Say you’re an unvarnished sort of person who is now in a position to think about art. If you want a short art history course, you could do worse than going to www.askart.com and reading down the list of “Styles of Interest.” The "askant" website began as mostly an index to American artists but now includes some “quik-hits” as guides and memory joggers. My tastes are not very elevated when it comes to painting -- mostly forms of impressionism, esp plein-aire and tonalist (Ah! Russell Chatham!), and including abstract expressionism. I’m a color eater.
The sculpture of the period around 1900 has a deep appeal for me, esp that identified with the Beaux Arts of Paris. It was a time when the medium of sculpture was just moving from marble to bronze and when a return to the classic was countered by a defiant opposition which motivated Rodin, that passionate sexual bacchanalian but disciplined studio control freak. Figurative sculpture is almost necessarily about people and animals, therefore sensual but also responsive to the skeleton, the structure.
There’s another reason, which is that I grew up in Portland, OR, which -- like Boston -- is populated by many monumental bronzes of the Beaux Arts school. To my eye they are as familiar as family, not least because of my deep relationship to Bob Scriver’s work. Plastilene is as familiar to my hands as flesh (all species) and molten bronze is a living embodiment of passion, its fumes the breath of spirituality, its process an illustration of risk -- both what’s at stake and what the reward might be.
Saint Gaudens -- monument to a sculptor who died young
Just now I found a little money to resubscribe to the National Sculpture Society’s magazine, the National Sculpture Review. www.sculpturereview.com. I have the same almost sweaty heart-leaping response to seeing it in the mail that I suppose some people have for porn. It used to be far more expensive than it is now: $25 a year, four issues. The issues are grouped around themes and the writing is always insightful. This is NOT like the Western art mags, which tend to obsess about value, popularity, personality, and what would look well in one’s parlor. It is the substrate and matrix for the work done by Russell, Remington, Schreyvogel, Phippen, Beeler, Beil, Dallin, Proctor, Jackson, and a host of others now dodging in and out of the Western art auctions. In other places I’ve talked about the special difficulties of addressing three-dimensional art -- which is ironically related to the ease of duplication -- so I’ll not spend time on it now.
Another aspect of the Beaux Arts period is that it was the beginning of the admission of female sculptors to the active world of art. Malvina Hoffman and her friend Joy Buba connected Bob Scriver to the larger international context, which is the main difference between his work and someone like Evelyn Cole. It’s not just a matter of skill, but of vision and discipline (armature). Both Cole and Scriver grew up on the Montana High-line but Scriver saw a larger world. Part of the reason for that was the Reiss brothers’ school on the border of Glacier National Park and Canada. They were generous and inclusive of women. For instance, Hans Reiss taught his wood-carving skills to Clare Sheridan, who carried them back to Ireland. This interest in the huge Western parklands and ranches extended to the Whitney family so that Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s portrait of Buffalo Bill was the precipitating crystal for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.
Other women in this context were Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, and Harriet Goodhue Hosmer. They tended to come from prosperous families, so maybe the three names was a way of smuggling in credentials or expressing dignity. But the convention for sculptors and writers of this period has been three-named. Because they were women they often portrayed children. Many of the pieces are garden ornaments given whimsical or Greek mythological names. Babies and toddlers had always been included in religious sculpture, disguised as cherubs and putti. Now there was a great interest in the “straight-sided” children -- the age of adrenarche (8 to 11) before secondary sexual differentiation. At the time they were seen as expressions of Rousseauian nature, not at all shocking, but today’s viewers may see them quite differently.
This piece by MacMonnies was in the Portland Public Library.
This one is in Washington Park in Portland.
My favorites from this period include the key people: Daniel Chester French, Frederick William MacMonnies, both Gutzon and Solon Borglum, Herman Atkins MacNeil, Cyrus Edwin Dallin, James Earle Fraser, Augustus Saint-Gaudens -- maybe this last is my favorite, as much because of his personality as because of his work. He was one of those colorful, temperamental, red-headed, fascinating Irishmen that rich people often like and support. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t8K7Aisx8U This is a PBS story about the bas-relief of the Shaw Memorial which I used to be proud to say was across the street from the UUA headquarters at 25 Beacon Street. Now they, like Meadville/Lombard, have sold out.
The whole Boston Commons is studded with Beaux Arts monuments. In some ways, like the Unitarian movement, these monuments are the product of the Civil War challenge to the country’s ideals plus the prosperity that seems to come from war. The need to commemorate met the ability to pay for it. Both are also connected to the industrial development of the American West, a connection that begins in Butte copper and continues through the popularity of cowboy and Indian art. This is another irony since the main monumental bronzes were about the romance of life on the landscape rather than the underground mining by Europeans or the near-slave labor of Chinese immigrants building the railroads, both of which were key to industry.
Speaking in terms of English markers, this period between the Civil War and WWI, was Edwardian, our beloved “Upstairs, Downstairs,” “Downton Abbey,” period. My in-laws, Bob’s parents, and my grandparents were from this period and carried most of the assumptions of the times into my early adulthood. They have been useful and sustaining in unexpected ways. Those were times of radical self-contradiction, high and low, risk and guarded sinecures -- same as now. There are American stories that still remain for someone to develop, like the story of the ranch of the Marquis de Mores in North Dakota, an elegant little chateau based on the economy of slaughtering cattle, or maybe the Conrad brothers semi-legal empire that is now challenging the water laws of the West.
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