THE STATUE AND THE BUST AND THE IDEAL FIGURE
I
As originally planned, the title of the following chapter was The
Statue and the Bust, and the Wart Well Lost. For I have often felt (and
who has not?) that the Cromwellian forthrighteousness in the matter of
that wart has been over-estimated. However, on second thought, it would
seem wiser to suggest the possibility of occasional ideal presentation
rather than to decry the virtues of exact realism in commemorative
portraiture. Hence the more dignified heading seen above. And how does
that old case of idealism _vs._ realism stand at present in the field
of the portrait statue? Before answering this question, let us consider
for a moment the modern sculptor’s preparation for his life-work.
Following hard upon the three leaders who remain central figures in
our hundred years of sculpture came the outriders of that large and
ever increasing group whose creative genius, fostered by the training
enthusiastically received in the French school, now stands four-square
among us. The men and women of this group are the present-day nucleus
of sculptural activity here. Most of them keep a firm footing in two
centuries; they still profit by the light of the later nineteenth
century French masters, and they themselves pass on their own clear new
light to twentieth century learners. When the names of Falguière and
Mercié, Dubois and Chapu, Saint-Marceaux and Frémiet and Rodin are
spoken, these men and women are thrilled, just as Heine’s Grenadier
was thrilled by an imagined footstep; and these men and women know why
Schumann’s song soars up into the Marseillaise. They know that their
French masters once gave them something priceless, yet left them free
to use the gift according to their own bent and will. The principles
taught in the atelier seemed to them necessary and suggestive, not
despotic.
To-day, both the New World and the Old are altered. Good art schools
are now found in most of our large cities; as far as mere technical
training is concerned, opportunities for art-study are at present
brighter here than in Europe. But nothing can ever replace the
inspiration given by the sight of European masterpieces of painting,
sculpture, and architecture on European soil. Therefore we no longer
say with Ward, “Go abroad to study, but not to stay.” We say instead,
“Remain at home for your study, but go abroad during vacation periods
for travel and for inspiration.” A generation ago, the eager young
student body of returning painters and sculptors would not have
believed that this change of base in an artist’s education could occur
within their lifetime.
Until rather lately, the youthful sculptor returning to America to
practise his profession would hope first of all to make a portrait
bust or two, eking out his income by teaching classes in modeling, or
by assisting some more experienced sculptor in developing important
commissions. Then if he were lucky, a fountain figure for some one’s
garden or a portrait statue for his native town would loom up on his
horizon, and he would be fairly started on his way to glory.
II
The portrait statue; imperishable bronze trousers; the frock-coat
immortalized. Art thou there, truepenny?
Most of those persons who are now confirmed haters of sculpture
probably became so through having in tender childhood looked too long
on the bronze portrait statue when it was dark, when it gave its color
all wrong to the countenance of some beloved hero. Even among sculptors
there are many who admit a secret distaste for the portrait statue,
except when it proceeds from the art of the rare absolute master.
Hearing the grumblings of sculptors as to the difficulties of this
form, one is tempted to ask with Mr. Caudle, “If painful, why so often
do it?” The answer is, “The portrait statue is what committees want,
and will pay for. The portrait statue is my children’s bread; the
ideal figure will not keep them in shoes.”
So then, the situation must be examined on all sides. And is there not
a certain high courage in that sculptor who takes his age as it is,
and, like Saint-Gaudens and Ward, manfully makes the truthful best out
of Peter Cooper’s whiskers, and Horace Greeley’s long-legged boots?
“But,” retorts the sculptor, “the whiskers we can endure and celebrate;
the boots are not too much to bear. These things are not decorative,
but they have character, they tell their times. It is the frock-coat
and the trousers that paralyze our imagination.”
Perhaps it will never be known how much the modern male costume,
convenient indeed, but uncomely,--tyrannously uniform in its
formlessness, and rejecting any individuality as an indecency,--has
contributed to the rather wide indifference of the public toward the
usual dark effigy of estimable manhood set up in the marketplace. Well,
no conflict, no drama! If there were no inherent difficulties in the
problem of the portrait statue, there would be no exultation for the
sculptor in his successful solution. True, our days lack beauty; man’s
apparel is not a sculptural delight. But unless the artist can do
something to mend matters, there is little use in mournfully reminding
the world that there was no Wragg by the Ilissus. It is interesting to
mark how our American sculptors have come out from their clash with the
commonplace, and whether they emerge as victors or vanquished.
