discovered by George Butler Griffin, who had married a Castilian lady
from Colombia and lived in Los Angeles. They had several gifted
children, one of whom was the mother of the actress, Bebe Daniels.
Another daughter, Mrs. Eva Griffin Turner, herself a painter, was among
Gutzon’s early heralds. She met him first in the eighties and never
forgot a detail of their meeting.
She was twelve years old at the time and for a year or more had been
sketching and painting in her own fashion with a child’s color box. She
was allowed to trail along with him and a class he was instructing, and
she never forgot what he said as the pupils gazed at a sunset beyond Los
Angeles.
“The artist,” he declared--and it seemed to her that he was talking to
himself--“The artist should approach nature with great reverence.”
[Illustration: BORGLUM WORKING IN FIRST IMPROVISED STUDIO AT STAMFORD]
[Illustration: “DR. TRUDEAU,” THE BELOVED PHYSICIAN]
He left the class for a while when he went to work with William Keith,
an artist in San Francisco. Gutzon was an extravagant admirer of Keith,
who was called the “Grand Old Man of California Painting.” He stayed in
his class for several months. During that same period he took a short
course under Virgil Williams.
Mrs. Turner vividly remembered his home-coming and how his old students
reassembled with him for outdoor sketching. But he was not long for his
old ways. He had painted a picture called “Stage Coach” and some rich
man had seen it. There was an immediate furor over the picture and
Gutzon. And so presently he went to Paris to study.
“He won prizes,” Mrs. Turner mentioned, “and he was greatly admired.”
And then we have the memory of Bob Davis, onetime editor of _Munsey’s
Magazine_ and a columnist for the New York _Evening Sun_. In his
California days he was a printer’s apprentice with a job near Gutzon’s
studio. Davis describes Gutzon’s studio thus:
His walls were the most fascinating thing in my life. They were
hung with pictures of stage coaches and horses leaping at you from
every direction. These things were painted in oils and I thought
they were the finest things in California. He also modeled in clay
and chiseled a bit in stone. During the lunch hour I visited his
studio and struck up a friendly acquaintance. He confided that his
ambition was to excel in sculpture and that he painted only to get
the sinews with which to go on.
One noon I entered his studio and found him in high spirits. He was
rigging a large canvas on the easel and making great preparations
for something important.
“I’m going to do a life-size, seated portrait of General Frémont in
military regalia,” he told me. “Mrs. Frémont is bringing him around
this afternoon for the first sitting. Come around tomorrow at lunch
time and I’ll have the figure rounded in. He has a strong face and
I think I can make a pretty good picture.”
I saw the painting from the first touch of the brush. Frémont
always came in on the arm of his wife who seemed to be the one
person he wanted to please. She brought with her a military coat
adorned with gold fringe and epaulets, a garment the great Indian
fighter wore with dignity.
And it was a good picture. Day after day it assumed more life and
grandeur until it was finished and taken away to be exhibited in an
art gallery on Spring Street. I went to see it there. And I boasted
about my acquaintance with the artist to anybody who would listen
to me.
There seems to be no doubt that the Frémont portrait was one of the most
important works of Gutzon’s youth. It got him attention and acclaim. But
more than that it got him the friendship and advice of Mrs. Frémont. The
general was nearing death when Gutzon first saw him. The portrait was
finished in 1888 and Frémont died in Washington, D. C., in 1890. But the
motherly interest of Jessie Benton Frémont in the artist went on
unbroken for many years. She helped him with letters to important people
and with advice on how and where to sell his works. Some of these
letters were still in Gutzon’s effects when he died.
The most discriminating patron of the young artist in California was,
perhaps, Spencer J. Smith. Smith bought enough canvases to give Gutzon a
start toward his training in Paris. These pictures, tenderly cared for,
are still in the possession of Smith’s widow in the same house where the
artist saw them hung some sixty years ago. As then the house, surrounded
by gardens, stands like an oasis in the heart of busy Los Angeles.
Shortly before going abroad in 1889, Gutzon married Mrs. Elizabeth
Putnam, whom the family called “Lisa,” a painter of ability and a
teacher of art. Unfortunately, the details of the romance are lacking.
