plagiarists--“cribbers,” he called them--especially in the field of
architecture. He had a keen sense of humor and many a laugh we all
had at the way he would tell of an amusing incident he had seen.
One of his sayings when referring to someone who lacked initiative
was, “You can’t pick up custard with a hook.” He also could tell a
man’s character by a look at his clothes. If worn for any length of
time, he said, they seem to take on the lines of the body.
When making a statue or a portrait bust in marble, he would first
model it in clay from life. Then a plaster cast from the clay
figure was made by the studio help. The stone cutter used the
plaster figures to measure from and, with the aid of a pointing
machine (with three points), he would cut the stone to within an
inch of the finished surface in some parts. Then Mr. Borglum would
take over, working with mallet and chisel direct from the model
upon the marble. If a defect in the marble showed up (which in my
experience occurred only in the cream-colored Maryland marble), he
would cut deeper and set the whole figure back or change the pose
slightly to escape the flaw.
To do the finishing he used fine tools and sandpaper, every now and
then wetting the marble with a sponge to help bring out the
lifelike effect he was striving for. His high ideals inspired me to
do my best to express in the pose the spirit of the idea he was
portraying in the marble. I consider it an honor and a great
privilege to have worked for him.
An entertaining character who worked in the studio and slept there was a
Japanese called “Humbo” by the others; and there was another student
from Japan, scholarly Takamura, who was admitted by an introduction from
Daniel Chester French and a somewhat exceptional letter written by
himself. This notice had begun:
If you will not take me, I must greatly disappoint myself. I must
have no work, no study, no hope, no pleasure. My coming to this
country must end by all in vain. Please, please let me have your
favor, just like Mr. Honpo. I do not care much of money. I shall be
quite satisfied with only a little, if you could. I will do
anything you order. Pray accept my request, sympathising with a
lonely little soul from a far country over the sea.
Other models included young Lieutenant Phil Sheridan, who spent many
hours posing for the equestrian statue of his father in Washington.
Among the horses were Smoke, a Virginia hunter, and Halool, a
thoroughbred Arab imported by Walter Davenport, the cartoonist. These
horses wandered about the studio on the days they were needed, and were
perfectly gentle. They were kept at a riding academy in the park where
Gutzon occasionally rode bareback with a group of army men.
Edith Wynne Matthison, the actress and a dear friend, posed for the
heroic-sized figure called “Rabboni” in Rock Creek Cemetery at
Washington. That figure is in startling contrast to the beautiful,
brooding figure of the Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the
same place. The “Rabboni” expresses joy and hope, while the other is
complete negation. Still others who came to pose were the Mortimer
Schiff children of whom the sculptor made a portrait relief to accompany
the portrait of the Jacob Schiff children made in the previous
generation by Saint-Gaudens.
One of the sculptor’s most revered friends was John S. Clark, much older
than himself, who came all too seldom from Boston. He was engaged in
writing a life of John Fiske, the historian, and took a great interest
in the sculptor’s work. He liked most of all the marble figures of
“Conception,” “Motherhood” and “Martyr,” which he spoke of as a trilogy.
In a letter written in 1907 Clark makes this interesting comparison of
literary and sculptural work:
I daily realize that I am engaged in a task not unlike several you
have in hand. I have really to create an imaginary portrait of a
great man with mere words. My task is to create so distinct an
image that it can be realized by the imagination as a truthful
representation of the real man. In the process of work I have to
employ many of your methods for producing effects, and I can see
more clearly than ever before how widely different is genuine
artistic work from imitative work of literal reproduction.
Whether you come to Boston or not, know this--that you stand in my
heart as one of my dearest friends and that there is no success or
honor that comes to you that does not warm the “cockles of my
heart” to a ruddy glow.
In those early days in New York, before Gutzon became involved in many
big public memorials, he had more time to express his creative fancies
or “pipe dreams” in marble. A larger than life-size nude figure of a
woman which he called “Conception” or “Inspiration” caused some stir and
was considered too daring in certain circles. To him it represented the
holiness of creation, and his small marble called “Wonderment of
Motherhood” was produced in the same reverent, humble spirit.