III
Looking at the general assembly of portrait statues here, we see at
once that these works are freer and happier when their subjects, to
alter Washington’s historic words, permit “some little deviation in
_disfavor_ of modern costume.” Mr. Quinn, in his statue of Edwin Booth,
and Mr. Weinman, in his spirited Macomb, have profited sculpturally
by such permissions. Most of the bronze statues in the Rotunda of
the Library of Congress have an added chance at immortality because
personages like Solon in his _himation_ and the Droeshout Shakespeare
in his doublet and hose, Michelangelo with his angry leather apron
and Columbus with his sea-coat and world-map, and Joseph Henry in his
gown are freed from the tyranny of modern tailoring. They evade the
question; they have every opportunity to look as good as they are. But
the statue of a plain blunt modern man rarely looks as good as it is;
clothes bewray it; and so we shall find all our modern artists using
one subterfuge or another to relieve the bleak dulness of modern
manly dress seen at full length in the round.
[Illustration: STATUE OF MAJ. GEN. MACOMB
BY ADOLPH A. WEINMAN]
Saint-Gaudens seats his Peter Cooper king-like within a Renaissance
portico, and places a curule chair behind his standing Lincoln. Though
Lincoln is a greatly revered subject in American sculpture,--a subject
of exceedingly rugged force,--few sculptors are satisfied to present
Lincoln, plain in his usual garb; they give the hero a background,
or a cloak, or an exedra, or a top hat on a bench, so keenly do they
feel the lack of amplifying circumstances. Yet certainly Lincoln’s
bronze clothing offers more of interest than that of today’s captains
of destiny, soldiers excepted. And how distinctively American is the
note sounded in all our portrait statues of Lincoln! Saint-Gaudens,
French, MacNeil, Weinman, Barnard, Borglum, and O’Connor have made some
of the best of these. One sees that a good statue of Lincoln _must_
be “distinctively American”; let all “viewers with alarm” be comforted
by observing that Frenchification or Italianization slips away from a
Lincoln statue like water from a duck’s back.
IV
The major heroes of sculpture may well receive the tribute of shrine
or exedra or canopy, but what of the more numerous lesser heroes? In
avoiding a commonplace rendering, the imaginative sculptor has other
avenues of escape beside those offered by the architect, sometimes
gloomily called by unbelievers in collaboration the sculptor’s evil
genius. A first aid is the impressionist manner, used by O’Connor in
his Worcester Soldier, and in his masterly statue of General Lawton at
Indianapolis. In these works the modeling is fluid, the planes vibrate
in light; we feel the happy absence of a sample-card arrangement of
buttons; no one could for a moment say, Here are two more triumphs
of bronze tailoring. Already in some of our new War memorials, our
sculptors are making use, but not always the best use, of broad
simplifications of mass and surface. They are showing us young heroes
of the Argonne not cap-a-pie in their uniforms, (no one asks that)
but with torn tunics, if any, and with riven flesh. Rodin and the
grand old Bourgeois de Calais are indirectly responsible for some of
these compositions. But will these bronze pictures of human agony long
satisfy the human heart? Have such memorials the permanence of spirit
we implore, or are they big bronze studies that are really almost as
far from the heroic greatness of the Bourgeois de Calais as from the
unpretending littleness of a Rogers group, say the Wounded Scout in
the Swamp?
The answer depends entirely upon the artist. We have no right to
dictate his manner, but we demand that beneath the manner there shall
be sound construction as well as feeling: we ask also a knowledge of
ensemble, of silhouette. The impressionist style is a fine instrument
in the right hands. But in the hands of mediocrity, this style of
sculptural language performs the third and most regrettable function
of all language, that of concealing the lack of thought. The result is
what Mr. Grafly might well call “union-suit sculpture.” Between the
Devil of a prosaic literalness of rendering, and the deep sea of a
sloppy and would-be poetical impressionism, the genius of the sculptor
is our only salvation. Impressionism ill-handled will not save from
the commonplace either a group or a figure. While the problem of the
portrait statue remains as difficult as it now is, one is glad to see
that of late committees are turning toward other ways of perpetuating
the memory of greatness. Here in New York, the Pulitzer Memorial in
the Plaza has taken the form of a fountain, surmounted by a figure of
Abundance, the last work from the hands of Karl Bitter; and the Straus
Memorial is a fountain, in which the chief motive is a reclining figure
of Contemplation, at the head of a large pool. Other cities also have
their successful memorial avoidances of the “iron photograph,” as
the darkened bronze effigy has been called. A distinguished example
is Daniel French’s Du Pont fountain in Washington, made to replace
a portrait statue. Mrs. Whitney’s Titanic Memorial, a memorial for
many rather than for one, is admirable in its sincere originality of
inspiration.