Gutzon never talked about such intimate matters. His father and other
members of the family met her only after the marriage.
Lisa seems to have loved her husband. At any rate, his worries during
the early years in Europe made little impression on her--nor on him.
Yet, that there was some difficulty in their relationship is evidenced
in letters written to Gutzon by friends of both of them. A young
sculptor pupil, Arthur Putnam, who lived with them at Sierra Madre,
mentioned the vague unhappiness he sensed in Gutzon and tried delicately
to probe into the matter. But, unfortunately, only the question of
Putnam is extant. Gutzon’s reply to his letter has not been kept.
From the sculptor’s diary, a sporadic and sketchy document, it is plain
that he was passionately anxious to have a child. It is probable that
the impossibility of this was the basis of whatever trouble he had with
Lisa. Moreover, she was twenty years his senior and did not care much
for his strenuous way of life.
Such was Gutzon’s fear of hurting her, and his almost abnormal dread of
publicity in so personal a matter, that the legal tie was not broken for
several years. Few of Gutzon’s friends of later years knew of this
marriage, and his own children were in their teens before they heard of
it.
A French servant, Jeanne, who had lived with the Borglums in Europe,
accompanied Lisa to California to live with her until her death. In 1931
she wrote to the sculptor about certain of his paintings that he had
given to Lisa and closed her letter with a significant and touching
thought.
“You have two beautiful children,” she said, “and you are at last happy.
You deserve it....”
Gutzon and Lisa bought a little house among the orange groves in Sierra
Madre, near the base of the mountains back of Pasadena, not far from
where the Santa Anita race track now stands. “Lucky” Baldwin, who had a
horse ranch on land that included the site of the race track, was a
great friend and allowed Gutzon to use his horses as models. Gutzon
loved this place. His favorite subjects for sculpture were horses, and
he never tired of looking at them. Mrs. Frémont, after seeing his
equestrian casts and drawings at his studio in 1889, summed up his
future with the gift of prophecy: “The boy is spirited. Here is one
sculptor who will ride to fame on horseback!”
That wasn’t quite true, but it was near enough. Within the year he was
moving. And never thereafter did he recognize the existence of anything
that could hold him back.
CHAPTER FIVE
_OVERSEAS ART_
Gutzon left California in 1890 accompanied by his wife and forty unsold
canvases. He was fairly happy. He had made a little money, he had
learned something about art and he had a growing circle of friends in
California. On the other hand, he gave little evidence that he might be
something other than one more simple art student from the Pacific coast.
That is what makes his progress remarkable.
He stopped in Omaha to visit with his father and, almost unaccountably,
left a pile of his canvases with a Mr. Leininger, a dealer and patron of
art. It is a little difficult now to identify or appraise these works.
This is a pity, for, good or bad, expensive or cheap, they all seem to
have found somebody who loved them. They never came back to haunt his
garret, nor, for that matter, did the ones we are told he sold “at an
exhibition in New York.”
There is little known about the “exhibition in New York” except that
Mrs. Frémont, the general’s widow, had been informed of it. She wrote a
note to the one person in New York who might be able to give a lift to
the young artist. And that’s how Gutzon met Theodore Roosevelt, then
Police Commissioner, who became a lasting friend.
Through some similar effort Gutzon also met Collis P. Huntington, one
of the builders of the Southern Pacific railroad. Their encounter would
be of no interest here save for the example it gave of the young man’s
purpose and directness and of his confidence in himself. Huntington,
impressed by Gutzon’s work and charm as well as his friends, wanted to
know what he could do to help him. Gutzon shook his head and smiled.
“Nothing,” he said. “When I get through with this exhibition I’m going
to Paris to study art.”
This was something new to Huntington--as it would have been to any art
patron in New York. “I am amazed,” he said. “Almost nobody comes to see
me that doesn’t want me to do something for them.” He bowed and went
away and Gutzon never saw him again.
* * * * *
Gutzon sailed on the _Bourgogne_ with plenty of hope and the proceeds of
his art sales in Omaha and New York. He admitted that he felt proud of
himself. He had been out of St. Mary’s seven years.