A second marble figure symbolic of motherhood represented a woman on her
knees, holding up her infant child in her arms as if offering it on an
altar. This was a step toward his marble “Atlas,” a female figure on her
knees, about four feet high, holding a globe representing the world in
her arms, lifting it up to God instead of balancing it on her back as in
the old mythology. Of his “Conception,” which with other of his works
was exhibited at Columbia University, George Luks, the painter, said:
Here in all the sublimity of majesty we see the symbolism of life,
the symbolism of love, affection, devotion and piety. Like the
chrysalis that liberates the butterfly, we see the soul that hovers
above this classic piece of marble. We seem to feel the same thrill
as we watch the distended lips that drink the breath of life. We
wonder. There is something in this appealing countenance that
strikes us with peculiar awe. We see a soul rising above passion.
We feel the same admiration that we do for a flower that forces
itself up through the muddy soil into a new life and light--a sort
of emancipation. We see the early morning sun break through the
skies of splendor, the unfolding of the rose, the _Wille zum
Guten_, the revelation.
The group called “I Have Piped and Ye Have Not Danced” was produced in
the studio at about this time, but never during his life got out of the
plaster stage because Gutzon could never afford a large enough piece of
marble when he had the time to carve it. The thought of it had been in
his mind a long time. The initial idea, he said, had come to him at a
concert where Ysaye, the violinist, had been playing. The way the women
stood up at the end of the concert, arranging their furs and chattering
about where they were going next made him feel that the music had passed
completely over them, leaving no impression. He exhibited the female
figure alone as a pastel sketch in Boston in 1901, where it elicited the
following description of the group from Lillian Whiting, poet and art
critic:
It is the ideal figure of a girl, her hands thrown up and clasped
to the right, the head turned a little to one side, and the
countenance bearing the most inscrutable expression. She has been
piping to Pan, who lies at her feet unmoved, unrecognizing, until
she drops the pipes and the melody ceases. Then he is aroused and
turns to see why the music is heard no more. It is one of the most
typical interpretations of life. The artist paints his ideal
vision. The poet offers his dream. The musician sings his song. And
the world goes on, careless, unheeding. At last, saddened and spent
for want of that sympathy which should have made life all joy and
ecstasy, the painter turns his canvas to the wall. The poet drops
his pen. The song of the singer is heard no more, and the world
turns to ask the meaning of this silence.
Since Borglum’s death the figure has been carved in marble and is in
California.
In the meantime a very large “pipe dream,” something made for his own
pleasure, the sculptor said, was gradually taking shape in his New York
studio. His love for horses and the exceptional opportunity for studying
their movements at the Baldwin ranch in California were still bright in
his mind. They always were. He said once that he never saw a horse
anywhere that he didn’t study it and learn something new.
In his studies for the Grant competition he had become acquainted with
army equipment, and he later began a group of artillery horses with
their trappings. Because such externals were bothersome to his
composition, he abandoned them and concentrated on horses alone, adding
the figure of an Indian for interest. He was familiar with the ways of
those expert riders--how a man could decoy horses out of a corral and by
riding around and around them until they followed his mount could lead a
dash into the open. That was the moment chosen by the sculptor for his
group--five wild horses in full gallop.
The group was cast in bronze by the Gorham Company and exhibited in
their window on Fifth Avenue. Not only because the action of those
horses was very lifelike but because the plan was wholly American in
both subject and design, it attracted instant attention and was
purchased by James Stillman and presented to the Metropolitan Museum. It
happened that Sir Purdon Clarke, an Englishman, was director of that
institution at the time.
For a long time it stood in the entrance hall and was almost the first
thing that caught the eye of the visitor. Near it was Rodin’s “Age of
Bronze,” a slight figure which was one of Gutzon’s favorites. School
children, who were taken on regular tours through the museum, used to
vote the horses as their favorite exhibit. The name “Mares of Diomedes”
was given to the group by some classical scholar who recalled the story
of Hercules and the wild horses of King Diomedes. The sculptor never
cared much for the name; it harked back too loudly to outworn mythology.
More and more Gutzon’s sense of the bigness of America, of her value to
the world, of the importance of her heroes, was growing upon him. He had
bought a large block of marble and one day began to carve the head of
Abraham Lincoln--his first experiment in colossal sculpture. He worked
on it for weeks until it became a perfect likeness of the man, but still
he worked while watchers feared that one more stroke of the chisel might
ruin the whole work. And then a miracle happened. Suddenly a real
character seemed to look out from the carved features. The face became
inhabited.
