Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan, Essay 5

Charging Bull

By Arturo Di Modica, 1989

Bibliography & Out-takes

• Index page for OMOM bibliography, out-takes and discussion questions

• Published comments on the sculpture

• On the sculptor, Arturo Di Modica

• On the subject, Charging Bull

• Photos: Forgotten Delights blog entry for 12/28/06. Forgotten Delights Salute of March 2004. Same picture for both, of the Bull in front of an American flag and the NYSE Christmas tree.

Published comments on the sculpture

New York Times 12/16/1989 (with a photo of the Bull lashed to a flatbed truck in front of the Stock Exchange), 12/20/1989, 10/3/1993.

New York Post 06/26/1999: reports an unauthorized copy of Charging Bull in Ningbo, China. Informed of the forgery, Di Modica promised legal action.

New York Post 11/24/2003: the Bull briefly disappeared, apparently moved by a contractor to prevent possible damage.

New York Newsday 12/20/2004 and New York Post 12/21/2004: noting that the Bull was for sale by Di Modica at a minimum price of $5 million, but the buyer would have to agree to keep it at its present location and donate it to NYC, in exchange for a tax break and branding rights. As far as I can tell, no one snapped up this offer.

In a conversation with me in 2004 Henry Stern, former Parks Commissioner, said that Charging Bull has been on City property for 15 years, and can probably be counted as City property now. Under copyright laws, however, ownership does not necessarily include the right to reproduce copies or sell images: see below.

New York Post 9/22/06: reports that Di Modica copyrighted the Bull in 1998 and was taking Wal-Mart, the North Fork Bank and other businesses to court for unauthorized use of images of the Bull. On the fine points of copyright law re sculpture and architecture, see the ArtLaw page.

The New York City Parks Department's historical marker on Bowling Green mentions Charging Bull.

SIRIS (Smithsonian Institution, Inventory of American Sculpture) IAS NY000119.

On the sculptor, Arturo Di Modica

The only available information about Di Modica seems to be what appears in the Wikipedia article on him.

On the subject, Charging Bull

On the derivation of "bulls" and "bears," see Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991.

Most of the material on the Internet regarding the origins of "bulls" and "bears" in the Wall Street sense is simply a rehash of the Oxford English Dictionary entries on those two words.

Thomas Nast's famous "Battle of the Bulls & the Bears" cartoon appeared in Harper's Weekly 9/10/1864, p. 592. It shows a bull and a bear fighting while their young look on. Behind them, a bag labelled "gold" tumbles from the top of a wall bearing the sign "Wall Street." The wall is inscribed at the corner (vertically) with the numbers 100, 200, 300. The subhead is "Humpty Dumpty on a wall, Humpty Dumpty got a fall!" The advertisements that fill the rest of this Harper's Weekly page include offers for Bridgewater Paint ("in several drab shades"), American Steel Collars, Fogg's Patent Lever Buckle (don't buy your gaiters or shoes without them!), Remington's Army and Navy Revolver ("Warranted superior to any other pistol of the kind"), Benjamin's Rupture Cure Truss ("challenges the world to equal it in retaining and perfectly curing hernia, or rupture"), and new publications by Harper & Brothers such as Carlyle's History of Friedrich II and Thackeray's Denis Duval. Harper's Weekly is now available online, by subscription.

The Sidebar in Outdoor Monuments is from a Harper's Weekly article of 9/8/1860 arguing that all of us are either bulls or bears. After the section quoted there, the article continues: "The hopeful man who puts his money into new enterprises - builds houses, and ships, and railroads - founds lyceums, and establishes debating societies, is a bull; he who sees in the future railroads ruined, ships wrecked, houses untenanted, lyceums deserted, and dull debates at 'the Athenaeum,' and who therefore will have nothing to do with them, is a bear. The one is a type of enterprise; the other of caution." I found particularly interesting the type of ventures the bull would favor (the Atlantic Telegraph, flying machines) and those the bear would expect to fail (the Erie Railroad, Walker in Nicaragua, Louis Napoleon, the British in India, Garibaldi in Italy, and all New York banks).

Sarah Burns, "Party Animals: Thomas Nast, William Holbrook Beard, and the Bears of Wall Street," American Art Journal 30:1-2, pp. 9-35, includes a long section (pp. 19-33) on the imagery of bulls and bears on Wall Street in the 1860s to 1870s, with a footnote (n.18, p. 35) on the derivation of bulls and bears as applied to the stock market. (Article available from JSTOR.)