[March 17th
is St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday
that is apparently a far
bigger deal in the U.S. than in Ireland. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a
handful of famous Irish American cultural figures, leading up to a post on some wonderful Irish
American literary voices!]
On the
artist whose inspiring Irish 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 other late 19th century Bostonian cultural 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 Isabella
Stewart Gardner and so many of her friends and contemporaries, 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 “General 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 John Singer 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.
_by_John_Singer_Sargent.jpg){kind=link}
To me,
that connection and combination sums up quite concisely the goals of all these
late 19th century artistic 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.
Next Irish
American tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Irish Americans you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment