works have exhibited imagination; the sweet and gaysome kind of it that
plays like sunlight upon water; or, if occasion demands it, the kind of
deeper, serious import. But there is a kind of decorative sculpture for
which we can have little patience: the nude or draped inanities that
spread themselves over space, exploitations of brainless facility; or,
again, the figure which would be meaningless except for the added
symbols, and which we only recognise as a model, posturing with
something borrowed or stolen from the Old World property-room.
Yet one of the shibboleths glibly passed around the studio is “ideal
sculpture,” and it is largely applied to just such sculpture as this; to
works which are barren of ideas, or in which the subject of the statue
is declared only through some time-worn symbol. Not that the
introduction of a symbol is of itself objectionable, though it is a fact
that the works of finest imagination, as Saint-Gaudens’s “Grief,” to
quote a modern example, are free of such aids to suggestion. But I am
thinking of that vast majority of statues
[Illustration: BUST OF A CHILD
By Birtley Canfield]
[Illustration: THE STONE AGE
By John J. Boyle]
in which the figure would convey no hint to our imagination if it were
not for the symbol introduced. And how far, I wonder, does the symbol
succeed in leading us? We are apt to find it either trite or, as in the
case of some of the mystically symbolic work of modern times, abstruse.
With religious symbolism it is different. In old days, at least, the
artist and the public had a common starting-ground of knowledge, and the
symbol awoke a clear impression, invested by religious habit with a
weighty import.
But what of the frequent statues, representing “Law,” “Truth,” “Justice”
and the like by a draped model, alternately holding a tablet, serpent,
mirror, scale and swords, or what not; or that countless family of
undraped statues, clever studies merely of anatomy and academic
composition? Their only suggestion to the cultivated imagination is one
of weariness, yet they pass in the studios for “ideal.” Let us clear our
minds of cant and see these things for what they really are--more or
less skilful imitations of the model, but of creative imagination, of
the faculty to give expression to an idea, possessing nothing.
On the other hand, some sculptors, in their avoidance of the trite, run
to the opposite extreme of the abstruse--to that occult and mystic
symbolism, which has been sporadic for half a century in Europe and has
found at least two exponents in this country.
Here again, if the artist makes the figure the main source of
expression, establishing a chord of communication between his own
imagination and ours, and uses the symbolic object solely as an
accessory, the latter may possibly help our act of appreciation, or, at
least, will not hinder it. But, when it usurps the chief function in the
composition and we find in the figure no clue to any line of
imagination, having to turn to the symbol for assistance, it is then
that our distress begins. We may or may not recognise the object, and,
if we do, may be baffled in our attempt to discover its allusion in the
present case; haunted meanwhile by a disagreeable doubt as to whether it
was really intended to be allusive or only introduced for decorative
effect. It is not by such little stepping-stones to understanding,
slippery and insecure, that the truly creative imagination proceeds. It
takes its leap into the air, clear of obstructions, relying upon its own
power of flight. For, even if we comprehend the meaning of the symbol
and its allusion, how far, I wonder, does it carry us? When from the
mysteries of Egypt, for example, the modern artist borrows a symbol to
garnish his modern thought, I wonder if we are much impressed? He uses,
we will say, the device of the winged globe. We know that it once stood
to people as a sign of immortality; we recognise that much, but does it
touch our feeling--will it increase our belief in immortality or promise
anything to our yearning after it? The statue itself must do that, and
if it does, the symbol is likely to be felt intrusive.
I do not forget that Sargent in his Boston decoration has made noble use
of symbolism. Yet I feel strongly that the earlier part of the work
which involved Egyptian, Assyrian and Judaic symbolism is inferior to
the subsequent work, which is impregnated with the Byzantine. For in the
latter the artist has identified himself so completely with the medieval
mind, that he is thinking in it, while working in the modern technique;
consequently his work is veritably a reincarnation of the old thought.
Compared with this his earlier use of symbolism appears only scholarly
and ingenious. So, one may infer, it is not the use of symbolism that is
alien to the modern mind, but that use of it which borrows from the past
and does not reproduce the ancient spirit or incorporate the old with
modern thought.