At least one thing could be done which is now left undone by most of
the City Fathers in our land. Under the direction of Municipal Art
Commissions, bronze statues could be cleaned; not polished until they
are a glittering congeries of high lights, an effect heartily detested
by sculptors, but cleaned reasonably, with a decent regard for the
opinions of those who made them. Is it not a singular superstition
that a statue once placed should never be touched by the hand of
cleanliness, but should suffer in silence whatever indignities the
soot and the birds and the climate heap upon it? Again, in a country
in which gold is said to be no rare possession, this metal, properly
toned, could often without prohibitive expense be used to dignify our
statues, and prevent dark oxidization. And this would be done, if we of
today cared as much about art as we do, let us say, about advertising.
Future civilization will probably have a place for a new profession,
that of the well-trained custodian of statues. The first attempts in
this work will not in the nature of things be as destructive as were
the labors of the old-time picture-restorer, so-called, a personage
long reviled for his ignorant or dishonest acts, but now becoming
extinct. And what a boon it would be if this statue-custodian of
the future, with a body of intelligent criticism behind him, could
be depended upon for judicious removals as well as for faithful
guardianship! This liberating thought is brought to the attention of
all Municipal Art Commissions.
V
Among appealing portraits in the Louvre is Ghirlandaio’s Priest and
Boy. Whatever might be hideous in its realism is at once atoned for
by something singularly lovely. The priest has the ugliest nose
in the world; Cyrano is a Hermes to him; but the child looks up
to him in intimate childlike trust. The most unflinching realism
and the tenderest idealism meet in that portrait. And our American
portraits in sculpture, taken one by one, run that gamut. From the
day of William Rush’s rude self-portrait down to the present hour of
an occasional polychrome marble bust of exquisite workmanship, our
sculpture has advanced in the art of the portrait bust. The creator
of the Greek Slave was happier, whether he knew it or not, in rugged
masculine portrait heads such as his Jackson and his Calhoun, than in
his famed ideal figures; those male likenesses have a living quality
that is lacking in his series of idealized busts of classic heroines
such as Proserpine and Psyche, all much the same in feature, and all
appropriately corseted in a kind of marble corolla, springing up from
a leafy marble base. The ending of a bust, that is to say its base or
support, is always a question with the sculptor, unless, like Houdon,
he chooses one type of base for all, or unless, as Rodin in his marble
portraits of women, he counts upon the richly associative charm of the
unachieved.
Since the time of Verocchio’s bust of a woman with flowers in her
hands, many sculptors, for the sake of added interest, a more vivid
characterization, or a more striking composition, have attempted to
show the hands as well as the face of the person portrayed. In this
difficult undertaking, no modern sculptor has succeeded better than
Mr. Niehaus, well-known for his imposing monuments. His portrait bust
of John Quincy Adams Ward is not only a work of distinguished realism,
worthy of the artist it represents; it is also a perfect solution of
an almost insolvable problem in arrangement.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT BUST OF J. Q. A. WARD
BY CHARLES H. NIEHAUS]
Among the greatest virile portraits of our age are those of the “all
around” American sculptor, Charles Grafly; for style and workmanship
and seizing of character any half-dozen of his busts would proudly hold
their own if placed beside Rodin’s male portraits in the Metropolitan
Museum. Furthermore, they have the old-fashioned advantage of looking
like the persons they represent, an advantage not always attained in
the Rodin portrayals. Perhaps a fairer tribute to Mr. Grafly’s power
would be to say that his busts need not fear comparison with the
Saint-Gaudens Sherman, that most spirited portrait of a war-chief.
One of our memorable sculptured portraits is Mrs. Burroughs’s bust
of John La Farge, modeled at about the period of Mr. Lockwood’s
painted portrait. Both artists have attained truth. Mr. Lockwood’s
broadly enveloping technique shows La Farge as the cosmopolitan,
the artist who is also the gracious citizen of the world; Mrs.
