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SALUTES
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SALUTES: January
Many sculptures in Manhattan are linked to important dates in U.S. or world history. The current selections lean toward the martial, because the second volume of the Forgotten Delights series of guidebooks (now in progress) includes many soldiers.
January 8, 1975: Death of Richard Tucker
*
Richard Tucker,
by Milton Hebald, 1979. Broadway at 66th St. / Columbus Ave.,
across from Lincoln Center.
Richard Tucker (1913-1975) is in the running for best American tenor, and even to be in the running for such a title is pretty impressive. He grew up singing Jewish liturgical music in Brooklyn, and was eventually offered a contract by the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera: “If you can hold an audience of 2000 in a synagogue you can hold an audience of 3600 in an opera house.” Tucker debuted at the Metropolitan in 1945. Over the next thirty years he did a whopping 734 performances there, in over thirty leading roles. He is the only person to have had his funeral service on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House.
By all accounts Tucker had a fierce drive to excel, a great natural talent and great technique. In addition he had a phenomenal aural memory. Singing dozens of roles in Italian, Tucker had a diction so pure he was often mistaken for a native of Florence – although he didn’t understand a word of Italian. Neil Kurtzman commented, “His vocal production was pure, like silver seems the most apt comparison. Like a silver trumpet is even better. While his physical acting was inept, his vocal characterizations were passionate and intense. He was an Italian tenor through and through. He sounds more Italian than most native singers from the boot. I can think of no Italian singer of his worth and vocal size who could match his technique. Of the non-Italians only Björling is in the same league and he couldn’t trill very well and had a much smaller voice…. In brief, he’s on the very short list of the greatest Italian tenors of the last century.” (http://www.grandi-tenori.com/articles/articles_kurtzman_tucker_01.htm )
On January 11th, 2005, the Richard Tucker Foundation (founded by the singer’s family) will award to an up-and-coming opera singer the $30,000 Richard Tucker Award, sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize of opera." See http://www.richardtucker.org. Hebald's official website is http://www.miltonhebald.com .
January
9, 1875: Birth of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
* Washington Heights - Inwood War Memorial, by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1921. Broadway and St. Nicholas Ave., between 167th and 168th Streets.
Whitney (1875-1942) trained in the classical sculpture tradition, although she was also strongly influenced by Auguste Rodin. During World War I she established a hospital for war victims in Juilly, France, and her months there inspired many sculptures of soldiers with war injuries, executed (like this one) in a loose, impressionistic style, with minimal attention to surface texture and detail.
These Whitney sculptures are part of a trend in early 20th-century New York sculpture. Portraits of outstanding military leaders such as Sherman and Farragut cease to be produced, replaced by anonymous, often wounded figures. Compare Karl Ilava’s 107th Infantry Memorial, Fifth Ave. at 67th St. For more on this change of subject, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
Whitney’s other sculptures include the Titanic Memorial of 1914 in Washington, D.C., whose pose inspired a moment in the movie Titanic; Buffalo Bill, 1924, at the entrance to Yellowstone National Park in Cody, Wyoming; and Manhattan’s own Peter Stuyvesant, 1936.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, used some of her inherited wealth to support young artists. She also contributed funds for the 1913 Armory Show, which introduced modernism to America. (One of the most notorious exhibits was Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.) When the Metropolitan Museum refused Whitney's gift of 500-odd modernist pieces she used them as the core of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened its doors in 1931.
For more on Whitney see pp. 169-176 in Conner and Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture, which has fantastic photos by David Finn. (If you don’t like Whitney’s work, the book includes works by MacMonnies, Frishmuth, Huntington, and others that are marvelous.)
January 1412: Birth of
Joan of Arc
* Joan of Arc, by Anna Hyatt Huntington, dedicated 1915. Bronze, over-life-size. Riverside Drive and West 93rd Street. Faces west; best seen in the afternoon, and after the leaves have fallen.
Since I'm not religious, I'm not a soldier, I'm not a horseback rider, and I'm not French, you might wonder what it is that appeals to me about this statue of Joan of Arc.