In his “Fountain of Man” at the Pan-American Exposition, Charles Grafly
combined a cryptic motive with what was otherwise simply and
intelligibly sculpturesque. The crowning and most prominent feature of
the composition, to which the remainder served as an elaborate base, was
a draped mass, which on nearer view proved to be two figures back to
back, their heads covered with perforated casques, joined together over
the top by what had the appearance of a handle. The faces were visible,
but from the rim of the casques descended curtains of drapery,
enshrouding the figures, but leaving exposed the hands, which grasped
short cylinders. There can be no doubt of the general suggestion of the
symbolism, the twofold nature of man, the mystery of it; but I must
confess that I am baffled by the headgear and the cylinders. Yet the
mass was impressive as a finial to the fountain, having something of the
character of a low obelisk. Indeed, for decorative purposes it might
almost as well have been a shaft, the special aptitude of the human form
for the expression of ornamental design having been obliterated by the
drapery. Not so, however, in the lower part of the composition. The
pedestal on which the figure rested was surrounded by nude forms of
youths and maidens intended to represent the seasons, while the platform
on which they rested was supported by crouching male and female forms,
personifying, I believe, the virtues and vices. Yet with all Grafly’s
inclination toward symbolism, there is very little expressional
suggestion in his treatment of the nude. He becomes preoccupied with the
model and his imagination seems to leave him. However, in one statue at
least, “The Vulture of War,” he has shown what he can accomplish, when
he permits his imagination to control. Here the nude is made a vehicle
of emotional force: a male figure stooping forward, as if he were on
some lofty crag and about to hurl himself to earth; his face treacherous
and cruel; the limbs constricted like a beast of prey’s. There is a
largeness of design in this figure as well as expression; something
infinitely finer than mere close studies of anatomy, accompanied with
accessories of abstruse suggestion; a real incentive to one’s
imagination which is lacking, if I mistake not, in such compositions as
“Symbol of Life,” “In Much Wisdom” and “From Generation to Generation.”
On the other hand, in his busts Grafly exhibits a directness of insight
into character and a vigorous, very personal technique that make them
most distinguished.
Nor does the symbolism of F. E. Elwell, as shown for example, in his
“Goddess of Fire,” stir more in me than an interested curiosity. Why
should he have drawn the type of his figure and its accessories from the
art of ancient Egypt? Had he the intention of fashioning something
beautiful, or that should pique the appetite for surprise? Was his
motive to allure or tantalise our imagination? For my own part, I admit
the fascination of this spritish figure, so queerly bedizened, but am
not conscious of any appeal to the imagination. On the other hand, when
his work is not abstruse it is apt to be too obvious. The “Orchid
Dancer” is clearly posing for effect, looking for applause, and, I
should judge from the expression of her face, quite unable to understand
why any one could withhold it. However, while the movement of the figure
lacks expression, there is a very pleasing fancifulness in the treatment
of the drapery, curling across the body and upward from the feet in
petal-like volutes. I think I do not fail to appreciate the sentiment
which inspired this statue, and, if I speak of it as being too obvious,
it is because it seems to me that the sentiment stands out clear of the
sculptural feeling. Thought and technique are not wedded in such manner,
that you not only cannot feel them separately, but would find it
impossible to distinguish how much had been inspired by the one, how
much by the other.
Elwell’s work suggests a man of poetic and intellectual capacity who has
resorted to sculpture to express his ideas, and this is a different
thing from the sculptural instinct, influenced by intellect and poetry.
Accompanying this lack of a predominant feeling for form is a lack of
mastery of it, which becomes apparent when he confronts his model. The
latter does not act as stimulus to sculptural motive, but becomes
something to be reproduced, and his invention is absorbed in the details
which shall convey a suggestion of the intellectual and poetic motive.
One may even feel that this intellectual or poetic motive becomes an
obsession, which interferes with his receiving sculptural stimulus from
the model. For among his later works are two in which evidently the same
model has been used; but in one case he has been filled with an idea,
and the use he has made of the model is tame, whereas in the other case
it would appear to have been the model herself which engaged his
imagination. He has made a close study of her head and bust, producing
something in which the nobility of form and flesh are very apparent,
which, in fact, has very strongly the sculpturesque feeling. He calls
the finished work “Mary Magdalen,” but this, one feels sure, was a
convenient afterthought, and that the original intention, as I have
said, was simply a study of form and flesh; and his temporary escape
from the prepossession of an idea has given free course to the
sculptural purpose. Two earlier works, regarded as being his most
important productions, were the Dickens Memorial and a statue of General
Hancock at Gettysburg.
