Salon; he also received a silver medal at the Universal Exposition of
1900 and another at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo; quite
recently a fuller display of his work has been seen at the Keppel
Gallery in New York. Yet, although he is probably the most original
sculptor that this country has produced, he is still but little known to
the American public.
It may seem strange that a people with such eagerness for novelty should
in some cases be so slow to appreciate originality. But there is no
necessary connection between the two; indeed, the pleasure in novelty
may easily pass into a craving for it, as enfeebling to the mind as the
habitual use of drug or dram; whereas the recognition of originality
demands some independence and original effort on the part of ourselves.
Again, originality does not act by blind jumps in midair, as in that
species of dream with which some of us may be familiar, wherein we find
ourselves midway in a leap, and then, by successive contractions of the
muscles, seem to continue our leaps in the air until we fancy that we
are flying. The leap of originality must always commence from some
mental _terra firma_--conscious or unconscious experience; and,
according as there is in ourselves some degree of corresponding
experience, shall we appreciate or at least be impressed by the
originality of the inventor and the artist; of the creator, in a word,
whether he deals in facts or in ideas. For this reason the creator of
facts meets with readier recognition than the creator of ideas. Marconi,
for example, though he deals with matters far beyond the understanding
of most people, nevertheless appeals to their imagination through their
habitual, though it may be unscientific, acquaintance with the previous
methods of telegraphic communication. So, in the case of every creator
in the domain of practical experiment; either he meets a realised need
or quickly suggests a need through the analogy of our every-day
experience.
On the other hand, the creator of ideas must be satisfied with a smaller
following, at least at first, and at any rate with slower appreciation.
Yet here, too, there are degrees of slowness, according to the medium
of expression which he employs. Of all such artists, he who works in
words will reach the people most quickly, since this is an age of words,
especially of the written word.
The public eye is habituated to the printed page; though, truly, not so
much in search of ideas or for suggestive stimulus to thought, but
rather to the loss of independent thinking and to the smothering of the
imagination in a banal prodigality of detailed statements. In the palmy
days of painting and sculpture it was to them that the eye was
habituated, and the impressions thus received were informed with the
experience and the imagination of each observer. We, however, in the
superiority of our modern education, run our eye over a painting or
piece of sculpture to discover what there is in either that is
convertible into words, and overlook the qualities which affect the
senses abstractly, which are indeed the bones and marrow and very
physiognomy of the work of art, its distinguishing characteristics and
capacity to move us. And this powerlessness to enter into a work of art
from the artist’s point of view deprives us of all independence and
initiative of appreciation. When a gap has been made by some bell-wether
in the hedge of stubborn intolerance which public opinion had set round
the art of a Rodin, we take our turn in the long row of sheep that
follow each other’s tails through the gap and fancy that we are
discoverers and appreciators of genius. Small wonder, then, if one of
our own prophets, merely a young sculptor of America, should still be
waiting for honour in his own country.
Yet it is here, if anywhere, that Borglum’s work should be appreciated,
since it is American to the core, dealing with the incidents of cowboy
life on the western prairies. Others have essayed the same subject, but
rather from an outside standpoint with technical equipment derived from,
or at least inspired by, the teaching of the Parisian schools. Borglum,
on the other hand, knew from childhood the inside of the life, was
himself a cowboy, and for a long time with no thought of anything but
the joy and interest of the life itself. Least of all had he any notions
about art. The free, open-air existence amid spaciousness of earth and
sky; the recurring seasons, each with its separate routine of necessary
work, demanding the exercise of vigour, resourcefulness and courage;
intimacy with man and animal life, and sympathy begotten of mutual
hardships and frequent dangers--these things possessed him, and in the
vast silence of nature
[Illustration: COWBOY MOUNTING
By Solon Hannibal Borglum]
[Illustration: LOST IN A BLIZZARD (marble)
By Solon Hannibal Borglum]
penetrated silently the fibers of his being. He grew and grew
unconsciously; his manhood matured before the artist in him awoke; his
mind stored with experiences before the need came upon him of
expression.
