Kenyon Cox - Artist and Public
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Kenyon Cox >> Artist and Public
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[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 24.--Saint-Gaudens. "Amor Caritas."]
First of all, by nature and by training, Saint-Gaudens was a designer,
and exquisiteness of design was the quality he most consciously strove
for--the quality on which he expended his unresting, unending,
persevering toil. From the start one feels that design is his principal
preoccupation, that he is thinking mainly of the pattern of the whole,
its decorative effect and play of line, its beauty of masses and spaces,
its fitness for its place and its surroundings; in a word, its
composition. In the beginning, as a workman in the shop of the cameo
cutter, he was concerned with a kind of art in which perfection of
composition is almost the sole claim to serious consideration. Then he
produces a multiplicity of small reliefs, dainty, exquisite, infallibly
charming in their arrangement--things which are so dependent on design
for their very existence that they seem scarcely modelled at all. He
goes on to decorative figures in the round, to heroic statues, to
monumental groups, but always it is design that he thinks of first and
last--design, now, in three dimensions rather than in two--design
properly sculptural rather than pictorial, in so much as it deals with
bosses and concaves, with solid matter in space--but still design. This
power of design rises to higher uses as time goes on, is bent to the
interpretation of lofty themes and the expression of deep emotions, but
it is in its nature the same power that produced the delicate, ethereal
beauty of the reliefs. The infinite fastidiousness of a master designer,
constantly reworking and readjusting his design, that every part shall
be perfect and that no fold or spray of leafage shall be out of its
proper place, never satisfied that his composition is beyond improvement
while an experiment remains untried--this is what cost him years of
labor. His first important statue, the "Farragut," is a masterpiece of
restrained and elegant yet original and forceful design--a design, too,
that includes the pedestal and the bench below, and of which the figures
in bas-relief are almost as important a part as the statue itself. In
later and maturer work, with a more clarified taste and a deeper
feeling, he can reach such unsurpassable expressiveness of composition
as is shown in the "Shaw Memorial" or the great equestrian statue of
Sherman.
Saint-Gaudens's mastery of low relief was primarily a matter of this
power of design, but it was conditioned also upon two other qualities:
knowledge of drawing and extreme sensitiveness to delicate modulation of
surface. And by drawing I mean not merely knowledge of form and
proportion and the exact rendering of these, in which sense a statue may
be said to be well drawn if its measurements are correct--I mean that
much more subtle and difficult art, the rendering in two dimensions only
of the appearance of objects of three dimensions. Sculpture in the round
is the simplest and, in a sense, the easiest of the arts. It deals with
actual form--a piece of sculpture does not merely look like the form of
an object, it _is_ the form of an object. Leaving out of the count, for
the moment, the refinements and the illusions which may be added to
it--which must be added to it to make it art--it is the reproduction in
another material of the actual forms of things. Something which shall
answer for it, to the uninitiate, may be produced by merely casting
natural objects; and there is a great deal that is called sculpture
which scarcely aims at anything more than the production, by a more
difficult method, of something like a plaster cast from nature. It is
the very simplicity of the art that makes its difficulty, for to avoid
the look of casting and achieve the feeling of art requires the most
delicate handling and the most powerful inspiration, and there is need
in the art of sculpture for the rarest qualities of the greatest minds.
The art of drawing is entirely different. It is all illusion, it deals
only in appearances. Its aim is to depict on a flat surface the aspect
of objects supposed to stand behind it and to be seen through it, and
its means are two branches of the science of optics. It is based on the
study of perspective and on the study of the way light falls upon
objects and reveals their shapes and the direction of their surfaces by
the varying degrees of their illumination. Of this art a sculptor in the
round need not necessarily know anything, and, in fact, many of them,
unfortunately, know altogether too little of it. The maker of a statue
need not think about foreshortenings: if he gives the correct form the
foreshortening will take care of itself. Sometimes it does so in a
disastrous manner! Theoretically he need not worry over light and shade,
although of course he does, in practice, think about it and rely upon
it, more or less. If he gives the true forms they will necessarily have
the true light and shade. But low relief, standing between sculpture and
drawing, is really more closely related to drawing than to sculpture--is
really a kind of drawing--and this is why so few sculptors succeed in
it.
