The Spirit of American Sculpture
9781465685520
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Any survey of the Spirit of American Sculpture must naturally take into account the Body of American Sculptors. On the other hand, the outline here offered does not attempt the preposterous task of putting everyone in his place, and thereby producing an unmannerly and unreliable Who’s Who in Sculpture. Many sculptors whose work is dear to me are scarcely named in the following pages. Why? Because, very frequently, the individual achievement has been too fine to be slurred over and shunted off with the faint praise of mere listing, while at the same time it cannot well be appreciated at deserved length, given the limitations laid upon the present writer,—limitations temporal, spatial, personal. Again, it often happens in art, as in nature and in politics, that certain forces for good are better left unmentioned; headlines would disturb their harmonious functioning. The brief annals of our sculpture may be divided either according to our wars, or according to our times of peace. The critic who chooses the former way will point out that our Revolution called into being a national consciousness which was strengthened by the War of 1812, and which immediately thereafter sought expression in Federal or State buildings, and in their adornment by the arts. Side by side with national yearnings for art sprang up half-thwarted individual longings either to produce art, or to enjoy art, or to possess art. Not until the close of the Civil War, with its legacy of greater national unity and advancing prosperity, did we find out that our education in art was too meagre to let us express in any fitting way the emotions aroused by that conflict and its costly sacrifices. In the marketplace, we were naïve and unformed enough to accept with more or less satisfaction and in infinite repetition the stone soldier of commercial origin. In the home, we thoroughly enjoyed the anecdotes, patriotic or parochial, told by our Rogers groups. But before the Spanish War was over, our enlightenment as to the artistic value of these productions was rather general. With respect to the Rogers groups, we passed to the other extreme; in our headlong attempt to register culture, we forgot that these works had performed a genuine service. Later, the wave of romantic rococo noted in the “red-blooded” literature of the day had its parallel in some of our noisier war monuments, creatures surging from a limbo that was neither art nor commerce. Since the World War, and even before the World War, there has been, through our museums and other sources, an honest effort toward coöperation between art and manufacture. An up-hill task but a necessary one, in any sound national development! The day of the stone soldier is over, but whether we are laying up for ourselves a store of future regret in other forms of memorial sculpture remains to be seen.
