On the
artist whose inspiring American and international legacy is written in stone.
I’ve
already said a good bit in this space about Augustus
Saint-Gaudens, the Irish American sculptor and Boston Cosmopolitan par
excellance: first in this
post on his most inspiring work, Boston’s Robert Gould Shaw Memorial; and
then in his March
1st Memory Day nomination. Saint-Gaudens has a great deal in common
with the week’s other figures: not just in his artistic and cultural community
and relationships, such as his lifelong working friendship with the
architects Stanford White and Charles McKim; not just as an international
traveler who brought inspiration from all those places back to his work on
distinctly American monuments and memorials; but also and most especially in
his dual and complementary desires for American art and society. Like all of
the week’s focal figures, that is, Saint-Gaudens sought both to more fully link
America to the old world (in every sense) and to bring it more successfully
into its own new world future.
Two of
Saint-Gaudens’ other impressive public sculptures and monuments exemplify that
balance. His “German
Sherman Led by Victory,” located in the Grand Army
Plaza of New York’s Central Park, took Saint-Gaudens more than a decade to
complete; the result weds the old and new worlds explicitly, in its iconography
and in its link of a distinctly mythological figure (one sculpted as such) to a
highly realitistic one (in both content and style). Far more intimate and yet
just as compelling and thematically rich is his “Adams
Memorial or Grief,” a sculpture located in Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Cemetery;
the sculpture, a tribute to Henry Adams’ wife Clover after her 1885 suicide, casts
that real person and American as a mythological figure, one generally known as
Grief but also called by Saint-Gaudens “The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace
of God that Passeth Understanding.” In some ways the sculpture echoes
dramatically Sargent’s
end-of-life portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner; but in others it weds
such a humanistic portrayal to millennium-old mythological narratives, bringing
the American present and the world’s past together in particularly striking
ways.
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To me,
that connection and combination sums up quite concisely the goals of all this
week’s figures, and and certainly of Isabella Stewart Gardner and her Museum. There’s
no question that Gardner and her fellow Cosmopolitans loved much of what they
found in Europe, especially its historical and cultural depth and breadth. But
there’s likewise no question that these artists, authors, and activists worked
throughout their lives to strengthen America, to help construct an American culture,
community, and tradition that could learn from the best of and ultimately rival
those in Europe. Such a goal might fly in the face of the new world mythos, and
of American ideals and narratives of independence and self-making and the like.
But once we dissociate
American history and identity from such narratives—and as I
have argued many times, there’s very good reason to do so—we open ourselves
up to the possibility that Gardner and her fellow Cosmopolitans were right:
that one of the best ways to build an American future is to learn about and
incorporate the cultural, historical, artistic, and inspiring strengths of the
world beyond.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So
what do you think? Thoughts of this post or any of the week’s posts? Other
unique sites or figures you’d highlight?
9/14
Memory Day nominee: Margaret
Sanger, the nurse, sex
educator, and birth control activist whose founding
of Planned Parenthood and radical views remain
controversial to this day, but who unquestionably helped
expand 20th century American women’s
options and futures.
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