THE ART OF RELIEF, HIGH AND LOW
I
How summarize an art that shows us sculptured form, not in the faithful
four-square roundness of fact, but in a subtly chosen and poetic
projection of fact? For the manifestations of the spirit of relief are
legion. A relief of a certain figure may have scarcely the thickness of
a flower petal, or again it may have an even greater salience than life
itself. All depends upon its purpose. When I am told that Mr. Aitken
and Mr. MacNeil are making some studies, in relief, I do not know
whether Mr. Aitken is at work on another large equestrian subject like
that of his George Rogers Clark monument, or whether he is devising
one of his little medallic Pegasi such as his Watrous medal; and I do
not know whether Mr. MacNeil is to give us a new coin, such as his
quarter-dollar of a recent series, or a new memorial as imposing as his
military monument at Albany with its serried stone warriors in relief.
Surely it is a Protean art that can produce the Brenner cent, the
Weinman dime, the Fraser Victory medal; that can make the Saint-Gaudens
portrait of Stevenson a suitable adornment for the church of St. Giles
in Edinburgh; that can decorate the façade of St. Bartholomew’s in
New York with bronze portals crowded with figures of the apostles and
crowned with marble tympana of the saints; that may even serve the
dynamic purpose of Rude’s great Chant du Départ on the Paris arch and
the static majesty of Calder’s Washington and MacNeil’s Washington
paired on the New York arch.
When we remember all the little coins and medals in the world, and
all the architectural ornament, structural or otherwise, on the
buildings of the world, and all the religious reliefs of Bible story
such as those that Mino and the Della Robbias have left us, and all
the patriotic and allegoric tales hoisted aloft into pediments and
springing up on arches, it is clear that relief sculptures vastly
outnumber the other sort. How often sculptors must have hailed relief
as an escape from rendering facts in the round, to be seen all around!
For commemorative portraiture in the public square, the future will
probably make a wider use of high relief (or even of low relief,
properly framed) to take the place of the portrait statue, often the
result of a purely automatic choice. And the purely automatic choice is
not a choice at all; it is a habit.
II
I am told on high authority that there are many persons who think
that a bas-relief in sculpture is a form resulting from an exactly
proportioned flattening of the same subject in the round. It is also
dismaying to find that there are those who would invent a machine
whereby on some principle of proportionate recession from the eye a
bas-relief could be produced from a form in full-blown dimensions. Is
not the art of sculpture already sufficiently mechanized? And surely
a good look at a fine relief should dispel mechanistic illusions. For
in relief, if nowhere else, live sculpture laughs at the despotism
of mathematics. Even the tyro in relief portraiture soon finds that
he cannot give the human ear the projection from background that
a proportional representation would demand; he sees that to do
this would exalt that whimsical volute beyond its merits, and divert
attention from other and perhaps more delightful, more characteristic
features of a face. If his portrait is in profile, as is not unlikely,
he discovers that this profile is in itself a very telling thing, and
that he can make it interesting or lively by softening a contour here,
by hardening it there, by letting it alone somewhere else, by sinking
or by raising parts of his background; before long he has discovered,
as Egyptians and Italians and Frenchmen and Americans before him have
discovered, a thousand devices of art, not algebra, that give his
relief a look of life and truth. In short, his work will never seem so
false and so far from sympathetic as when its chief quality is that it
is topographically true in its proportionate flattening. Of course I
feel ashamed to say such things baldly, when so many of our American
bas-reliefs have said them poetically. My excuse is that my words may
drive some unbeliever to look at the works. For, as the Metropolitan
Museum’s curator of prints lately said in an address, “Art in this
country doesn’t need to be talked about; it needs to be _seen_.”
[Illustration: WELCH MONUMENT
BY HERBERT ADAMS]
III
Someone promptly asks what are the rules of relief. But are rules of
much use here? Rules of relief are seldom mentioned by the sculptor;
never until after they have been patently transgressed. He has of
course his standards; he allows to his reliefs some of the privileges
of painting, such as perspective and distance, but he does not presume
too far with these borrowings, lest his work lose its sculptural
style. A relief is largely a matter of innate artistic feeling, as
well as of trained taste. And quite as much as a work in the round,
it tells the personality of its maker. A Saint-Gaudens relief, whether
the monumental bronze Shaw, or the marble portrait, slightly under
life-size, of Mrs. Stanford White, or the little reduction, “about as
large as the hand of a child of twelve years,” made from the bas-relief
of the baby Homer, reveals the artist’s temperament, shows his
principles and prejudices in art.