These two, Grafly and Elwell, are the only American sculptors within my
knowledge who have been drawn toward symbolic mysticism; for the
mysticism that appears in Barnard’s work, and must have been present in
the colossal “Spirit” by John Donoghue, a work known to me only by
report, is of a grander, deeper character, growing out of and
penetrating the form itself. This statue of Donoghue’s, a seated, winged
figure thirty feet high, represented the Spirit, the “Thou” of Milton’s
apostrophe, who
“from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like, satst brooding on the vast abyss,
And madst it pregnant.”
Described as a work of great impressiveness, with suggestion of
sublimity, benignity and mysterious power, it was executed in the
artist’s studio on the Roman Campagna and sent to this country for
exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair. But for some reason it never
reached its destination, and was allowed to crumble away in the
warehouse of a Brooklyn wharf. Other works of his also--“Sophocles,”
“Diana,” “Venus”--for lack of appreciation lie in storage.
Working fitfully and with painful hindrances from insufficient facility
in the handling of his medium, Theodore Bauer has produced some works
full of imagination. Nature gave him the gifts of music and of dreaming;
and, nursing these, he slipped on into middle life, without ceasing to
be a child. The grit of manhood, the practicality of the world and the
need of responding to it in kind, are outside his comprehension. He
lives within himself in a world of his own: a world of rosy lights and
purple shadows; soft, Æolian breezes, whose wailing arouses a rapture of
mild despair; distant mountains, whose inaccessible snows prompt sweet
imaginings of purity and high endeavour, while he meditates in his
valley of unlaborious delight and delicious, pleasurable pain. A world
of reverie, darkened, however, at times by storm-clouds and disturbed by
the deep moan of thunder along the distant heights.
For in Bauer’s work delicate fancy alternates with sadness, as one may
see in his two statues in the Library of Congress. “Religion” is
represented as a young girl peering into the far beyond with wistful,
visionary gaze and holding before her a poppy flower with leaves and
seed-pod. In her grasp is the pride of life and the narcotic with which
the world lulls its pain; but she looks beyond them to the ideal and to
the balm of spiritual ecstasy. In the “Beethoven,” however, is expressed
the world-wearied yearning of the artistic soul. The well-known face,
rugged and graven with the lines of time and suffering, is slightly
bowed, and the right hand is held to the ear as it listens intently for
the far-off strain of inspiration, while the other hand is poised as if
above a keyboard, the fingers searching to express the music in his
brain. A heavy cloak with high-standing collar gives breadth and
picturesqueness to the figure. It is, indeed, too picturesque, one may
feel--with too expanded a composition and too much play of movement, to
satisfy its architectonic function of relieving by a vertical line the
horizontal of the balustrade. But, however that may be, as the portrait
of a great musician and an idealisation of his art, it is a statue full
of suggestion--a work of imagination, elevated, tender, deep and true.
Bauer had long pondered a series of four groups, representing “The
Tragedy of the Sphinx”; her awakening to love, her passion, disillusion
and death; and in one of the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair, amid
the chaos of the construction period and in a winter of unusual
severity, a winter of veritable discontent to him, he worked upon the
first of these, “The Sphinx and the Cupid.” During the exposition months
it stood in a retreat of foliage near the Art Palace unnoticed. Yet,
even unfinished as it was, it exerted an extraordinary fascination. The
little Love God was whispering in the creature’s ear, and as the honey
of his words sweetly melted her slow imagination, a smile of aroused
appetite began to play upon her lips, hunger shone in her eye; a passion
hot and cold, eager with desire, callous to everything but its own
satisfaction; a cruelty that would not be appeased until it had consumed
itself.
I have said that Bauer is painfully hindered by a lack of facility in
the handling of his medium; but I doubt if it is from lack of skill in
technique, as is sometimes said. He is, in fact, a very rapid and sure
worker up to a certain point, that of bodying forth his conception in
its broad, general aspect; and the subsequent embarrassment is due to
the subtlety of the expression for which he is striving; a kind of
subtlety, often alien, I expect, to the expressional capacity of his
medium. For Bauer has long wished that fate had made him a painter
instead of a sculptor, and there is no doubt that the quality of his
imagination is more suited to the medium of colour.
