Sculpture

The mainstream, high-style sculpture of late 19th-century America, largely public monuments and architectural embellishments, was an important chapter in the story of the American Renaissance. Commissioned mainly by government and other corporate bodies, sculpture advanced civic virtues. The formal neoclassicism of Rome that had dominated sculpture at mid-century was replaced by the freer, yet still academic, Beaux-Arts classicism of France. The human figure, executed in marble and bronze, was the dominant subject matter. A degree of immediacy and naturalism was thus injected into the long heritage of Greco-Roman statuary.

Most of the prominent sculptors trained in Paris, either at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or in affiliated ateliers. Americans returned home to establish their own ateliers for the production of large-scale sculpture. With drawings and clay maquettes, the artist conceived the basic form; then specialized assistants, working in the studio, the foundry, and the marble yard, enlarged it in plaster and cast or carved it. Professionalism was furthered by the exhibition of maquettes and finished works in national and international exhibitions and with the founding of the National Sculpture Society in 1893.

Ambitious buildings of the era included elaborate sculptural programs. Alexander Milne Calder supervised sculpture, which encompassed figural groups as well as capitals and pilasters, for the Philadelphia City Hall, built from 1871 to 1881. Daniel Chester French, a master at personifying abstract concepts, kept a large workshop busy for decades; his important commissions included the Minnesota State Capital in Saint Paul and the U. S. Customs House in New York City. An important subset of architectural sculpture was ephemeral, constructed from a plaster and straw mixture known as staff and erected at world’s fairs and other celebrations. At the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, millions saw the colossal Republic and Barge of State by French and Frederick MacMonnies, respectively, which decorated the central lagoon, while virtually every building in the fair was adorned with sculpture.

Civil War memorials and life-size bronzes depicting honored native sons were commissioned for countless public squares. While too many of these were formulaic, many incorporated an expressive naturalism. Among the best was John Q. A. Ward’s Henry Ward Beecher (1891, Borough Hall Square, Brooklyn). Collaborative works with architects were common; monuments by architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens were among the style-setters. The pairing of French and Henry Bacon produced the Lincoln Memorial (1922, Washington, D. C.).

A smaller percentage of the era’s sculpture was concerned less with memorializing and more with the exploration of form, surface, and psychological insight. Herbert Adams’s polychromatic busts were derived from early Renaissance sculpture, while Frederic Remington’s bronzes celebrated the American cowboy. George Gray Barnard’s Struggle of the Two Natures in Man (1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) owed a debt to the expressive innovations of Auguste Rodin. Occasionally, sculpture was controversial, especially the nude. In 1893 temperance and women’s groups protested that MacMon-nies’s Bacchante and Infant Faun was licentious; in opposition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave it a home, and the Luxembourg Museum of Paris ordered a replica.

See also Aesthetic movement; art and architecture.

Further reading: Michele H. Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America, 2d ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press; New York: Cornwall Books, 1984); Lorado Taft, The History of American Sculpture, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

—Karen Zukowski

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