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SALUTES
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SALUTES: May
Many sculptures in Manhattan are linked to important dates in U.S. or world history. Here are a few for May.
May 2005: Time to
Panic
* The Great God Pan, by George Gray Barnard, 1894-1899; given to Columbia University in 1907. Enter the campus on the west side at 116th St., turn left toward the Low Library (which has French's Alma Mater in front of it), bear left again into the quadrangle between Earl, Lewisohn and Dodge.
Pan, a Greek deity half goat, half man (here he has goat ears and legs), was blamed by the Greeks for "panic" - sudden, extreme and irrational fear. Zamfir fans should thank him for the invention of the Pan pipes. Pan's association with Dionysus, Greek god of wine and sponsor of rowdy parties, may have been what led early Christians to particularly detest Pan. Satan's cloven hoofs and horns seem to be based on Pan's.
Alfred Corning Clark, a big name in the Singer Sewing Machine Company, was a patron of young George Gray Barnard. Clark's widow offered this statue to Central Park, but there was some difficulty finding a site for it - perhaps its pagan nudity seemed out of place among the frock-coated gentlemen already in residence. In 1907 it was offered instead to its present owner, Columbia University. It seems appropriate to salute Pan in May, as finals approach.
Barnard (1863-1938) designed the figures of Arts and History on the façade of the New York Public Library at 42nd St. and Fifth Avenue. The Clark family donated his 1894 Struggle of Two Natures of Man (a work I particularly dislike, for philosophical rather than esthetic reasons) to the Metropolitan Museum, where it's usually displayed in the American Wing Courtyard. Barnard's collection of medieval art, kept in Washington Heights, formed the basis for the Metropolitan Museum's Cloisters. For more on Barnard, see http://www.kankakeecountymuseum.com/exhibits/barnard/barnard2.html (illustrated biography) and http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,737372,00.html (a TIME Magazine article of 2/11/1929, with Barnard's very odd definition of art).
Tangents: The Great God Pan, an 1894 novel by Arthur Machen (Welsh-born author of sci-fi and horror stories), may or may not have a connection with this sculpture: go read it, and let me know. (Summary in Wikipedia: www.answers.com/topic/arthur-machen). Elizabeth Barrett Browning (d. 1861) refers to "the great god Pan" in "A Musical Instrument," so perhaps the phrase was more widely used in the nineteenth century than it is today.
May 2006: Puck and Puck
*
Puck, by Henry Baerer,
1885. Puck Building, 295 Lafayette St. at Houston. A 6-foot Puck
faces Lafayette St. (top illustration); a 10-foot Puck overlooks
the corner of Houston and Mulberry (second illustration).
Puck was America's first successful humor magazine. Its founder, Joseph Keppler (1838-1894), named it after the mischievous character in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, whose famous line he adopted as his magazine's motto: "What fools these mortals be!" Issued weekly in German from 1876 to 1896 and in English from 1877 to 1918, Puck was a substantial 10 x 13.5" with several pages of color illustrations. Keppler, a German immigrant, was a master lithographer whose cartoons rivaled those of Thomas Nast. Unlike Nast he was attacked both political parties with gusto, as well as Catholics, Mormons, Chinese, Irish, suffragettes, trade unions, Thomas Edison and Joseph Pulitzer.
Each Puck sports a top hat and tails. In the proper left hand is a mirror, in the right an oversize writing instrument. Over the left shoulder, on a sash, is slung a book or satchel bearing the magazine's motto. The sculptures are slightly different - note the angle and detail of the pen, and the knee dimples.
Beneath their bright gilt the Pucks are zinc, a popular late 19th-century sculpture material when there was a shortage of time or money. Zinc sculptures could be quickly assembled from small pieces. The joins were hidden by a coat of paint that simulated more expensive marble or bronze. Temperance at Tompkins Square Park (Ave. A, south of the 9th St. transverse) is an inexpensive zinc copy of a work by Danish sculptor Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen. (The building atop which it sat held a fountain; temperance advocates hoped that public availability of water would encourage New Yorkers to stop guzzling alcoholic beverages.) In the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn stands a zinc sculpture of a 12-year-old drummer boy who was killed by friendly fire) in June 1861 - one of the first Brooklyn casualties of the Civil War. (See illustration below.)