Many of this master’s pupils have made memorable reliefs in various
styles from medallic to monumental. The medals and portrait-reliefs of
Martiny, Flanagan, Fraser, and Weinman are well-known. Less familiar
to the general public because kept in private collections are the
admirable bronze or marble portrait-reliefs by Frances Grimes. After
the mechanical roughing-out of the pointing-machine is over, Miss
Grimes herself finishes all her marbles, whether created in the round
or in relief. She does this oftener in her studio than in the Sunday
picture papers; and because her designs for marble are from their first
rude beginnings in the clay imagined with a full realization of their
final possibilities in marble, they naturally have an integrity not
always attained in the work of sculptors unfamiliar with the chisel.
IV
Most artists would probably agree with Saint-Gaudens that “the great
coins are the Greek, ... just as the great medals are those of the
fifteenth century by Pisanello and Sperandio.”
[Illustration: VICTORY MEDAL
BY JAMES EARL FRASER]
But he who designs the modern American coin, however enthusiastic he
may be in his admiration of the Greek high relief masterpieces of
monetary beauty, must take serious and constant thought of the
curiously un-Greek conditions confronting him. His coin must work
harder than the Greek coin; it must “stack” properly; it must be
struck in numbers undreamed of in Hellas. Our difficult modern ideal
calls alike for quantity and for quality. Comparatively limited as
was the circulation of our recent Victory medal, four million copies
were considered necessary. One of the good precedents introduced by
Roosevelt, in consultation with Saint-Gaudens, was that of entrusting
the designing of our coins to our most talented sculptors; the
resulting improvement in our coinage, on the æsthetic side, has
been one of our twentieth-century triumphs. And the “great medals”
Saint-Gaudens loved are still influencing the medallic art of the
Western world.
The candor and warm simplicity of Pisanello and Sperandio were
perhaps lost sight of during those years while the earlier French
master-medalists of the nineteenth century, David d’Angers, Oudiné,
and Ponscarme, were paving the difficult way for a later and more
sympathetic flowering of the medallic art in the hands of Roty,
Chaplain, and Charpentier. But the delightful quality of the
Renaissance medal was never more deeply appreciated in France than at
the time when a goodly number of our American sculptors were studying
there, and shared in that appreciation; and now that the modern
reducing-machine allows the artist fully to develop his design for
a medal in a fairly large size before bringing it within the final
small circumference, it is certainly well for him to bear in mind the
admirable results obtained by the less sophisticated quattrocento
methods. Never before has the medalist had at hand as many excellent
mechanical aids as at present. Never before has he faced a greater
need of remembering the value of clarity in his vision, of simplicity
and sincerity in his touch.
Some of our purists maintain that every medal should be modeled from
first to last in its ultimate size, however trying and meticulous
this task may be. But does not such strictness denote a rather rabid
hostility to mechanical contrivances? There are medals whose intricate
yet logical design could hardly be carried out by the human hand, no
matter how skilful, within the narrow limits thus prescribed. Of this
type is the plaquette designed by Saint-Gaudens as a token of gratitude
to all who took part in the Masque of the Golden Bowl, offered to him
on a famous anniversary.
“Within its harmonious oblong are shown the columns and the blazing
altar and the Greek seat that figured in the scene, framed by the
proscenium arch of great New England pines, and by the stage-curtains
crowned with masks invented by the joyous fancy of Maxfield Parrish;
below is the triumphal chariot; and, as a symbol of the love that
prompted the pageant, there stands by the altar the winged figure of
Amor, who has borrowed the lyre of Apollo. The names of the seventy
figurants are beautifully inscribed, making a decoration for certain
spaces in the background; this feature, naturally prized by those
who received the medal, was made possible by modeling the original
on a large scale. Here is no hodge-podge of unrelated symbols,
but a beautiful and lovingly considered arrangement of deeply
significant things. We associate with it the same sculptor’s Columbus
medal-obverse, and many reductions, in plaquette form, from his
portrait reliefs. While delighting in the conceptions of antiquity and
of the Renaissance, Saint-Gaudens, more than any other master of his
day, made a faithful study of all the conditions of the modern portrait
relief.”
[Illustration: PLAQUETTE
BY AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS]
The fact that this sculptor not only prized the bas-relief form, but
also achieved a beautiful originality in it has of course turned many
Americans to the same path of expression. It is one of the delightful
ways in which modeling can take an occasional half-holiday from the
facts of form.