It is a kind of drawing but an exceedingly difficult kind--the most
delicate and difficult of any of the arts that deal with form alone. As
to the contour, it stands on the same ground with drawing in any other
material. The linear part of it requires exactly the same degree and
the same kind of talent as linear design with a pen or with a burin. But
for all that stands within the contour, for the suggestion of interior
forms and the illusion of solidity, it depends on means of the utmost
subtlety. It exists, as all drawing does, by light and shade, but the
shadows are not produced by the mere darkening of the surface--they are
produced by projections and recessions, by the inclination of the planes
away from or toward the light. The lower the relief the more subtle and
tender must be the variation of the surface which produces them, and
therefore success in relief is one of the best attainable measures of a
sculptor's fineness of touch and perfection of craftsmanship. But as the
light and shade is produced by actual forms which are yet quite unlike
the true forms of nature, it follows that the artist in relief can never
imitate either the shape or the depth of the shadow he sees in nature.
His art becomes one of suggestions and equivalents--an art which can
give neither the literal truth of form nor the literal truth of
aspect--an art at the farthest remove from direct representation. And
success in it becomes, therefore, one of the best tests of a sculptor's
artistry--of his ability to produce essential beauty by the treatment of
his material, rather than to imitate successfully external fact.
As the degree of relief varies, also, from the lowest possible to that
highest relief which, nearly approaches sculpture in the round, the
problems involved constantly vary. At each stage there is a new
compromise to be made, a new adjustment to find, between fact and
illusion, between the real form and the desired appearance. And there
may be a number of different degrees of relief in the same work, even in
different parts of the same figure, so that the art of relief becomes
one of the most complicated and difficult of arts. It has not, indeed,
the added complication of color, but neither has it the resources of
color, success in which will more or less compensate for failure
elsewhere. There is no permissible failure in bas-relief, any more than
in sculpture in the round, and its difficulties are far greater. Nothing
but truest feeling, completest knowledge, consummate skill will serve.
This explanation may give some measure of what I mean when I say that I
believe Augustus Saint-Gaudens the most complete master of relief since
the fifteenth century.
He has produced a series of works which run through the whole range of
the art, from lowest relief to highest; from things of which the relief
is so infinitesimal that they seem as if dreamed into existence rather
than wrought in bronze or marble to things which are virtually engaged
statues; from things which you fear a chance touch might brush away,
like a pastel of Whistler's, to things as solid and enduring in
appearance as in actual material. And in all these things there is the
same inevitable mastery of design and of drawing, the same infinite
resource and the same technical perfection. The "Butler Children" (Pl.
25), the "Schiff Children," the "Sarah Redwood Lee" (Pl. 26), to name
but a few of his masterpieces of this kind, are in their perfection of
spacing, their grace of line, their exquisite and ethereal illusiveness
of surface, comparable only to the loveliest works of the Florentine
Renaissance; while the assured mastery of the most complicated problems
of relief evinced in the "Shaw Memorial"--a mastery which shows, in the
result, no trace of the strenuous and long-continued effort that it
cost--is unsurpassed--I had almost said unequalled--in any work of any
epoch.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 25.--Saint-Gaudens. "The Butler Children."]
Illustration can give but a faint idea of the special beauties of this
or that particular work in this long series. It can show no more than
the composition and the draughtsmanship. The refinement of workmanship,
the sensitiveness and subtlety of modelling, can be appreciated only
before the works themselves. And this sensitiveness and delicacy of
workmanship, this mastery of the problems of relief, with its reliance
on illusion and its necessary abstention from realization, is applied to
sculpture in the round, and becomes with Saint-Gaudens, as it did with
the sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, the means of escape from
the matter of fact. The concrete art of sculpture becomes an art of
mystery and of suggestion--an art having affinities with that of
painting. Hollows are filled up, shadows are obliterated, lines are
softened or accentuated, as the effect may require, details are
eliminated or made prominent as they are less or more essential and
significant, as they hinder or aid the expressiveness of the whole. It
is by such methods that beauty is achieved, that the most unpromising
material is subdued to the purposes of art, that even our hideous modern
costume may be made to yield a decorative effect. Pure sculpture, as the
ancients understood it, the art of form _per se_, demands the nude
figure, or a costume which reveals it rather than hides it. The costume
of to-day reveals as little of the figure as possible, and, unlike
mediaeval armor, it has no beauty of its own. A painter may make it
interesting by dwelling on color or tone or texture, or may so lose it
in shadow that it ceases to count at all except as a space of darkness.
