History and Memory in Augustus Saint-gaudens
The monumental artwork of Saint-gaudens takes us on a journey through history, conjuring sentiments of times long past
The monumental artwork of Saint-gaudens takes us on a journey through history, conjuring sentiments of times long past
We pass right by most monuments. They’re just there, on our daily rounds as we walk or drive, getting from our points A to our points B.who they are meant to remember, what events they commemorate, these are often names and deeds we long ago buried in high school history. But public art is in the news again. Monuments that more pigeons than people pay attention to have suddenly sprung to new, politicized life as we reappraise their subjects, the manner in which these artworks came to be, and attempt to ascribe intention to their imposing existence.when we do notice them, they are imposing.we can turn that word—imposing—to our advantage here and wonder just what it is that those imposing bronze and stone figures in our cities and towns mean to impose.
Because of his many public commissions and his wide-ranging influence on other artists, Augustus Saint-gaudens is one of America’s most important sculptors. Saint-gaudens was born in Ireland in 1848 to an Irish mother and French father.the Potato Famine drove the family to immigrate to Newyork when Saint-gaudens was just 6 months old. Saint-gaudens loved art and
wanted to make some sort of career as a creator, so his father arranged for him to apprentice with a cameo carver.this led to successful commissions in marble and an eventual course of study in
Paris and Rome. In Paris, Saint-gaudens met and befriended a host of American expatriate artists and art students, among who was his future wife, Augusta Homer, cousin to Winslow Homer. Saintgaudens’ early work, inspired by J.Q.A.WARD, one of his instructors, is romantic and emotional, but his exposure to Italian masters such as Donatello, as well as his interest in the delicate bas-relief work of the Renaissance masters of the portrait medallion guided his own work toward a more restrained naturalism—that is, a realism tempered by psychology, the inner life of the sitter. Marble portraits led to bronze memorials and plaques, including a poignant portrait of a bedridden Robert Louis Stevenson, whose verses, dedicated to their mutual friend,will Low, float in the air around him. Later, numismatic commissions came from President Theodore Roosevelt, one of which became the coveted—by this budding numismatist anyway, when he was young—high relief $20 gold piece, or Double Eagle, first minted in 1905.
By 1907, the year of his death, Saintgaudens was just about everywhere you looked, even in your pocket, if you were lucky enough.
On View in Cornish: American Art at the Picture Gallery, 1948-2019, the new exhibition at the Saint-gaudens National Historical Park, site of the sculptor’s New Hampshire home and studio—and the locus of the Cornish Artists’ Colony—offers us a golden opportunity to reconsider an artist of monumental (pun intended) impact, at a moment when we as a nation are diving deeply into our history through the very sort of public, memorial art that Saint-gaudens is best known for. Saint-gaudens’ last public work, The Sherman Monument—erected in 1903 to honor Gen.william Tecumseh Sherman, hero of the Civil War—is almost certainly the most imposing sculpture— perhaps the most important work of art—that I routinely ignore.
So I took a stroll on my lunch hour, to see how the old general was faring. Standing on a pink granite pedestal designed by famed architect Charles F. Mckim, and led by a striding figure of Victory, Sherman, bareheaded, caped and mounted, looks south down Fifth Avenue from 59th Street. Re-gilded from head to hoof a few years ago— that process was fascinating and
I urge you to find a video somewhere showing how artisans gild frames and bronzes—sherman gleams in the late July sun.two tourists speaking languages other than English take fast snapshots.a homeless woman, surrounded by her worldly possession, naps in the northern shade of the pedestal. Pigeons, despite the forest of spikes attached with wax to the statue, find the creases and do their cooing, pooping thing.
To the right of General Sherman, the Plaza Hotel stands in the shadow of its own Cary Grant glories. Behind him, Central Park, with its zoo, carriages, lake, sycamore-shaded walks and the Strand Book Store kiosk (which is why I’m usually there) offer just about all that remains in Midtown of an earlier
New York, a strolling, Beaux-arts, art deco Newyork that, in my mind, approximates Audrey Hepburn’s Paris, a Barefoot in the Park Newyork not yet populated with tall, shiny yet dull, glass and chrome rectangles, a New York of marble and bronze.
From his heroically elevated vantage, Sherman takes in his maker’s New
York: Saint-gaudens’ works, ghosts of vanished works and the works of the sculptor’s many students.take a short walk down Fifth Avenue with me.
Rene Chambellan’s art deco reliefs, on the Bonwit Teller building, demolished when Trump Tower was built, descend directly from Saint-gaudens by way of his protégé, Solon Borglum. At Tiffany’s, Saint-gaudens collaborated with John La Farge and others, eventually creating the reredos for St.thomas Church on 53rd and Fifth, lost in a fire in 1905. At the corner of 55th and Fifth, while we’re having a cocktail at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis Hotel, look up at the newly restored mural painted by Saintgaudens student and Cornish Colony resident, Maxfield Parrish. Now that we’re refreshed, let’s be on our way and take in the golden Prometheus and the gorgeous bronze sea creatures secreted in and around the pools of Rockefeller Center, all of them done by another of Saint-gaudens’ students, Paul Manship. We could walk on and on.
