The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Arturo Di Modica, sculptor of Wall Street bull, dies at 80
ROME — The artist who sculpted Charging Bull, the bronze statue in New York which became an iconic symbol of Wall Street, has died in his hometown in Sicily at age 80.
Arturo Di Modica died at his home in Vittoria on Friday evening, the town said in a statement on Saturday. Di Modica had been ill for some time, it said.
The sculptor lived in New York for more than 40 years in New York. He arrived in 1973 and opened an art studio in the city’s SoHo neighborhood. With the help of a truck and crane, Di Modica installed the bronze bull sculpture in
New York’s financial district without permission on the night of Dec. 16, 1989.
The artist reportedly spent $350,000 of his own money to create the 3.5-ton bronze beast that came to symbolize the resilience of the U.S. economy after a 1987 stock market crash.
“It was a period of crisis. The New York Stock Exchange
lost in one night more than 20 percent, and so many people were plunged into the blackest of depressions,” Rome daily La Repubblica quoted Di Modica as saying in an interview earlier this month.
He said he conceived of the bull sculpture as “a joke, a provocation. Instead,
it became a cursedly serious thing,” destined to be one of New York’s more visited monuments.
In the La Repubblica interview, Di Modica detailed how he, some 40 friends, a crane and a truck carried out a lightningswift operation to plant the statue near Bowling Green park, a short stroll from the headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange, without official authorization.
“Five minutes. The operations shouldn’t have lasted more. Otherwise, we’d risk big,” he recalled. “After a couple of scouting trips, I had discovered that at night, the police made its rounds on Wall Street every 7-8 minutes.”
When the sculptor and his friends arrived at the
spot he’d picked, they were surprised to see a Christmas tree had been erected there. They deposited the bronze bull anyway, and, as the artist told it, uncorked a bottle of Champagne.
Di Modica left Vittoria, Sicily, at age 19 for Florence, where he studied at the Fine Arts Academy.
At the time of his death, he was working on prototypes for a twin horse sculpture he planned to make for the Sicilian town. It was envisioned as a 132foot-high work to be erected on the banks of a river.
The town declared Monday, when Di Modica’s funeral will be held in Vittoria’s St. John the Baptist Church, as an official day of mourning.
WASHINGTON — When Joe Biden walked into the Oval Office for the first time as president a month ago, his pens were ready. Already.
Lining a fine wooden box, they bore the presidential seal and an imprint of his signature, a micromission accomplished in advance of his swearing-in.
Four years ago, pens were just one more little drama in Donald Trump’s White House. The goldplated signature pens he favored had to be placed on rush order in his opening days. Over time, he came to favor Sharpies over the government-issued pens.
On matters far more profound than a pen, Biden is out to demonstrate that the days of a seat-of-thepants presidency are over.
He wants to show that the inflationary cycle of outrage can be contained. That things can get done by the book. That the new guy can erase the legacy of the “former guy,” as Biden has called Trump.
On policy, symbolism and style, from the Earth’s climate to what’s not on his desk (Trump’s button to summon a Diet Coke), Biden has been purging Trumpism however he can in an opening stretch that is wholly unlike the turmoil and trouble of his predecessor’s first month.
The test for Biden is whether his stylistic changes will be matched by policies that deliver a marked improvement from Trump, and a month is not long enough to measure that. Further, the length of Biden’s honeymoon is likely to be brief in highly polarized Washington, with Republicans already saying he has caved to the left wing of the Democratic Party.
The first time the nation saw Biden in the Oval Office, hours after he was sworn in, he sat behind the Resolute Desk with a mask on his face.
Trump, of course, had eschewed masks. Not only that, but he had made their use a culture war totem and political cudgel even as thousands of Americans were dying each day from a virus that properly worn masks can ward off.
Though Biden wore a mask in the campaign, seeing it on the face of the new president at the desk in the famed Oval Office made for a different message. Biden wished to make a sharp break with his predecessor while his administration came to own
the deep and intractable crises that awaited him.
The strategy had been in the works since before the election and began with Biden at the desk signing a flurry of executive orders. The intent was clear: to unwind the heart of Trump’s agenda on immigration, the pandemic and more while also rejoining international alliances and trying to assure historic allies that the United States could be relied upon once again.
“The subtext under every one of the images we are seeing from the White House is the banner: ‘Under new management’,“says Robert Gibbs, who was press secretary for President Barack Obama.
“Whether showing it overtly or subtly, the message they are trying to deliver, without engaging the
former president, is to make sure everyone understands that things were going to operate differently now and that hopefully the results would be different, too.”
In a whiteout of executive actions in his first weeks, Biden reversed Trump’s course on the environment and placed the Obama health law at the center of the pandemic response with an extended special enrollment period for the insurance program that Trump swore to kill.
The Iran nuclear deal that Biden’s predecessor abandoned is back on the diplomatic plate. The U.S. is back in the World Health Organization as well as the Paris climate accord.
But memberships and diplomatic outreach only go so far. The world wants to see how far Biden will actually go in making good on climate goals, whether he will steer more help to poorer countries in the pandemic and whether his words of renewed solidarity with NATO may only last until the next pendulum swing of U.S. politics.
In addition, Biden faces the reality that over the past four years China has moved in to fill the void left by the United States on trade, and allies have learned to rely less on the U.S. during the more hostile Trump era.
One month into Trump’s presidency, he had already lost his national security adviser and his choice for labor secretary to scandal. The revolving door of burned-out, disgraced or disfavored aides was already creaking into motion.
Forces in the bureaucracy were leaking information and resisting his policies. Revelations were emerging about an FBI investigation into his campaign’s contacts with Russian intelligence officials, a precursor of a special inquiry that would eventually morph into impeachment. Judges had already blocked his order to suspend the refugee program and ban visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Biden’s first month has been comparatively dramafree, with many of his Cabinet picks approved and no evident convulsions among his staff other than the departure of a White House press officer who made a profane threat to a journalist.
After 40 years in Washington, eight years as Obama’s vice president and two failed presidential campaigns before his successful one, Biden has had a lifetime to think about the mark he wants to make as president and how to get rolling on it.
“Nobody who observed Joe Biden as a candidate should be surprised by any of this,” said senior adviser Anita Dunn. “He had no learning curve in terms of the issues but also in how to be president.”
There have been challenges nonetheless: the distraction of Trump’s post-presidential impeachment trial, a more narrowly divided Senate than his predecessor faced and a nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget who’s been busy deleting years of social media posts assailing Republicans and some on the Democratic left.