In 1891 a description of him was included in a passport issued by the U.
S. Embassy in Paris and signed by Whitelaw Reid. It gave his age as
twenty-four years; stature, 5 feet, 8½ inches; forehead, broad; eyes,
gray; nose, regular; mouth, medium; chin, round; hair, dark; complexion,
dark; face, oval--and it is a matter of great puzzlement to one who knew
Gutzon for forty years. It shows the picture of a somewhat thin,
energetic young man of dark complexion, regular features, broad forehead
and no great height. Yet, not until he had read this record did an old
friend realize that Borglum’s complexion was anything save that
contrived by weather and wind. Even more astoundingly came the
revelation that Gutzon was less than six feet in height. He looked to be
taller.
Nobody seems to have found much about Gutzon’s art studies in Europe
worth recording. He passed two years in Paris, studying at the Julien
Académie, at the École des Beaux Arts and under individual masters. He
exhibited in the Old Salon as a painter in 1891 and 1892. His picture
called “Clouds” attracted some attention. In 1891, through a
deliveryman’s mistake, a piece of bronze was taken to the New Salon. It
was accepted by the New Salon, which made him a member of the society.
The notice informing him of this unexpected honor was followed by a
personal letter of congratulation written by the celebrated painter
Puvis de Chavannes, who had succeeded Meissonier as president of the
Salon. Borglum’s work of sculpture was called “Death of the Chief”
(_Mort du Chef_) and represented a horse with lowered head beside the
body of a dead Indian. A copy of the group was unveiled in Los Angeles
in 1947.
The great experience of Gutzon’s life in Paris was meeting and forming a
friendship with Auguste Rodin. He said afterward that it wasn’t a new
experience. “It was rather a feeling of coming home,” he said, and
finding something he had dimly sensed in himself and was trying to
express. Rodin at the time was having trouble with the Academicians and
would follow a long road before being acclaimed the great master the
world now recognizes. Gutzon’s attitude toward life was much the same.
He was also committed to a long quarrel with that state of mind which
accepts stereotyped standards and resists change or improvement. Gutzon
wrote this about Rodin:
I hold Rodin to be one of the great individuals of history. He was
one of the rarest souls of whom we have any record during the last
3,000 years. He is passing and there will be nothing left to speak
for this man, who stands with Phidias, Donatello, Rembrandt and
Shakespeare, but a trail of broken fancies. The nineteenth century
has made no adequate use of his incomparable gifts.
He quoted Rodin’s remarks as recorded by M. Gsell in his book about the
master:
To any real artist worthy of the name, all nature is beautiful,
because the eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read
there, as in a book, the inner truth. Not a feature deceives him.
Hypocrisy is as transparent as truth. The beauty of the Greek ideal
is ever present and there is as much loveliness in the human form
today as when Phidias immortalized his race. But this loveliness is
passing into oblivion unrecorded, because the artists of today are
blind. That is all the difference.
Whether or not we follow what Rodin said, there is no doubt that Gutzon
did. He brought home with him from Europe nothing that so continuously
affected his life. Again he writes of Rodin:
Rodin meant more. He meant what I will add. The artists have not
seen, nor felt, nor understood the present, although they still
seem to appreciate the beauty of the Greek.
Great emotion, with great understanding, again united with mastery
over medium, are indispensable in the production of masterpieces in
song, form or color. Prophetic insight, coupled with great love and
trained to be a master in one of the mediums which the human race
has invented or discovered to express itself, is lost in our day,
as Rodin laments.
This paragraph seems to sum up Gutzon Borglum’s position on the matter
of art expression, and it explains his reaction to much of what is
called Modern Art. Years afterward he augmented it with another bit of
learning out of his two years of study in France. At a meeting in honor
of the French during the First World War he said:
France has been a foster mother and I shall always remember her, as
Hugo put it, as my second birthplace, because to be “educated in
another place is to be reborn there.”
So I was born in France at Auvers-sur-Oise. Here at Auvers I had a
quiet little home and for three years grubbed and labored with my
stubborn Americanism.