Puck
magazine was headquartered from 1885 in this red brick building whose
round arches mark it as Romanesque Revival. Structurally, the building is
related to the Chicago-Style buildings developed by (among others) Burnham
& Root and Sullivan & Adler. The steel frame allowed much larger bands of
windows along the ground floor than were possible on the masonry buildings
constructed in New York City well into the 1880s.
See "Joseph Keppler" in American National Biography. A number of Puck cartoons are available at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/PUCK/toons.html . Although the name of Puck's sculptor is sometimes given as Caspar Buberl, the signature "Baerer" is clearly visible on the rock beside Puck's right foot. For a list of conflicting citations, see item IAS 88300006 in the Smithsonian's Inventory of American Sculpture, http://siris-artinventories.si.edu . On zinc sculptures, see the informative page on the Smithsonian's website: http://www.si.edu/scmre/learning/zincscuplture.htm . On Clarence D. MacKenzie, the drummer boy, see http://www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/civilwar/cwdoc027.html, with an illustration.
May 19, 1895: Death of Jose Marti
*
Jose Marti, by Anna Hyatt Huntington, 1959
(dedicated 1965). Central Park South at Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the
Americas).
Marti (1853-1895), a major force in the movement for Cuban independence from Spain, lived in exile New York from 1880 to 1895. Early in 1895 he returned to Cuba and was given an honorary rank in the revolutionary army. He insisted on being on the front lines at the battle of Dos Rios, where he suffered a fatal bullet wound.
Like Joan of Arc, of whom New York boasts another wonderful Huntington sculpture, Marti is more to be admired for the courage of his convictions than for the convictions themselves. He praised liberty without any notion of the requirements for gaining and keeping it, and was a thorough-going collectivist, altruist and socialist:
Talent is a gift that brings with it an obligation to serve the world, and not ourselves, for it is not of our making. To use for our exclusive benefit what is not ours is theft. Culture, which makes talent shine, is not completely ours either, nor can we place it solely at our disposal. Rather, it belongs mainly to our country, which gave it to us, and to humanity, from which we receive it as a birthright. A selfish man is a thief.
More excerpts by Marti are available at http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/marti.pensamientos.10797.html .
The statue of Marti is radically different from most sculptures of soldiers, in that it shows him at the moment of his death rather than a moment of triumph. (Think, for contrast, of Sherman or Sheridan.) If you agree with Ayn Rand’s view that art helps men focus on matters of fundamental importance, what are you meant to think about when viewing Marti? And how would your life change if you focused on that? I'll have more to say on this in my New York Objectivist Club lecture of 5/22/04, available eventually on audiotape. (Check the Lectures, Essays and Reports list on this site for details.)
This was Anna Hyatt Huntington’s last major work, finished when she was 82 years old. Aside from the Joan of Arc on Riverside Drive mentioned above, she also produced the full set of sculpture for the Hispanic Society, including the magnificent Cid. Many more of her sculptures are on display at Brookgreen Sculpture Gardens in Murrells Inlet, S.C. Founded by Anna and her husband Archer Huntington, Brookgreen remains America's largest outdoor sculpture garden, displaying only representational sculpture.
For more on Ayn Rand's theory of art, see The Romantic Manifesto and Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 12. Marti is discussed in more detail in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.
May 24, 1844: Morse Sends First Telegraph Message on Completed Line from Baltimore to Washington
*
Samuel F.B. Morse, by Byron M. Pickett. 1870.
Just inside Central Park at 72nd St., near Fifth Avenue.
In 1844, with a Congressional appropriation of $30,000 (a substantial sum in the mid- 19th century), Morse and his partners ran the world’s first telegraph line, a 40-mile stretch between Baltimore and Washington. The first message on the completed line from Baltimore to Washington was transmitted on May 24, 1844 (160 years ago). The text, “What hath God wrought?,” was chosen by the young daughter of a friend of Morse.
