saint-Gaudens, wanting only the intellectual element to put
him in the same class with his brother; and Karl Bitter, capable and
conscientious, whose accidental death brought grief to a host of
admirers; and Lorado Taft, who has put the ethereal, haunting spirit of
the Great Lakes into his Chicago fountain; Larkin Mead, sculptor of the
old school; Phimister Proctor, lover of American animals; besides Bela
Pratt, Rohl-Smith, Bush-Brown, Rideout, Boyle, Waagen, Bauer, Martiny,
Blenkenship, and the satisfactory Partridge.”
Later Fairs have but exemplified what was well suggested by the White
City. The Exposition at San Francisco, most recent of all, and taking
place in bright evanescence while Europe was already in the bitter
throes of the World War, brought forward, under the vigorous direction
of Mr. Calder, sculptor of the Pioneer Mother and of the Triumph of
Energy, much that was stimulating and fresh in our sculpture, even
though none of these American exhibits labelled themselves as Dynamic
Decompositions, and few attempted the earnest sort of modernism found
in French works such as Bernard’s Maiden with Water Jar. The fountain
in particular was delightfully renewed in Mr. Aitken’s Fountain of the
Earth, Mrs. Burroughs’s Fountain of Youth, Mr. Taft’s Fragment from
the Fountain of Time, Mrs. Whitney’s Fountain with Pristine Motives
from Aztec Civilization, Mr. Putnam’s Fountain with Mermaids, and Miss
Longman’s Fountain of Ceres. Individual pieces such as William Sergeant
Kendall’s half-length portrait of a peasant girl, carved in wood and
realistically colored, attracted attention for successful originality.
IV
By and large, our expositions have done three good things for
sculpture. They have managed to dislodge, even from the most
painstaking of workers, a fearless immediacy of expression in their
art. They have introduced to the public, in a large way on the terrace
and in an intimate way within the gallery, the most interesting
sculptors of the time. Above all, they have fostered and amazingly
developed the give-and-take of collaboration in the arts. This last is
their best gift to the spirit of American sculpture; it is the gift of
the broader mind.
Our American Academy in Rome, with its stirring legend, “Not merely
fellowships, but fellowship,” is the direct outcome of the World’s Fair
of 1893. Burnham, McKim, Mead, La Farge, Millet, Saint-Gaudens, and
other artists who by collaboration made that Fair a thing of beauty
resolved then and there that younger men should have such advantages
as these that they themselves had gained by working together. Through
their efforts, the project took shape. Though a National institution,
our American Academy in Rome is endowed and maintained by private
citizens. Its beneficiaries are young sculptors, painters, architects,
classical scholars, landscape architects, and musicians who have
already shown themselves signally fitted for their chosen work, and
who, for the sake of our country’s art, ought to have the benefit of
the three years of intensive and inter-related study in Rome. To-day,
our Academy in Rome is regarded as the most important modern influence
in American sculpture. “My reason for thinking it admirable,” writes
Saint-Gaudens, “is my belief that the strenuous competition required to
gain access to the Villa Medici, as well as the three years of study in
that wonderful spot, tend to a more earnest and thorough training than
could elsewhere be gained under the present conditions of life in our
times.”