Memorial Sculpture: By Artist or Committee?

I seldom mention sculpture here because I tend to restrict subjects to those that I've dabbled in. The last serious piece of sculpture I made was done when I was 14 years old; I hope that explains my lack of strong interest.

That aside, there are matters sculptural that need to be raised now and then. For instance, the problem of public sculptures memorializing people or events. The main problem here, in recent times, lies in the conflict between the modernist-biased Art Establishment desiring sculptures to follow modernist aesthetic principles and the desires of the general public which, on average, has tastes that favor tradition representation. A lesser complication has to do with politics, as we shall see below.

Given that monumental sculptures are expensive to create, their cost is typically borne by public funds, a rich donor, or a public subscription of voluntary donations. The process sometimes includes competitive submissions of proposals and in most cases probably involves appointment of a committee to select the sculptor and the design. The last factor is why I'm inclined to give the committee more credit than the sculptor for the final result, especially work works completed over the last 50 or so years.

Here is food for thought.

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George Washington on University of Washington Campus
Sculpted by Lorado Taft, 1909. More information about this respectful statue is here.

Standing Lincoln (Lincoln: The Man), Chicago
By Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1887. Illinois was Lincoln's home state, so Saint-Gaudens, one of America's foremost sculptors at the time, was an obvious choice. The Wikipedia entry on it is here.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, D.C.
Details on the entire memorial are here. The sculptor was George Segal and the memorial was dedicated in 1997.

Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, London
The sculptor of this 1973 statue was Ivor Roberts-Jones whose inclination was to mild modernism; more information about the statue is here.

Father Damien on the state capitol grounds, Honolulu
This 1969 statue was the result of a competition won by fashionable modernist sculptress Marisol Escobar.

The selection of examples above is tiny, so I won't make generalizations even though it's tempting to do so.

The Washington and Lincoln statues are from an era when such monuments were intended to be respectful and sculptors and committees largely did the best of their abilities to convey that respect.

The Father Damien statue selection apparently was the result of a conscious desire by the committee to be different, to go modernist. I find the cartoonish statue disrespectful of the courageous, selfless man it was intended to honor.

True respect also seems lacking in the Churchill statue. He comes off as a sluggish old cripple (note the cane and how it is shown being handled, especially when viewed from the rear) rather than how he was at the peak of his career during the terrible summer and fall of 1940 when the war came close to being lost. I think members of the committee were not strong fans of Winston.

Jump ahead to the mid-1990s and the Roosevelt statue. The sculptor was a modernist and modernism was riding as high as ever. Yet the statue is as conservatively naturalist as those of Washington and Lincoln. Why? I don't know for sure, but I guess that the committee really, truly wanted to honor and respect FDR and made sure that nothing like the Churchill or Father Damien statues would be found at the memorial.

Brangwyn's Railroad Posters

Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) is perhaps best remembered for his murals. He also did easel paintings and posters, many of the latter in support of Britain's effort in the Great War.

But that was not all. For a while in the 1920s he created a few posters for what became the London and North Eastern Railway, a major line that ran trains from London into Scotland along a route near the eastern coast of the island. (The London, Midland and Scottish followed a more westerly path north, while the Great Western and Southern railroads served other locations.)

At the time Brangwyn created the designs shown below, a trend toward simplified images was getting underway. Perhaps because Brangwyn was probably incapable of delivering a simplified image, his career in railroad poster making was comparatively brief.

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Durham

Firth of Forth Bridge

Scotland

Over the Nidd near Harrogate

Multi Ritratti: Hazel Martyn Lavery

Sir John Lavery (1856-1941) was orphaned, yet through determination and ability rose to become one of Britain's foremost portrait artists.

Despite his busy career, Lavery found time to paint numerous portraits of his favorite subject, Hazel (1886-1935), his second wife. Biographical information on the Laverys can be found via the links above.

I'm likely to devote an entire post to Lavery some day, so won't say much more here other than that even though he is best known as a portrait painter, I think his best work dealt with landscapes. His portraits convey their subjects, but his brushwork seems fussier than I think it should be.

Let us now feast our eyes on the lovely Hazel.

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Photo by E.O. Hoppé - 1916

Hazel Martyn
Apparently painted before their 1909 marriage, though I can't independently confirm the date.

Mrs. Lavery Sketching - 1910
She also was an artist.

Hazel in Rose and Gold - 1918

Red Rose - 1923

Lady Lavery - 1922

Lady Lavery as Kathleen Ní Houlihan - 1928

Irish 20 pound banknote
The painting above served as the basis for an image engraved for Irish currency of various denominations.

Lady Lavery - 1934
Painted not long before her death.

Regional Legislative Building Evolution

This posting is a selective look at the architectural evolution of sub-national legislative or parliament buildings in the United States and the United Kingdom. Admittedly, designing an intrinsically symbolic structure has never been easy, given all the formal and informal groups with a stake in the result. In the past, the easiest thing for the architect was to fall back on tradition. Nowadays, in the era of architectural egomania ....

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New York State
This 19th century state capitol building is unusual (for the USA) in that it was inspired by French châteaux.

Washington State
This late-1920s structure is far more typical of state capitol buildings, following the theme set by the national capitol in Washington, D.C. which, in turn, borrowed from cathedrals such as St. Peters in Rome and St. Paul's in London.

Oregon
Oregon's capitol from the 1930s retains a dome of sorts, but it's a drum-shaped variety.

Nebraska
This 1920s capitol design rejected conventional domes for a mini-domed Art Deco skyscraper style.

Hawaii
Being the latest state to be admitted to the union, Hawaii opted for a modernist structure that supposedly contained a whiff of native architecture.