In a word: conviction. Even though I don't share her beliefs, her vocation or her nationality, it's wonderful to see absolute certainty paired with willingness to act. You can see it in her uplifted glance and her posture, in the way she raises her sword, stands in her stirrups and prepares to rush into battle. Statues of Joan at prayer have no effect on me. This one does.
When you assume that only works of art reflecting your own philosophical and moral premises can give you a lift, you deprive yourself of a great deal of potentially inspiring art. A work of art doesn’t teach you what's right: it shows you what the artist considers important about man and the world. A sculpture such as Joan of Arc, showing that having strong values and acting on them is possible and good, can give you a tremendous emotional boost, even if you don't share Joan’s beliefs. A particularly good discussion on this topic is Dr. Leonard Peikoff's “The Survival Value of Great (Though Philosophically False) Art,” available from www.AynRandBookstore.com.
This sculpture was
commissioned in 1914 to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth
of Joan of Arc (1412-1431), and was dedicated in 1915. Since World War I
had already begun, its unveiling was also treated as a salute to the
spirit of France.
Hyatt (who later married Archer Huntington, heir to the Central Pacific Railroad fortune) had already made a name as an animalier - an artist specializing in animal figures. Here the wonderful lines of the muscular, spirited horse make an effective contrast to the diminutive figure of Joan, stiffly upright and encased from head to toe in plate armor, with only her young, unlined face visible.
For an equestrian statue by the same artist with a very different message, compare the statue of the Spanish medieval hero El Cid in the courtyard of the Hispanic Society of America, Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets. See the September Salute to El Cid.
Anna and her husband, Archer Huntington, founded Brookgreen Sculpture Gardens in Murrells Inlet, S.C., which remains America's largest outdoor sculpture garden, displaying only representational sculpture. If you like the sculptures on this site, make a point of visiting Brookgreen.
For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
January 15, 2005: On Studying History
*
History and Romance, by Paul
Weyland Bartlett, 1914. Far left of the the attic story of the New York
Public Library, FIfth Ave. at 42nd St.
As a homeschooling parent, I've always been dissatisfied with history textbooks. The surveys are usually disjointed, and the ones devoted to a single period often wallow in a morass of detail. They bore my 12-year-old daughter and they aggravate me. So starting this year, my daughter and I are writing our own world history textbook. My essay on studying history follows our joint essay on Mesopotamia. I'm putting the essay up on this site because it elaborates on a couple important facts about studying history that have driven everything I write on www.ForgottenDelights.com about the sculptures standing in New York City.
These observations seem obvious to me, but stating the obvious - by which I mean here stating fundamental principles - is the most difficult part of being a teacher. It's ever so much easier to provide statistics about the dimensions of the pyramids than to explain succinctly what ideas made the Egyptians act as they did. Click here to read the essay.
January 17, 1706: Birth of Benjamin Franklin
* Benjamin Franklin, by Ernst Plassmann, ca. 1872. Bronze, over life-size. Nassau St. and Park Row at Nassau St., on the east side of the street (in front of Pace University, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge entrance ramp).
Franklin's
often thought of as comfortably plump old gentleman, urbane, witty,
diplomatic. He was on the committee that drafted the Declaration of
Independence in 1776, served as America's minister plenipotentiary in
France during the Revolution, and helped negotiate the final peace treaty
with Great Britain afterward.
But that was Franklin in his 70s. He began working in a printer’s shop at age 12, earning enough money to retire in his early 40s. He then began his second, and perhaps most remarkable, career - in science. Franklin was the first American to win an international reputation as a scientist, and the first scientist ever to become famous wholly for work done in electricity. The very terms we use for electricity are Franklin's: plus, minus, positive, negative, charge, battery.