A sculptor can do none of these things, and if he is to make it serve
the ends of beauty he has need of all the resourcefulness and all the
skill of the master of low relief. It was fortunate that the artist
whose greatest task was to commemorate the heroes of the Civil War
should have had the temperament and the training of such a master, and I
know of no other sculptor than Saint-Gaudens who has so magnificently
succeeded in the rendering of modern clothing--no other who could have
made the uniform of Farragut or the frock coat of Lincoln as interesting
as the armor of Colleone or the toga of Augustus.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 26.--Saint-Gaudens. "Sarah Redwood Lee."]
But if the genius of Saint-Gaudens was primarily a decorative genius--if
it was, even, in his earlier work, a trifle picturesque, so that, as he
said himself, he had "to fight against picturesqueness," his work was
never pictorial. He never indulged in perspective or composed his
reliefs on more than one plane; never took such liberties with the
traditions of sculpture as did Ghiberti, or painted pictures in bronze
or marble as more than one modern has done. His very feeling for
decoration kept him from pictorial realism, and his fight against
picturesqueness was nobly won. His design becomes ever cleaner and more
classic; by years of work and of experience he becomes stronger and
stronger in the more purely sculptural qualities--attains a grasp of
form and structure only second to his mastery of composition. He is
always a consummate artist--in his finest works he is a great sculptor
in the strictest sense of the word.
I have dwelt somewhat at length upon technical matters because technical
power is the first necessity for an artist; because technical mastery is
that for which he consciously endeavors; because the technical language
of his art is the necessary vehicle of expression for his thoughts and
emotions, and determines, even, the nature of the thoughts and emotions
he shall express. But while the technical accomplishment of an artist
is the most necessary part of his art, without which his imagination
would be mute, it is not the highest or the most significant part of it.
I have tried to show that Saint-Gaudens was a highly accomplished
artist, the equal of any of his contemporaries, the superior of most.
What made him something much more than this--something infinitely more
important for us--was the vigor and loftiness of his imagination.
Without his imaginative power he would have been an artist of great
distinction, of whom any country might be proud; with it he became a
great creator, able to embody in enduring bronze the highest ideals and
the deepest feelings of a nation and of a time.
It is a penetrating and sympathetic imagination that gave him his
unerring grasp of character, that enabled him to seize upon the
significant elements of a personality, to divine the attitude and the
gesture that should reveal it, to eliminate the unessential, to present
to us the man. This is the imagination of the portrait-painter, and
Saint-Gaudens has shown it again and again, in many of his reliefs and
memorial tablets, above all in his portrait statues. He showed it
conclusively in so early a work as the "Farragut" (Pl. 27), a work that
remains one of the modern masterpieces of portrait statuary. The man
stands there forever, feet apart, upon his swaying deck, his glass in
one strong hand, cool, courageous, ready, full of determination but
absolutely without bluster or braggadocio, a sailor, a gentleman, and a
hero. He showed it again, and with ampler maturity, in that august
figure of "Lincoln" (Pl. 28), grandly dignified, austerely simple,
sorrowfully human, risen from the chair of state that marks his office,
but about to speak as a man to men, his bent head and worn face
filled with a sense of power, but even more with the sadness of
responsibility--filled, above all, with a yearning, tender passion of
sympathy and love. In imaginative presentation of character, in nobility
of feeling and breadth of treatment, no less than in perfection of
workmanship, these are among the world's few worthy monuments to its
great men.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 27.--Saint-Gaudens. "Farragut."]
And they are monuments to Americans by an American. Saint-Gaudens had
lived through the time of the Civil War, had felt, as a boy, the stir of
its great happenings in his blood, and its epic emotions had become a
part of his consciousness, deep-seated at the roots of his nature. The
feelings of the American people were his feelings, and his
representations of these and of other heroes of that great struggle are
among the most national as they are among the most vital things that our
country has produced in art.