The dormant artistic instinct was an inheritance from his father, a
Danish wood-carver, who had migrated to this country early in the
sixties. He settled in Ogden, Utah, where Solon was born in 1868; but he
found no encouragement for his craft and, resolving to become a doctor,
turned back to St. Louis, took a degree in medicine, and then
established himself in Fremont, Nebraska, where his practice soon
extended far into the prairies. He kept many horses, and the son grew up
among them, with little inclination for school studies and a keen desire
for the open-air life. At first he worked as a cowboy on a ranch of his
father’s; later assumed control of a larger one, where for a number of
years he lived in that close companionship with men and animals which
breeds sympathy as well as knowledge.
One of his elder brothers, Gutzon, had already become an artist, and it
was a visit that he paid to the ranch in 1890 which first aroused in
Solon’s mind a thought of trying to draw. He began to experiment with
the pencil, and gradually the fascination of representing form grew
upon him, so that sketching occupied all his leisure time with
continually increasing grip upon his desire, until by 1893 he made up
his mind to sell out his share in the ranch and go forth and study art.
First he sought his brother in the Sierra Madre Mountains of California
and studied painting with him for a few months; then drifted to Los
Angeles, and thence to Santa Anna. In the latter town he rented his
first studio at two dollars a month; but it was not long before he found
his clothes were getting shabby, and, moreover, the confinement of the
four walls was irksome. So he put a sign upon his door, “In Studio
Saturdays Only”; and under cover of the dusk started for the wild
country of the Saddleback Mountains. All through the week he lived among
the old Spanish Indians and Greasers--lawless people who have been left
stranded in the march of civilisation--eating with them, sleeping beside
them in the thicket, sketching everything he saw. On Friday he started
back for the town, and, sleeping on the outskirts, was early astir in
the morning and passed unobserved to his little room before the
towns-people were awake.
That first Saturday he was uninterrupted in his work, and at nightfall
again set out for the mountains. But the following week, to his
surprise, a visitor called, a school-teacher from the East, and the
result of the visit was first a commission to paint the stranger’s
portrait for five dollars, and secondly, the beginning of a valued
friendship. Next Saturday the teacher called again, accompanied by two
ladies, who wished to learn to paint. The lessons were continued weekly
at a dollar a visit, and thus for nearly a year he subsisted, one day of
each seven in his studio and during the others among the mountains;
until, encouraged by his friend, he made a sale of his drawings, netted
sixty dollars, and therewith packed up his blanket and oil-stove and set
his face toward Cincinnati.
Here he entered the day and evening classes in drawing and rented a
little room. Before long, however, he was heartsick for the old, free
life. It was beyond his reach; yet, as he went to and from his work, he
passed the United States mail stables, and the sight of the horses
stirred the old feeling of comradeship. The lights were kept burning at
night in the stables, so morning after morning before daybreak he lived
among them, drawing and studying. By degrees he turned to modelling and
executed the figure of a horse pawing a dead one. It was shown to Mr.
Rebisso, the head of the school of modelling, who, discovering the
young man’s ability, gave him encouragement and advice, permitting him
to work in his own studio and finally making it possible for him to
visit Paris.
Until Borglum’s fingers had found their way to clay he had been groping
in the half-light of unrealised purpose. Now, however, he discovered at
one stride the kind of subject nearest to his heart and the method of
expression best fitted to his experience and temperament.
For, look you, his experience had been of facts; facts, it is true, from
which in the aftermath of memory his temperament was to extract their
romance and sentiment; but, in the first place, facts of the most direct
and vigorous form. The subtleties, to which painting better lends
itself, were outside the habit of his mind; whereas the tangible shape
and more simple obviousness of sculpture exactly fitted his need. He had
reached it through the same natural, unpremeditated growth that had
characterised all his development. Such kind of growth is, perhaps, only
possible to one whose boyhood and early manhood have been spent in the
large vacancy of nature and the natural life. To those who are bred
within the crowded and conscious civilisation of cities the desire of
being an artist will probably come earlier; it will anticipate the
experiences of life; from the first will shape itself more definitely
and in its course conform to existing opportunities of instruction.