Finally I returned to America after having tried while there to
acquire French art. And then it came to me in an hour. I shall
never forget that hour. It came to me that the value and greatness
of French influence are in their superiority and their devotion to
the “inspiration” and not special concern for technique.
France has taught me respect for the sincere effort of other men,
courage in my own, and that originality lies in being true to one’s
self.
I learned that what is known as “French Art” is not the art which
has placed France as art mistress of the modern world. Rather, it
is Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Chavannes. It is not the Parisian
article, any more than it was Falguière or any other dozens of
masters of the technique, but Rodin and Dalou who helped French
sculpture to its high place in our century and fixed France with
the ancients.
Gutzon was not a pupil of Rodin, but he was a frequent visitor in his
studio. He used to tell of watching Rodin make quantities of water-color
sketches of his model, who was allowed to sit at ease and to change her
position as she wished. He gave Gutzon some of these sketches, which
have been preserved. They are inscribed “A mon ami, Borglum” and signed
“Rodin.” Letters from him across the years have also been kept. During
the First World War, when Paris was being bombed, Gutzon invited Rodin
to come to the United States and use his studio in Stamford. Rodin
declined and said he had decided to find refuge in Rome.
During this early period in Europe, Gutzon also passed an interesting
year in Spain about which his American friends seem to have known very
little. As a record of his stay, many spirited sketches of bullfights
are still extant. One of them is owned by O. R. McGuire, the art
connoisseur of Washington, D. C. He also made a copy of Velasquez’
portrait of the court jester, and a wood carving done by Gregory Pardo,
pupil of Michelangelo, in the Toledo cathedral. His studies of Cortez’
conquest in Mexico and the tragic fate of the Aztecs made a deep
impression on him.
He prepared background sketches for a large painting which he started on
his return to California. It depicted the gray dawn on the broken
causeway of Mexico City when the soldiers of Cortez were floundering
against the Aztecs in the gap. The episode, known to history as _noche
triste_, was a subject that haunted Gutzon through his life. But
although he first planned his picture of it for exhibition at the
Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, he seems never to have
finished it.
Other sidelights of his year in Spain are found in a letter to Mrs. J.
Seddon of Hollywood who bought a painting labeled “Don T., Toledo, Sept.
1892.” She had written to him for information about it, and his reply to
her query was this:
I am very much interested in the picture, and I have wondered what
had become of it. It ought to be in good condition, for it was
honestly and well painted.
It is the portrait of a Catholic priest, Don Tomas, pronounced
To-mass. He was the canon in charge of the great cathedral in
Toledo, a remarkable little man, very kindly and friendly, but he
belonged to the period of Philip II. He was extremely fond of
bullfights. He and I attended them regularly.
I first started to paint him smoking a cigarette, but when he saw
it, he threw the cigarette away and said it was undignified for a
priest. He is sitting in the outer room, the library room, which
forms the entrance to the Council Chamber where some 250,000 more
or less heretics and Protestants were tried, burned, exiled or
condemned to the galleys. The chamber beyond was like a court,
surrounded with seats against the wall in which the judges sat.
Into the middle of the room, the victim, or the accused, was
brought.
I don’t remember much of the carving of the background, but the
room was richly carved by Gregory Pardo, pupil of Michelangelo. The
work was done between 1549 and 1551, and this particular chamber is
called the Sala Capitula and was executed under orders of the
Archbishop of Toledo and in the reign of Philip II.
Gutzon returned from Spain to California in 1893 and brought a bit of
the Old World with him. He arrived to find a matter seemingly awaiting
his attention, as most matters did--the restoration of California’s
Spanish missions. It cannot be said that Gutzon Borglum ever came to
lavish his indignation over affairs with which he was unfamiliar, and
admittedly he was indignant over no small number or variety of them
before he died. In this instance he found a battlefield made to order,
because he had been studying the old records of the Spanish missions in
Spain.
His argument about the course and methods of the restoration became his
first recorded controversy, and was dragged out and redebated every time
he had a disagreement with somebody about something else. But, for all
that, it wasn’t much of a fight.