But if Saint-Gaudens's imagination was thus capable of raising the
portrait to the dignity of the type, it was no less capable of endowing
the imagined type with all the individuality of the portrait. In the
"Deacon Chapin" (Pl. 29), of Springfield, we have a purely ideal
production, the finest embodiment of New England Puritanism in our art,
for no portrait of the real Chapin existed. This swift-striding,
stern-looking old man, who clasps his Bible as Moses clasped the tables
of the law and grips his peaceful walking-stick as though it were a
sword, is a Puritan of the Puritans; but he is an individual also--a
rough-hewn piece of humanity with plenty of the old Adam about him--an
individual so clearly seen and so vigorously characterized that one can
hardly believe the statue an invention or realize that no such old
Puritan deacon ever existed in the flesh. Something of this imaginative
quality there is in almost everything Saint-Gaudens touched, even in
his purely decorative figures. His angels and caryatides are not
classical goddesses but modern women, lovely, but with a personal and
particular loveliness, not insisted upon but delicately suggested. And
it is not the personality of the model who chanced to pose for them but
an invented personality, the expression of the nobility, the sweetness,
and the pure-mindedness of their creator. And in such a figure as that
of the "Adams Memorial" (Pl. 30), in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington,
his imaginative power reaches to a degree of impressiveness almost
unequalled in modern art. One knows of nothing since the tombs of the
Medici that fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded,
deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternal
stillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest. Is she
Nirvana? Is she The Peace of God? She has been given many names--her
maker would give her none. Her meaning is mystery; she is the
everlasting enigma.
[Illustration: Copyright, De W.C. Ward.
Plate 28.--Saint-Gaudens. "Lincoln."]
Not the greatest artist could twice sound so deep a note as this. The
figure remains unique in the work of the sculptor as it is unique in the
art of the century. Yet, perhaps, Saint-Gaudens's greatest works are two
in which all the varied elements of his genius find simultaneous
expression; into which his mastery of composition, his breadth and
solidity of structure, his technical skill, his insight into character,
and his power of imagination enter in nearly equal measure: the "Shaw
Memorial" and the great equestrian group of the "Sherman Monument."
The "Shaw Memorial" (Pl. 31) is a relief, but a relief of many planes.
The marching troops are in three files, one behind the other, the
varying distances from the spectator marked by differences of the degree
of projection. Nearer than all of them is the equestrian figure of Shaw
himself, the horse and rider modelled nearly but not quite in the round.
The whole scale of relief was altered in the course of the work, after
it had once been nearly completed, and the mastery of the infinitely
complicated problem of relief in many degrees is supreme. But all the
more because the scheme was so full and so varied, the artist has
carefully avoided the pictorial in his treatment. There is no
perspective, the figures being all on the same scale, and there is no
background, no setting of houses or landscape. Everywhere, between and
above the figures, is the flat surface which is the immemorial tradition
of sculpture in relief; and the fact that it _is_ a surface,
representing nothing, is made more clear by the inscription written upon
it--an inscription placed there, consciously or unconsciously, that it
might have that very effect. The composition is magnificent, whether for
its intrinsic beauty of arrangement--its balancing of lines and
spaces--or for its perfect expressiveness. The rhythmic step of marching
men is perfectly rendered, and the guns fill the middle of the panel in
an admirable pattern, without confusion or monotony. The heads are
superb in characterization, strikingly varied and individual, yet each a
strongly marked racial type, unmistakably African in all its forms.
[Illustration: Plate 29.--Saint-Gaudens. "Deacon Chapin."]
These are merits, and merits of a very high order, enough of themselves
to place the work in the front rank of modern sculpture, but they are,
after all, its minor merits. What makes it the great thing it is is the
imaginative power displayed in it--the depth of emotion expressed, and
expressed with perfect simplicity and directness and an entire
absence of parade. The negro troops are marching steadily, soberly,
with high seriousness of purpose, and their white leader rides beside
them, drawn sword in hand, but with no military swagger, courageous, yet
with a hint of melancholy, ready not only to lay down his life but to
face, if need be, an ignominious death for the cause he believes to be
just. And above them, laden with poppy and with laurels, floats the
Death Angel pointing out the way.
[Illustration: Copyright, Curtis & Cameron.
Plate 30.--Saint-Gaudens. "Adams Memorial."]