While still immature in character and manhood the student will be run
through the mould of a matured system which will turn him out at best an
inexperienced expert.
But with Borglum it was otherwise. The experience here preceded the
expertness, and the latter is not such as the schools can teach or
possibly should try to teach. His groups have little of the ordered
arrangement of traditional composition, nor does the modelling show
facile skill or elegant refinement. His work, indeed, is much more an
expression of nature than of art, the frank, untrammelled expression of
a natural artist giving utterance to the fulness of his thoughts. He
acknowledges with gratitude the great assistance that he received from
Mr. Rebisso, and when he went to Paris he enjoyed the critical
encouragement of Frémiet and Saint-Gaudens; but for the rest he is
self-taught. His visit to Paris lengthened into a sojourn of four years,
during which he took a short course in the study of the figure at
Julien’s Academy and frequented the Louvre and Luxembourg; otherwise
keeping very much to his studio, drawing inspiration from the memory of
his own experiences, and discovering for himself a technique that
should give substance to his ideas.
So Borglum’s work does not readily line up with that of other modern
sculptors. In its disregard of symmetrical composition, in the frequent
appearance of passages left suggestively in the rough and in the vivid
naturalness that characterises it we may for a moment fancy that we
detect the influence of Rodin. Yet it shows none of the latter’s feeling
for subtlety of modelling, and by comparison is crude; moreover, the
point of view of each is widely different. Rodin’s is profoundly
analytical and introspective at the same time; Borglum’s more
spontaneous and instinctive, aiming to interpret in a vigorous
_ensemble_ the vivid impression of an objective fact. Again, in breadth
of handling and in knowledge of animal structure and movement, we might
compare him with Barye; only to find, however, that the latter far
excels him in nobility of line and mass and falls as far behind him in
the expression of sentiment.
For Borglum’s work reveals in a remarkable degree the sentiment which
comes of intimate, habitual companionship. He does not, on the one hand,
invest his animals with any quasi-human sentimentality, or, on the
other, look at them from the outside standpoint of the hunter or
otherwise observant student. He has entered into the actual sentient
part which they play in the life they share with man. Hence the
sentiment that his work reveals is most poignantly affecting. I doubt,
indeed, if any sculptor of animals has ever represented with such
fidelity and convincingness their intelligence and emotions. Note, for
example, some of the phases of character-building in which he represents
the bronco. Here it is full-grown, though still untamed, but quiet as a
lamb, resting its muzzle on its dam’s back. It has not yet come in
contact with the disciplining force of man. Now it is confronted with a
saddle that lies upon the ground and recoils with a mixture of trembling
and curiosity. There it has been rounded up and thrown, at first
struggling with impotent fury, then stretched in utter exhaustion. Later
the saddle is on its back, and it is pitting its strength and cunning
against the knowledge and endurance of man; then finally tamed, and
coöperating with man in the taming of other horses, or sharing the night
watch, or meeting with him the mortal peril of the blizzard.
But Borglum’s power of stimulating our imagination includes in some
cases even a suggestion of the environment of the figures, as, for
instance, in the marble group of a mare and foal caught in a snowstorm.
The little one is unconscious of danger, content as it noses close up to
the mother’s side for shelter; but the gesture of the latter is full of
solicitude and anxiety. In the swish of her tail and the droop and
stiffening of the hind quarters, we are made to realise the force of the
blizzard; while, is it the little mass of piled-up snow, or the
whiteness of the marble, or the intensity of the sculptor’s imagination,
that conveys to our own a sense of white, snowy desolation all around
the two poor creatures? It is seldom in modern sculpture that one will
find an expression of sentiment so unaffected and affecting.
And the other notable element in his work is its rendering of movement.