Move on to other cities.to
Chicago’s Lincoln Park, where the subject of Saint-gaudens’s masterful Abraham Lincoln:the Man has just risen from an eagle-backed chair. Lincoln looks down. On the one hand, he seems to be contemplating a problem or a turn of phrase; on the other, the vacant chair suggests his untimely death and departure from his post. Move on.to Washington, D.C., to a hidden grove in the Rock Creek Cemetery, where The Adams Memorial remembers Marion, the troubled wife of historian Henry Adams.as Kathryn Greenthal writes in her 1985 monograph that accompanied a Saintgaudens exhibition at the Met, the artist, hearing about Adams’ voyage to Asia and interest in Buddhism after his wife’s suicide,“created a presence, cloaked in rough, heavy drapery, that is sexless, ageless, timeless, expressionless, and unfathomable.” Move on, to Springfield, Massachusetts, where The Puritan’s witchfinder eyes seek the evil that lurks in hearts of men and his open cloak is straight out of Vincent Price’s Poe and Hawthorne adaptations. Move on, to Boston, where the African American troops of the 54th Infantry,
led by their young officer, Robert Gould Shaw, march off to war and death after distinguishing themselves at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863. In grim profile, the men of the 54th, seen up close, are sensitively rendered individuals, each keeping his own counsel. From a distance, they are a unit, part of an indifferent machine. Even their bedrolls, seen end on, spiral like the crests of waves on an ocean of, as Greenthal writes,“endless lines of young men marching off to endless wars.” As with most of Saint-gaudens’ works, the stone pedestals, plinths and benches by Mckim and Stanford White add a great deal to our experience of the bronzes, guiding our eyes to and around them. Located in Newyork and Boston, respectively, The Sherman Monument and The Shaw Memorial, aren’t going anywhere.they depict Union men and moments in Union cities.as a thought experiment, let’s say The Sherman Monument had been erected in Atlanta in the early 1900s, as a reminder to the South of just who won that uncivil Civil War. Dollars to doughnuts some Sons of Dixie organization, incensed by the presence of “March-throughgeorgia”, “Burning-of-atlanta” Sherman, would have lobbied to have that thing pulled down and cast into
shell casings long before Armistice Day in 1918—as a purely patriotic gesture, of course.this puts into sharp relief current efforts, particularly among African American civic organizations, to see Confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forrest, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and others, moved out of everyday public view. Just as Sherman in Georgia would have been be a reminder of a blood-soaked defeat, so Forrest—who founded the Ku Klux Klan—jackson and Lee are daily reminders of slavery’s advocates and champions. Even when the intentions are clear, as in the embattled school mural in San Francisco that sets enslaved Africans beside George Washington to show the not-so-sunny side of our nation’s founding or the enormous gallows in Minneapolis that was erected—and swiftly taken down—to symbolize the hanging of Native Americans who dared to resist confinement and starvation in the 1860s, how an artist means art isn’t always how that art is received, especially over time. Just as the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children, trauma, some researchers now say, is inherited, passed down in the fibers of being. Public art can open private wounds—and dormant scars.
Destroying art eliminates its possibilities as a tool for teaching and smacks too much of book burning and labels like “degenerate.” On the other hand, moving public art that no longer serves the public interest to a setting where it can be studied in light of history seems a far better option.the truth is, public monuments are meant to be permanent, insofar as anything can be. But history is not permanent. Indeed, if anything, history is permeable—the ever-changing present passes through it, flows through it, alters its course, meaning, and utility. But how we have seen and used history is itself part of history and should neither be dismissed nor discarded.
Saint-gaudens’ monuments appear to be in no danger of being removed or destroyed. In fact, The Gould Memorial— since the superb film Glory, at any rate—has attracted new attention. But the sobering side of the security of Saint-gaudens’ works is that they are not often studied often or even noticed as we move through our own time, adding another translucent filo dough page to the story of our days, a protean book we will not live to read.
Years before The Sherman Monument, Saint-gaudens sculpted Sherman’s bust. He spent hours with the old general and is said to have found his company charming. Still, as I look at the monument, what I notice—not at first glance but after a few minutes—is how Sherman’s cloak, the mane and tail of his horse, and the draperies of Victory seem to be snapping back.they all move into a stiff breeze, the headwinds of history. Then, when I look at Sherman’s face one last time, what I see is a man who knows he has made history wondering how history will see him. His eyes seem to water in the wind.