Early in May, before the line was completed, Morse offered to telegraph the results of the Whig Party’s national convention from Baltimore to Washington. The message would be hand-carried from Baltimore to Annapolis Junction, then telegraphed from there. When the message reached Washington, it was assumed that the transmission had become garbled: it stated that James K. Polk, a dark-horse candidate, had won the nomination on the first ballot. (Polk became the eleventh president of the U.S., 1845-49.)
Morse was originally a painter. Although he was one of the better painters working in America at the time, he could barely pay his living expenses, and decided to turn his energies to the invention of a working telegraph. His dramatic shift in career and his ultimate success is a welcome reminder that “ambition” is not a term of opprobrium:
"Ambition" means the systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one's goal. Like the word "selfishness," and for the same reasons, the word "ambition" has been perverted to mean only the pursuit of dubious or evil goals, such as the pursuit of power; this left no concept to designate the pursuit of actual values. But "ambition" as such is a neutral concept: the evaluation of a given ambition as moral or immoral depends on the nature of the goal. A great scientist or a great artist is the most passionately ambitious of men. A demagogue seeking political power is ambitious. So is a social climber seeking "prestige." So is a modest laborer who works conscientiously to acquire a home of his own. The common denominator is the drive to improve the conditions of one's existence, however broadly or narrowly conceived. --Ayn Rand, "Tax Credits for Education" (The Ayn Rand Letter I, 12, 1)
Morse’s original telegraph is on display in the Smithsonian. The Central Park statue of Morse has a replica of it under Morse’s left hand. For more on Morse and the revolutionary, worldwide effects of the telegraph, see Essay #7 in Forgotten Delights: The Producers.
May 29, 1979: Death of Mary Pickford
* Mary Pickford as Little Lord Fauntleroy, by Alexander Stirling Calder. 1928-1929. Miller Building, 1552 Broadway: statues are on the north side of 46th Street, just east of Broadway, second floor.
Mary Pickford (1892-1979), one of cinema’s earliest and most influential stars, began her career in 1909 - barely a decade after Edison unveiled his Vitascope. At the time, “flickers” were typically 8 to 12 minutes long and only directors were credited. Pickford was instrumental in getting name recognition for actors and became one of the industry’s earliest stars, rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Skillfully negotiating ever-higher salaries, the 24-year-old was making $150,000 a year by 1916, when an average family income was under $2,000. She also gradually won budgetary and creative control over her films. Director Adolph Zukor, impressed by her ability to grasp details of script, camera angles, directing, acting, wardrobe, editing and promotion, privately commented that if she’d gone into manufacturing she might have become president of United States Steel. Over the course of her career, she was featured in 140 one-reelers and 52 feature films (of which only seven are available on DVD).
In 1919, with Chaplin, director D.W. Griffith and husband Douglas Fairbanks, Pickford founded United Artists, as a way to allow actors to control distribution of their films. Although she stopped acting in 1933, Pickford applied her financial acumen to UA’s affairs well into the 1950s.
The sculpture on the Miller Building shows her as Little Lord Fauntleroy, with her famous sausage curls fashioned into the little boy’s long hair. In Fauntleroy, released in 1921, she played not only the young boy who inherits an earldom, but the boy’s mother. The sophisticated double-exposure techniques and special effects that created a size disparity between the child and mother were landmarks of special effects technology.
Pickford’s sculpture is on the façade of the I. Miller Building, which bears the motto “The show folks shoe shop dedicated to beauty in footwear.” The building, in the heart of the Theater District, also bears sculptures honoring Ethel Barrymore (drama), Marilyn Miller (musical comedy), and Rosa Ponselle (opera). All are in sad need of cleaning. The photo of Pickford above, by the way, includes 3 pigeons that have no business being there.
On Mary Pickford, see Aniko Bodroghkozy in *American National Biography, http://www.anb.org/articles/18/18-00937.html (Feb. 2000) and Hugh Munro Neely’s biography on the website of the Mary Pickford Institute (www.marypickford.com). Pickford’s autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow (1954), which is charmingly told but has less information about her business dealings than I’d like, includes pictures of her as Fauntleroy and Fauntleroy’s mother. For more on Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, which I recommend even if you’re over age 10, click here.
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