It matters not what kind of movement--impetuous dash, sudden arrest of
action, alert repose, the vicious fling of body and heels as the beast
prepares to turn a somersault, the limp of pain, the submission of
exhaustion, the supple step to music in the circus, the pause of doubt,
the spasm of baffled rage--each and all and others are represented with
an intimacy of knowledge and an instinctive certainty of method. He
knows his subject so well and realises in his mind so vividly the
impression which he seeks to interpret, that all pettiness of
observation is swallowed up in a large
[Illustration: TAMED
By Solon Hannibal Borglum]
comprehension which disregards details, except in so far as they are
essential to the action or the sentiment. And how characteristic are the
details which he does introduce! Here, for example, is the figure of a
horse, “tamed.” A saddle lies upon the ground. It is the object which
excites, first the terror, then the anger of the untamed horse. But this
one is conquered and hangs his head submissively over the instrument and
badge of his defeat. He stands with front feet planted forward, the legs
trembling, the hind ones limp and sluggish; the line of the ribs exposed
as the flank heaves; the nostrils distended with the gasps of breath;
the eye listless, the ear fallen. But, keenest touch of all, note how
the saddle-cloth and girths have left a hot, glossy impress upon the
body, the hair around their edges being clotted with sweat. It is detail
such as this, full of character, that one finds in all these pieces of
sculpture; and, for the rest, the modelling is broadly suggestive, yet
always distinctly characteristic; not only rendering structure and
action, but offering varieties of flesh texture, according to the
condition and character of the horse represented.
Borglum, in a word, is an impressionistic sculptor, untrammelled by
formula or tradition, seeking nature direct, with an eye habituated to
essentials and with a degree of sympathetic comprehension that
corresponds with the range and reality of his life’s experiences. His
work is, thus, truly original; a product of his own manhood, fashioned
to artistic fitness.
XI
VICTOR DAVID BRENNER
In this country, as elsewhere, prior to the establishment of the French
Société des Amis de la Medaille, medal-making had sunk to a department
of trade; or, if something artistic were attempted, there was a divorce
between the designing and engraving. A sculptor or painter, with no
practical knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of the cutting
process, would be commissioned to produce the design, while its
execution in the die was turned over to a more or less skilled
operative. The barrenness of the result may be seen in the majority of
medals produced during many years.
Recognising that the work of the medallist had been and should be a
special department of art, with very individual qualities of exquisite
expression, the National Academy two years ago established a class in
Coin and Medal Designing and put it in charge of Victor D. Brenner.
Ten years previously the latter had arrived in New York, an expert
die-sinker and engraver; now he had just returned from studying under
Roty in Paris. The story of his progress from artisan to artist is not
without a touch of romance.
To the student of personal accomplishment there is always a particular
satisfaction in the contrast between hard and strait beginnings and the
ultimate success. He forgets, as the artist himself perhaps does when
the sweets of victory are on his tongue, the long weariness of the
previous struggle, and is philosophically persuaded that the pain of
parturition must necessarily precede the birth of art as of life.
However that may be, Brenner has had his share of privations; and it is
well for him that he encountered them early and surmounted them before
the enthusiasm of youth dwindled.
He was born in 1871 at Shavly, in the north-west of Russia, and from his
sixth to his thirteenth year attended the Hebrew school. After three
years of apprenticeship to his father, who was a general mechanic and
seal-cutter, with considerable talent in carving, the youth, now sixteen
years old, travelled through the neighbouring towns, making seals. Then
he worked for a jewelry engraver in Riga, and subsequently migrated to
Mittau, where he found employment in a rubber stamp and type foundry,
cutting dies and illustrations for advertisements. In 1889 he
established himself in Kowno as a jewelry engraver and seal-cutter. By
this time he had saved nearly enough to pay his passage to New York, and
the following year he reached our shores. He was then scarcely nineteen,
without friends, knowledge of the language or ready funds. For a while
he sold matches on Fulton Street, and then graduated to the superior
opportunities of a sweat-shop in Brooklyn. He was rescued from this by
an advertisement through which he found employment with a jewelry firm.