He invented the lightning rod, of course, as well as bifocal glasses, the rocking chair, and the Franklin stove - all still in widespread use 250 years later. He published the first chart of the Gulf Stream, contributed to our knowledge of atmospheric convection currents and the movement of storms, and conceived of "Daylight Savings Time." As one biographer summed it up, "He had great curiosity, amazing versatility, astonishing genius, and, above all, an enormous capacity for self-discipline and sustained work." (Lemay, American National Biography VIII, 394. See also Dictionary of Scientific Biography V, 129-39.)
This statue, erected to Franklin in his capacity as printer (he holds a rolled copy of the Pennsylvania Gazette), stands near the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge, in an area formerly known as "Printers Row" because it included the offices of the Times and the Tribune.
January 25, 1759: Birth of Robert Burns
* Robert Burns, by Sir John Steell, ca. 1880. Bronze, over life-size. Central Park Mall, southern entrance (Literary Walk).
I
find this particular sculpture less than inspiring: the man looks as if
he's about to swoon. But let’s ignore the statue and concentrate on it
subject, Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scotland’s national poet. His birthday,
January 25th, is celebrated in Scotland as “Burns Night,” with
a centerpiece of haggis (calf or sheep organ meat boiled in the animal’s
stomach) and a reading of Burns'
"Address to a
Haggis."
You’re probably familiar with Burns’ poem about a louse, and you may be aware that “Auld Lang Syne” is his work as well. Let me present to you several other poems by Burns that are less well known, at least in the United States.
Remember that you can’t get the full effect of poetry unless you hear it read aloud.
“A Red, Red Rose” (1794 – nice words for your significant other on Valentine’s Day)
O my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June:
O my Luve's like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.
Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.
And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve!
And fare-thee-weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' 'twere ten thousand mile!
----------
Epigram On Rough Roads (1786 – presented here just in time for pothole season in the Northeast)
I'm now arrived--thanks to the gods!--
Thro' pathways rough and muddy,
A certain sign that makin roads
Is no this people's study:
Altho' I’m not wi' Scripture cram'd,
I'm sure the Bible says
That heedless sinners shall be damn'd,
Unless they mend their ways.
----------------
Inscription For An Altar Of Independence
At Kerroughtree, the Seat of Mr. Heron (1795)
Thou of an independent mind,
With soul resolv'd, with soul resign'd;
Prepar'd Power's proudest frown to brave,
Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;
Virtue alone who dost revere,
Thy own reproach alone dost fear--
Approach this shrine, and worship here.
-----
For more works by Burns, go to http://www.robertburns.org/works/ . To read Ogden Nash’s tribute to Burns (“But of Robert Burns I’m a serious fan, / He wrote like an angel and lived like a man”), you’ll have to find a printed book with his “Everything’s Haggis in Hoboken, or Scots What Hae Hae.” Nash’s works are still under copyright protection, and few of them appear on the web. I found the poem in the Pocket Book of Ogden Nash, pp. 49-50.
January 27, 1901: Death of Giuseppe Verdi
* Giuseppe Verdi,
by Pasquale Civiletti, 1906. White Carrara marble on granite pedestal,
total height 25.5 feet. West 73rd St. and Broadway (at the station for the
1, 2, 3 and 9 trains).
Verdi (1813-1901) was the most distinguished Italian opera composer of the 19th century, with over 20 operas to his credit. Although I am abysmally ignorant about opera, I am intrigued by one biographer’s comment that “He devoted himself to a series of operas in which the causes of individual freedom, patriotism, loyalty, and nobility of the human spirit were paramount." This sounds like the sort of performance that would be much more worth my time than, for example, the horridly depressing but critically acclaimed 21 Grams. (Could I have that 125 minutes of my life back, please?)
This elaborate monument includes not only a portrait of Verdi, but four of the most famous characters from his operas: Falstaff, Leonora, Aida and Otello. Carlo Barsotti, editor of the newspaper Il Progresso Italo-Americano at the beginning of the 20th century, was largely responsible not only for raising funds to the Verdi monument, but also for raising funds for the Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle, the Giovanni da Verrazzano in Battery Park, the Dante near Lincoln Center, and the Garibaldi in Washington Square Park.
The quote in the first paragraph is from the Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2002. For more on this sculpture, see Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
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