In contrast with the mysticism and subtlety of imagination, more or
less displayed in the work we have been considering, is that form of
imagination which turns to earth and to the facts of things for its
inspiration. How it has operated in the work of some of our sculptors
has been noticed elsewhere, as well as the fact that the Indian subject
has made frequent appeal to their imagination. A further example of the
latter is “The Medicine Man,” by C. E. Dallin, which was a prominent
feature on the grounds of the Paris Exposition. Mounted on a stringy
pony, the man himself lean and gaunt, the group counted very little as a
mass, yet compelled attention by the keenness of the characterisation.
Amid the extreme modernness of the scene and its variety of impressions,
the impassiveness of this figure, survival of an age so remote, was
strangely moving; a proud, stern figure, conscious of its dignity, in
pitiful, solemn protest against the inexorable march of destiny; the
last echo of an unrecorded epic. No sculptor has succeeded better in
combining with complete naturalism the poetry of the Indian subject.
Gutzon Borglum in his statuettes has represented with realism and vigour
its actualities, and H. A. MacNeil has reached inward into the thought
of the Indian; but Dallin has given us the realism, spirit and some
suggestion of the Indian environment, such as Brush did in his early
paintings.
In Philadelphia, however, is an Indian group representing “The Stone
Age,” which involves some further suggestion. A woman stands grasping a
hatchet and clutching her infant to her breast, as she looks into the
distance with wary, resolute courage, while a little child crouches up
to her on one side, and on the other a bear’s cub lies dead. It is by
John J. Boyle, one of his few ideal subjects, a work of powerful
imagination. This sculptor has essayed decorative subjects, but with
less success. His control of composition does not seem to extend beyond
the treatment of a single figure or of a group in which one is
predominant; and his strong point is the expression of character or
sentiment. Thus his seated statue of Benjamin Franklin is one of the
most interesting examples of portrait-sculpture in the country. It
possesses a considerable share of monumental dignity and a very
remarkable intimacy of feeling. The pose is informal, the expression of
the head and body quite natural, yet the conception has no trace of
obviousness, much less of commonplace. It is invested with just
sufficient idealisation to preserve the impression of a statue; that it
is not the counterfeit presentiment of a man, but a memorial of his
qualities and what they imply to his admirers. And the qualities are
expressed with admirable decision; the intellectual dignity of the head
well sustained by the erect torso and the broad, firm carriage of the
arms; the easy negligence of the costume according so well with the
benevolence and genial humanity of the face. Indeed, in this
portrait-statue Boyle reveals a penetrating and sympathetic insight and
a choice of treatment that are the products of an active imagination;
and when in a subject like the “Stone Age” his imagination can work as
it lists, it reaches to that point where the particular becomes merged
in the universal suggestion.
For in this group we pass from interest in the episode to a realisation
of the rude grandeur of the primitive nature, the physical grandeur of
untrammelled development and the natural instinct of the mother animal.
I recall another group of his: a modern peasant woman with her baby
folded in sleep upon her broad bosom and another child nestling at her
feet. Here, too, the mother is vigorous and ample, but rounded and
softened by more genial environment. Yet in the generousness of her form
as in the strenuousness of the other’s, we feel the same suggestion of
the earth-mother, the mother in closest affinity with nature. Only, as
nature progresses from rigour to amenity, the primal instinct of
preservation of her young has passed into the all-pervading tenderness
of maternal solicitude. It is, in fact, the typical conception of
motherhood, as compared with the merely individual representation that
appears in each of these groups.
The conception, moreover, is coloured with modern thought, not a
spiritualised abstraction, like Raphael’s, but enriched with the passion
and fecundity of earth. Raphael may have sought his models among the
girl-mothers of Trastevere or the Campagna; but his idea of motherhood
he brought down from the region of artistic and intellectual
speculation. On the other hand, the tendency of the modern artist is to
set back his model in her actual environment and to discover her
affinity thereto. Or, if his model be nature, he no longer attempts to
spiritualise it by arrangement of lines and forms that accord with his
abstract theories of beauty, or by investing it with atmosphere and
sunlight, drawn from his own imagination. Nor is he satisfied with the
objective nature-study of the Dutchmen of the sixteenth century; but,
observing nature no less closely than they, he peers further into it in
the search for a soul and heart within her that shall correspond to the
heart and soul within himself.