Charles Lummis, the editor, was at the head of a group of Californians
interested in restoring the ruined missions. He appears to have been
somewhat irritated when Gutzon came home from Spain and demanded an
important share in the work. The reconstruction plans, the sculptor
declared blithely, were prodigiously wrong. Incensed by this, Lummis
wrote several angry letters to Gutzon. Gutzon, never at a loss for
words, replied in kind. Unfortunately, some steps in the correspondence
seem to be lacking. There is no indication of how this battle came to be
resolved; however, the strong language presently ceased. Gutzon got his
way about the methods that should be pursued in restoring the buildings,
and he and Lummis became close friends. It appears that many of
Borglum’s arguments turned out that way.
Gutzon’s most important comment on the California missions never saw the
light until some time around 1927, when he was discussing the missions
of Texas. He wrote:
In the winter of 1893-1894 we organized in California the
Association for the Preservation of the Franciscan Missions,
founded or built by the followers of Junípero Serra. In preparing
for that work I made a trip to Spain and spent a year there
studying the Spanish civilization and securing the records of
Junípero Serra’s work in the New World, some original publications
and the records of the building of the missions.
On my return I recovered and re-established the boundaries of
perhaps the most beautiful ruins in America, San Juan Capistrano,
thirty or forty miles from Los Angeles and the only mission I hold
that is comparable to the San Jose Mission near San Antonio, Texas.
With the help of Indians who carried the dirt on their backs, I
removed the debris from the dome of the main church which had
fallen in during the earthquake of 1812, destroying some life.
Under the debris we found diamond-shaped flagging that formed the
floor. I made careful drawings of all the buildings, the pilasters
and cornices in place, cut beautifully by the Spaniards, much of it
of limestone.
In this work we came suddenly face to face with the very serious
question of how far we could go in the matter of
reconstruction--what constituted human rights in the work of
restoration, retouching and rebuilding, how much of our work would
immediately become vandalism--how far could we go without meddling
with the form and design and the actual work of the men who built
these fine structures. After much debate, the kind of debate that
took place in Rome many years later, it was determined that we must
do nothing more than save and preserve the work as we found it.
Where we found a stone that clearly had fallen out and where it was
recognizable, we might replace it. But to rebuild or in any way
reconstruct or restore what we conceived might have been the
character of the building at the time, all agreed would be
vandalism. There is no question that the Franciscan missions are
still a live subject of interest because they are not buried under
modern debris of cement and make-believe restoration. The late
Charles F. Lummis, president of the association since 1894, was
adamant in his resolution against any meddling with the ancient
methods of the work.
Of his art studies during this formative period Gutzon wrote:
As I became acquainted with the masterpieces in the fine arts, I
soon became aware that a landscape painter could not draw or paint
horses, cattle or sheep; that a cow painter could not paint a
convincing landscape equal to his cow painting as a matter of
creative production. The same applied to figure painting. I made up
my mind that I should master each of these subjects, and I began at
once. As I painted and drew almost exclusively in my first twenty
years of art work, I drew and painted incessantly dogs, cattle,
horses, portraits, figures, and never had to turn to a fellow
artist and ask him to draw my figure or cow or horse or sheep.
Reflection on this caused me to note that most men, as well as
artists, were one-track minded--that the average layman knew
nothing of art, nor the place in civilization held by the masters
of the fine arts, or even that civilization in its crudest forms
was solely the product of the arts, or that the reaching urge in
all civilization was the expressed mood of nature, seeking through
them an outlet.
The reaching, enveloping soul of musical harmonies is the prelude
to an understanding of the creative impulse. And again, who is
insensible to the tremendous power of words? The marriage of words?
The Milky Way of words which language conjures up and creates? Who
has not been conscious of the strange beauty of words ancient as
Lancelot--of heart, love, soul loneliness, craving and conflict?
And as these thoughts grew on me I became aware that the circle of
any human group was too small to live deeply within; that all moods
of life were something alive in the cosmic in which the creative
mind moves in limitless orbit, sensitive to every impression; that
the larger the spoken language, the greater, more comprehending
became one’s expression.
Gutzon, in this period, was no finished sculptor. He did some work with
stone and metal--but sporadically--for some three years. He painted
tirelessly. He was back at Sierra Madre, and life was placid and
pleasant.