A colored woman, whose duty it was to sweep the studio and to whom that
huge block of marble had always been a nuisance because she couldn’t
push it around, at last raised her eyes from the floor and exclaimed in
astonishment: “How’s Mista Bo’glum know ol’ Abe was in dat rock?”
The head was taken over to Gorham’s and exhibited in their window.
Robert Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, happened along and he also
exclaimed in astonishment, “I never expected to see Father again.” Later
he wrote that he considered it the best likeness of his father that he
had ever seen. Truman Bartlett, who had made a study of all the known
portraits of Lincoln, went farther, saying there had not yet been
sculptured a head of Lincoln that could compare with it.
It was the centenary of Lincoln’s birth, and Gutzon, as a matter of
sentiment, asked President Theodore Roosevelt if he would let the head
stand in the President’s room at the White House during Lincoln’s
birthday. Roosevelt welcomed it and after it had gone back to New York
wrote to inquire what had become of it. He said he wished it could be
kept in Washington permanently.
The letter was brought to the attention of Eugene Meyer, Jr., who bought
the colossal head and presented it to the nation. Congress, in accepting
the gift, specified that it should be placed in the rotunda of the
Capitol, never to be removed. As a demand for replicas began to be
heard, the superintendent of the Capitol grounds allowed the sculptor to
make a copy of it in plaster. Bronze duplicates of it are now at
Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, in the Hall of Fame in New
York, in the University of Southern California and in the collection of
the Chicago Historical Society. The sculptor made another head for
himself, which is now at the Detroit Museum of Art.
The carving of this head in marble, done as a labor of love, had
far-reaching consequences. It brought to Gutzon friends and admirers. It
led, undoubtedly, to his making the seated figure of Lincoln in front of
the courthouse in Newark and finally to the carvings at Stone Mountain
and Mount Rushmore.
CHAPTER NINE
_THE BIRTH OF A MYTH_
The building of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at Morningside
Heights, New York, might have been done for Gutzon Borglum alone. At any
rate, it had his close and abiding interest for a number of years.
“It is a fine example not only of medieval art but of the spirit of the
early churchmen,” he said. “It is something out of another age untouched
by pretentiousness and vanity.”
So he was immensely pleased in 1905 when he was asked to make the
statues for the structure and to supervise the carving on the Belmont
chapel, the first section of the cathedral to be finished. It was a
definite honor that must have been coveted by most of the sculptors in
New York, and out of sheer enthusiasm for the work he agreed to make
models of a hundred saints and angels. The fee wasn’t anything that
could be called remunerative in itself, and Borglum was presently to
learn that medievalist sculptors had about as many troubles as moderns.
It was in this pious undertaking that he laid the groundwork for the
first of the stories about his alleged evil temper. He was profoundly
disturbed by this development because, he argued, he didn’t have any
evil temper at all. He could have admitted, however, that he was saltily
vigorous in defense of what he decided was right. But anyway, the
longevity of what he titled an unfounded legend frequently puzzled him.
He knew from the beginning that he had a large order. In addition to the
topmost figures on the outside of the chapel there were larger, more
detailed ones of the Virgin, the boy Christ, two saints and two angels.
About the inside were any number of historic church dignitaries, bishops
and saints. And there was a concourse of other symbolic figures in the
King and St. Columbia chapels. Altogether there were twenty life-size
statues outside and about seventy-five smaller ones inside. It has been
pointed out by one shrewd observer that the chances for disagreement
between the sculptor and the architects and committee members were
virtually unlimited.
Heins and Lafarge, the original architects, had listened to discussions
ten years before any of the building was started. They had listened to
the reports of sundry committees who never came to them with anything
but grief. And, if they were like other men, they must have become
fairly callous and a little deaf to each new sound of woe.
G. L. Heins, State Architect and a member of the firm that had designed
St. John’s, seemed to have some doubts about Borglum. It is not quite
clear whether he thought the sculptor too headstrong or too
argumentative. Gutzon wrote to him a singularly polite letter at the
beginning of his commission, outlining the Borglum theories of
ecclesiastical art. And by that nobody could have been offended.