The main current of the poetic imagination in modern art is to find the
soul in the fact and it is a phase of the general tendency of modern
thought. Our gaze is earthward; to the beauty, poetry and desirable
goodness that are in nature and the natural life, and to the spiritual
suggestion in the actual.
There are minor currents, too, little streams of rebellion that flow
contrary to the general direction. The superesthetic and the
superintellectual, equally are protests against the trend toward
naturalism. The one responds to what there is in us of world-weariness,
of a jaded epicureanism that needs the subtlest stimulants to its
imagination; the other would emphasise the quality by which, it assumes,
we are differentiated from, and superior to, the natural world.
Disregarding the Universal Intellect which regulates the law of natural
growth and of natural habits, it would force the little unit of
intellect into premature development, into lifelong estrangement from
the wholesomeness of nature. For facts it would substitute names; words,
words and continually words, until they take the place of knowledge, of
ideas and of all religious, moral and esthetic consciousness.
In American art there is scarcely any trace of the superesthetic; but
more than a little of the superintellectual, a phase and product of our
infatuation for words, which binds the imagination with wrappings of
borrowed thought and checks the free flight of original ideas. For the
end of art is not to teach, but to make us feel; to refine and elevate
the operation of the senses, helping us through visible, tangible and
audible beauty to catch at something of the mysterious infinitude of
beauty. Even as man’s intellect reaches ever wider and further until
knowledge is merged in speculation; so by the promptings of the senses
we reach from appreciation of material things to that detachment of
feeling which exists in the ideal.
INDEX
Adams, Herbert, 99-115, 184, 193
Ball, Thomas, vi, 56
Barnard, George Grey, 21-36
Barnhorn, Clement J., 193, et seq.
Bartholomé, Albert, 6, 7
Bartlett, Paul W., 89-95, 184
Barye, Antoine Louis, 158
Bauer, Theodore, 223, et seq.
Bissell, George E., 184
Bitter, Karl, 204, 205
Borglum, Gutzon, 153, 154, 226
Borglum, Solon Hannibal, 149-162
Boston Public Library, 81, 83
Boyle, John J., 184, 227, et seq.
Brenner, Victor David, 165-171
Brooks, Richard E., 214
Brown, Henry Kirke, vi, 43, 203
Bush-Brown, H. K., 202, 203
Calverly, Charles, 213
Canfield, Birtley, 214
Canova, v, 56
Carpeaux, Jean Baptiste, 134
Casey, Edward Pearce, 188
Cavelier, Jules Pierre, 28
Centennial Exhibition, v, viii, 136
Chicago World’s Fair, 61, 65, 75, 84, 197, 203, 222, 224
Coloring Sculpture, 102, et seq.
Crawford, Thomas, vi
Dallin, Cyrus E., 184, 226
Donoghue, John, 222
Dubois, Paul, 6, 7, 15
Elwell, F. Edwin, 219, et seq.
Falguière, Jean Alexandre Joseph, 75, 100, 134
Flanagan, John, 185
Frémiet, Emmanuel, 90, 157
French, Daniel Chester, 55-70, 193
Grafly, Charles, 217, et seq., 222
Greenough, Horatio, 4
Harvey, Eli, 202
Jouffroy, François, 134
Kemeys, Edward, 197
Kitson, Alice Ruggles, 213
Kitson, Henry H., 213
Konti, Isidore, 205, et seq.
Library of Congress, 74, 83, 90, 113, 128, 142, 176, et seq., 223
Linder, Henry, 195
Macmonnies, Frederick, 73-85
MacNeil, H. A., 226
Martiny, Philip, 177, et seq., 179, 191, 205
McKim, Charles F., 65, 66, 189
Mercié, Marius Jean Antonin, 100, 134
Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, New York, 81, 89, 169
Michelangelo, 21, 26, 27, 102, 212
Murray, Samuel, 213
National Sculpture Society, 40
Niehaus, Charles Henry, 119-128, 184
O’Donovan, W. R., 213
Pan-American Exposition, 149, 203, 207, 217
Paris Exposition of 1900, 6, 77, 149
Perry, R. Hinton, 185, et seq.