Burroughs’s point of view emphasizes La Farge the individualist, the
thinker habitually pursuing his own spiritual adventures in many
realms, oriental and occidental. The painting tells wherein La Farge
resembles his fellow-men, while the sculpture with equal force brings
out his valuable points of difference. Twenty years ago, Jonathan
Scott Hartley’s sturdy renderings of masculine character delighted
his colleagues; and even today, his bust of John Gilbert as Sir Peter
Teazle loses nothing of its rich whimsical earnestness when considered
beside modern work of the highest order, such as Robert Aitken’s
portrait of Augustus Thomas, or one of Fraser’s presentments of our
great American citizens.
Naturally remote in intent and result from these virile modelings are
the lovingly rendered portraits of women and children familiar in our
sculpture. A well-known example is Manship’s realistically carved
marble image of his baby daughter placed within a captivating shrine
of blue and gold. Portraits in the round, carried out in a polychrome
ensemble of beautifully cut marble combined with other materials, such
as wood, gold, and semi-precious stones, offer a fascinating field for
the American sculptor willing to devote to such experiments the time
and thought they demand. The pure white marble bust looks ill at ease
in the warm precincts of the modern home; it is a thing of the past. We
can but wonder that our elders bore it so long, even when it was in a
measure suppressed by placing it looking streetward, between the parted
lace curtains.
[Illustration: MARBLE PORTRAIT OF BABY
BY PAUL MANSHIP]
For the male portrait, modern taste generally prefers bronze to
marble; and just as the dead whiteness of marble may be relieved by
color, so the severe darkness of bronze in statue or bust may be
altered by the use of a harmonious patina. Many of our sculptors have
given long and patient study to this subject of “patine”; others again
trust all to the bronze founder. But sculpture still has much to learn
from chemistry; and there are still a few artists who keep enough of
the weaker side of craftsmanship to believe in the advisability of
secret processes. Is it not true that art is the last field where such
secrecies should exist? Do we not look upon art as the liberator of
great things, not as the locker-up of little things like craftsmen’s
receipts? For receipts that are not exposed to the air get mouldy with
hugger-mugger and abracadabra; this is as true today as in good Cennino
Cennini’s time of “mordant with garlic,” and “tempera with the yolk of
the egg of a city hen.”
VI
A survey of the spirit of American sculpture should include, as a
cause for joy, a glimpse at the single ideal figures in which many
of our modern sculptors express themselves, more or less untrammeled
by the demands of the world. The subjects for such figures are
rarely new, yet they must be treated with perennial freshness. Take
Diana: Saint-Gaudens, Warner, MacMonnies, Miss Scudder, McCartan and
I know not how many others have done Diana in her phases, and each
new portrayal should prove a new joy. Take Maidenhood: Rudolph Evans
has chosen this ancient theme for his Golden Hour, one of the most
delightful pieces in all American sculpture; Barnard has rendered it
in marble; Sherry Fry’s classic bronze Maidenhood, in the guise
of Hygeia, and Mrs. Burroughs’s On the Threshold are sculptural
expressions of the same subject. Take the Ephebos: John Donoghue’s
Young Sophocles, dated 1885, a masterpiece coming just half way, in
point of time, between the arrival of the Greek Slave in America and
the unveiling of MacMonnies’s Civic Virtue, is a gloriously conceived
figure of youth in the abstract, rather than a full-length likeness of
the Greek poet leading the chorus after Salamis. Surely in sculptural
mastery, Donoghue is much nearer to MacMonnies than to Powers. Picking
our way past the Slave and her kin, and coming at last upon a classic
like this Young Sophocles, we may safely abandon the prefix _pseudo_.
What a relief! It is as if one could at last leave off over-shoes, and
walk abroad dry-shod, in fair weather. This example from the ’eighties
points out once more the progress made between the Fairs of 1876 and
1893. Does it also, in its old-school seriousness of consecration
to art, and in its reverence for “the nobler forms of nature” shame
a little the easy slapdash of the battalions of sketchy figures now
clamoring for space in print and in the galleries? Probably not. Other
times, other ideals. “She certainly saved herself trouble,” was the
comment of a sculptor, looking at a modernist figure whose drapery was
made by strings.
[Illustration: THE GOLDEN HOUR
BY RUDOLPH EVANS]