It is a work which artists may study again and again with growing
admiration and increasing profit, yet it is one that has found its way
straight to the popular heart. It is not always--it is not often--that
the artists and the public are thus at one. When they are it is safe to
assume that the work they equally admire is truly great--that it belongs
to the highest order of noble works of art.
The Sherman group (Pl. 32), though it has been more criticised than the
"Shaw Memorial," seems to me, if possible, an even finer work. The main
objection to it has been that it is not sufficiently "monumental," and,
indeed, it has not the massiveness nor the repose of such a work as
Donatello's "Gattamelata," the greatest of all equestrian statues. It
could not well have these qualities in the same degree, its motive being
what it is, but they are, perhaps, not ill exchanged for the character
and the nationalism so marked in horse and rider and for the
irresistible onward rush of movement never more adequately expressed. In
all other respects the group seems to me almost beyond criticism. The
composition--composition, now, in the round and to be considered from
many points of view--builds up superbly; the flow of line in wing and
limb and drapery is perfect; the purely sculptural problems of
anatomical rendering, equine and human, are thoroughly resolved; the
modelling, as such, is almost as fine as the design.
[Illustration: Copyright, De. W.C. Ward.
Plate 31.--Saint-Gaudens. "Shaw Memorial."]
To the boyish Saint-Gaudens Sherman had seemed the typical American
hero. To the matured artist he had sat for an admirable bust. The
sculptor had thus an unusual knowledge of his subject, a perfect
sympathy with his theme; and he has produced a work of epic sweep and
significance. Tall and erect, the general sits his horse, his military
cloak bellying out behind him, his trousers strapped down over his
shoes, his hat in his right hand, dropping at arm's length behind his
knee, his bare head like that of an old eagle, looking straight forward.
The horse is as long and thin as his rider, with a tremendous stride;
and his big head, closely reined in, twitches viciously at the bridle.
Before the horse and rider, upon the ground, yet as if new-lighted there
from an aerial existence, half walks, half flies, a splendid winged
figure, one arm outstretched, the other brandishing the palm--Victory
leading them on. She has a certain fierce wildness of aspect, but her
rapt gaze and half-open mouth indicate the seer of visions--peace is
ahead, and an end of war. On the bosom of her gown is broidered the
eagle of the United States, for she is an American Victory, as this is
an American man on an American horse; and the broken pine bough beneath
the horse's feet localizes the victorious march--it is the march through
Georgia to the sea.
Long ago I expressed my conviction that the "Sherman Monument" is third
in rank of the great equestrian statues of the world. To-day I am not
sure that that conviction remains unaltered. Donatello's "Gattamelata"
is unapproached and unapproachable in its quiet dignity; Verrocchio's
"Colleone" is unsurpassed in picturesque attractiveness. Both are
consecrated by the admiration of centuries. To-day I am not sure that
this work of an American sculptor is not, in its own way, equal to
either of them.
There are those who are troubled by the introduction of the symbolical
figures in such works as the "Shaw Memorial" and the Sherman statue;
and, indeed, it was a bold enterprise to place them where they are,
mingling thus in the same work the real and the ideal, the actual and
the allegorical. But the boldness seems to me abundantly justified by
success. In either case the entire work is pitched to the key of these
figures; the treatment of the whole is so elevated by style and so
infused with imagination that there is no shock of unlikeness or
difficulty of transition. And these figures are not merely necessary to
the composition, an essential part of its beauty--they are even more
essential to the expression of the artist's thought. Without that
hovering Angel of Death, the negro troops upon the "Shaw Memorial" might
be going anywhere, to battle or to review. We should have a passing
regiment, nothing more. Without the striding Victory before him, the
impetuous movement of Sherman's horse would have no especial
significance. And these figures are no mere conventional allegories;
they are true creations. To their creator the unseen was as real as the
seen--nay, it was more so. That Shaw was riding to his death at the
command of duty was, the only thing that made Shaw memorable. That
Sherman was marching to a victory the fruits of which should be peace
was the essential thing about Sherman. Death and Duty--Victory and
Peace--in each case the compound ideal found its expression in a figure
entirely original and astonishingly living: a _person_ as truly as Shaw
or Sherman themselves. He could not have left them out. It were
better to give up the work entirely than to do it otherwise than as he
saw it.
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