“There it will stand to praise or damn us,” Gutzon said, “not so much
concerned whether we have been wise or not, but whether we have been
sincere or not.” Heins replied to that but, unfortunately, his letter
has been mislaid. One gathers the purport from the sculptor’s answer.
Gutzon wrote:
I agree with you about making the figures as archaic as possible.
Still, if a little of the unstudied natural charm that was
creeping into sculpture about the time of Donatello should appear
in the figures of Christ, the Virgin and the two saints, I think
that the gain in real beauty would be a great advantage.
It will be interesting to hit upon a character of interpretation in
the sculpture of this great church that will be at once religious
in the best sense, profiting even by the mannerisms of the Middle
Ages, yet clearly a distinct product of the larger, modern view.
The sculpture should be what I feel you are making your
architecture, no slavish interpretation of what has preceded, but
an intelligent adaptation of what has proved best, not forgetting
the large human view that our western civilization, in its best
moments, holds in all matters religious.
That seems to have ended the architect’s worries, although the sculptor
appears to have had plenty left. Shortly thereafter a visiting English
architect, E. W. Hudson, wrote this in the journal of the Royal
Institute of British Architects:
Mr. Borglum’s work shows a marked originality, tending even to
impressionism. His determination not to sink his individuality has
brought upon him the criticism of a passing generation of
contemporaries working in Gothic, whose sympathies are with the
archaeological exactitude of the Revival, and who strive to get as
near as possible to the effects of a past age. On this account Mr.
Borglum will probably have to wait awhile for full appreciation, as
M. Rodin himself has had to wait. He seems, however, indifferent to
praise or blame, and appears determined to retain his
individuality, although it has involved the refusal of commissions
for collaborating with architects whose buildings in American
cities require as the _summum bonum_ exact compliance with
conventional precedent.
This critique seems a little out of step in view of Gutzon’s declaration
that the figures on the cathedral should be “made as archaic as
possible.” But he never took notice of it. He went on for months with
his work, vigorous and pleased with all that went on about him.
When he raised his voice, however, all of New York heard him. He had
discovered that John Barr, the contractor, was sending his models to a
Hoboken stoneyard to be finished by machinery under contract. This, of
course, had not been written in the bond. The machine treatment may have
made the pieces look more archaic, but it also made them look cheaper.
Some of them looked less like saints than gargoyles, and Gutzon was
angrily indignant.
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.
One might have thought that Gutzon’s quick acquiescence would have ended
the “controversy” over the angels. But things seem to have been
different in the rarefied atmosphere of the cathedral grounds. Severe
trouble was on its way the moment Dr. Peters dropped his letter into the
mailbox.
Gutzon wasn’t much concerned with the sex of the angels. The model of
the Angel Gabriel was still in soft clay. It was a simple matter to
remove the offending face and model one with sterner features. Gutzon
kept the original face, had it cast in silver and used a photograph of
it as a Christmas card. It brought to the Borglum home a signed
photograph of Bishop Potter. Everything was sweetness and light until a
reporter noticed that Gabriel’s countenance had quit being pretty and
amiable and was now a little hard ... and analytical and dour. The
discovery pleased him and he made a quick departure for his office.
The next morning his story appeared under a headline that didn’t seem to
fit it:
BORGLUM SMASHES ANGELS IN A HUFF
Other newspapers took up the cry and soon the subscribers were filling
the press with their personal, and no doubt authoritative, opinions on
the intriguing subject: Were angels men or women?
Gutzon wasn’t much concerned with this argument. He didn’t think it
concerned him. And, save for the fact that the first story had pictured
him smashing up things in a rage, he was probably right. It seemed good
fun, but twenty years later, during the Stone Mountain disagreement, a
reporter dug up the original story to prove that Gutzon’s temper was
ungovernable and always had been. The Atlanta _Constitution_, trying to
ferret out the truth, telegraphed the cathedral and got a reply from Dr.
Peters: “Angels still stand serene in their places where Borglum put
them,” he said. “We never had any trouble with the sculptor.”
The story of how Borglum smashed the inoffensive angels went on,
however, for years and years--and it still goes on. The evil that men
do, somehow, never lives as long as some of the evil that they never
thought of doing. Borglum, however, did think that destruction might
have been a good idea.
The last time he heard reports that he had gone berserk in his studio on
the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he sadly shook his
head. “I didn’t think of it soon enough,” he said.
CHAPTER TEN