Meanwhile his acquaintance with the language and with the local
conditions was improving, and it was not long before he obtained a
position as seal-cutter. Then followed an engagement with Mr. H. Popper
as die-cutter and jewelry engraver, during which he came to the notice
of Professor S. H. Oetinger, the numismatist, whose collection of medals
seems to have awakened in the young man a longing to be himself an
artist. In 1891 he first learned to handle clay at the Cooper Union
night class, but attended only for a month, and it was not until 1896
that he studied drawing under Ward in the night class of the Academy of
Design.
Meanwhile, in 1893, he had started for himself in business, working for
jewelry and silversmith firms; steadily improving his financial
conditions, but becoming more and more impatient under the restraints
which the exigencies of trade placed upon his desire to be an artist. I
should judge that these years of material comfortableness may have been
really more trying to him than the previous lean years. Then, work and
food and lodging seemed the only desirable things; now he was in labour
with a desire that exceeded all others. He had tasted of the sweets of
beauty and become conscious of having something beautiful within
himself, might he but learn how to express it; and all the while the
Gallios of trade “cared for none of those things.”
This period of probation at length came to an end in 1898, by which time
he had saved sufficient money for study in Paris. A little time before,
in connection with a medal for the Convention of Charities and
Corrections, he had made the acquaintance of Mr. Samuel P. Avery. But
the latter had for some time been acquainted with him, keeping watch
over his progress and secretly helping him to commissions. Of the value
and encouragement of Mr. Avery’s friendship Brenner speaks with warm
gratitude. Through him he obtained an introduction to Mr. George A.
Lucas, who befriended him in Paris and introduced him to Roty,
furnishing him with commissions while he was still studying in the
latter’s _atelier_. This he entered after preliminary studentship in
the
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF C. P. HUNTINGTON
By Victor David Brenner]
Julien school, and became the assistant as well as pupil of the master.
His progress was rapid, and examples of his work are already to be found
in the Paris Mint, Munich Glyptothek, Vienna Numismatic Society, the
Metropolitan Museum and the Numismatic Society, New York.
Up to the present time Brenner’s best work has been portrait-plaques and
the heads upon the obverse of medals. In designs which involve a
decorative treatment he has been less happy. As might be expected of one
whose period of study has been so short, he is weak in composition and
freehand drawing, nor does he display much inventiveness of fancy. On
the other hand, he has an extraordinarily direct vision, quickened by
experience in so exacting an occupation as die-cutting, and, moreover, a
very mobile sympathy. The latter helps him to be interested at once in
his subject, and with so much affection and reverence for the
personality that his portrayal exhibits a very unusual degree of
intimacy.
Among the best of his portraits are those of William Maxwell Evarts, J.
Sanford Saltus and George Aloysius Lucas, whom I place in one group; and
those of M. Vadé, Edward D. Fulde and M. Lacour in another. The
reasonableness of the separation is to be found in the difference of
motive, respectively, illustrated in the modelling; the more
distinctively sculptural as compared with the painter-like method.
For in all low-relief work one will find the artist to be showing a
preference either for form and the structural character of the subject,
or for its colour qualities, represented by delicate variations in the
planes, which produce a corresponding warmth of delicate light and
shade; in a word, he feels his subject either in the round or in the
flat. Which you yourself will prefer is a question of your point of
view. Among brother artists who are painters there will probably be a
verdict in favour of the second group, since it represents more closely
what they themselves strive for, and are therefore partial to. And its
pictorial quality may equally recommend it also to general approbation.
For, indeed, such a portrait as that of M. Vadé is unquestionably
fascinating. There is in it scarce any resort to lines, the modelling
being effected almost entirely by planes, at once broad and subtle, full
of a sense of colour and giving an expression of dreaminess to the face.
Yet, if one compares this portrait with either of the three included in
the former group, it is to find in the latter a compensating virility of
expression, a greater dignity of structure and of character.