Northern Ireland
The United Kingdom offers a different scene. The parliament building for Northern Ireland, completed 1932, is classical with a dash of imperial majesty.

Scotland
As devolution set in, Scotland opted to build a new parliament building (details here). The architect was Enric Miralles, not even a Scot, and the cost far exceeded original estimates. No doubt Miralles and his defenders have their justification for the design. Me? I consider it an ugly, un-Scottish mess. Where is Charles Rennie Macintosh when he is truly needed?

Glasgow Girls: The Second Team

First, there were the Glasgow Boys, a label attached to group of younger painters who built their careers roughly 1880-95. Once that name became established, it was a small step to refer to Glasgow-based female artists as the "Glasgow Girls," even though they were temporally out of synch with the "Boys" -- the "Girls" began making their marks about ten years later, on average. A Wikipedia entry dealing with both the Boys and Girls is here (scroll down).

I'll be reporting on two female painters who I regard as the best of the bunch in later posts. But first a little scene-setting by sometime Boy Sir John Lavery and Girls who were good, but not quite at the top of my list.

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"In the Studio" - John Lavery, c.1890

"Jean Macaulay Stevenson" (step-daughter) - Stansmore Dean

"Matron Anna C. Dick" - Jessie Alexandra Dick

"The Japanese Parasol" - Margaret Wright, c.1900

"The Silk Dress" (self-portrait) - Eleanor Allen Moore - c.1918

Self-Portrait - Dorothy Carleton Smyth, 1921

The Book is Completed

After more time than I care to admit to myself, I finally wrapped up my art history book and sent it off to Amazon as an e-book that can be downloaded onto one of their Kindles, an iPad, or certain other devices.

Back when I was blogging at 2Blowhards, I thought I would write about artists active 1850-1945 who were ignored by mainstream art historians. I would feature how and what they painted, of course, but I also wanted to treat how they dealt with the increasing influence of modernism. As it turned out, that concept wasn't really tractable due to the difficulty of finding the information I needed given the amount of time and effort I was willing to expend on the project. And given the advent of the Great Recession, the idea seemed like a long shot for acceptance by a publisher in any case.

I finally came around to accepting the notion of doing an e-book, even though that would mean sacrificing the richly-illustrated content that I originally had in mind. About that time I also realized that it wasn't just traditional painters who were having problems with modernism. Even famous avant-gardists had reached a point where they didn't quite know what to do next. This crisis happened around the end of the Great War.

At that point, everything clarified in my mind, and the actual writing of the book suddenly became a simple matter of grinding out the words, all 56,000 of them. Here is the blurb material I submitted to Amazon:

* * * * *
Art Adrift deals with a crisis of modern painting largely ignored in art history books. What happened was that modernist painters essentially stopped making major innovations by 1920 because nearly every alternative to the rejected traditional styles of painting had been tried. Yet it was believed by modernists that to become famous, an artist had to be creative in the manner of Picasso and other painters behind the art movements that bubbled up in the early 1900s. The problem of having to innovate when innovation was barely possible led to a period of comparative creative stagnation of the avant-garde between the world wars.

The 1920-1940 period also was one in which artists who were not originally modernist had to ponder how much modernism, if any, they needed to incorporate in their work in order to continue their careers. This added to the sense of drift and uncertainty in painting.

And then there were skilled magazine and advertising illustrators, aware of modernism, who had to deal with editors and art directors concerned that images be acceptable to the general public.

All this is brought to life via verbal sketches of dozens of painters and characteristics of their paintings.

This book begins by describing how modernism arose during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in fields such as architecture and industrial design as well as in painting. A chapter is devoted to the modernist narrative of art history 1850-1920 from the perspective of 1960, when modernism and abstract painting were thought to be the end-state of artistic evolution. A complementary chapter describes what non-modernist painters were doing at that time, painters ignored in the other narrative. Chapters deal with the matter of creativity and characteristics of modernist paintings, setting the stage for most of the remainder of the book which deals with what happened between 1920 and 1940 in the world of painting. The final chapter treats the continuing lack of direction in painting from 1960 to the present following a brief period of domination by abstract art (something already tried as early as 1912).

* * * * *
In the final chapter I also hypothesize why artists moved into fields other than painting.

Due to lack of a large budget for permissions and the dangerous waters of copyright law, illustrations are restricted to chapter headings until such time as I can find a hardcopy publisher (if ever). So a fair part of the book is comprised of short introductions to painters along with brief discussions about what modernist stylistic elements they used or rejected. This is to build my case regarding innovation following the Great War. In the Preface, I suggest that readers resort to the Internet to view paintings of interest that are mentioned in the text. Not an ideal situation, but my main goal was to get some ideas out without waiting years for the ideal publication to appear.

If my subject intrigues you, take a look here and perhaps download the book. The price is $9.95 or its equivalent in other currencies Amazon deals in.

A Somewhat Deceptive Exterior

What they say about judgments based on books and their covers can be applied to buildings -- in some cases, anyway. For instance, I get the feeling that many places in Italy where residential streets are lined with buildings with drab, fading stucco exterior surfaces actually camouflage totally modern interiors. I know that to be the case for a Mestre hotel I once stayed in.

The same applies in a more limited sense in Dublin at a place called The Burlington Hotel. It is a large structure beyond the Grand Canal that roughly marks the edge of the old southern part of the city. The exterior, as can be seen below, is nondescript t-square and triangle modernism common in the 1950s and 1960s. Our room was in need of renovation, but not drastically so. After all, the hotel caters to tour groups such as ours as well as to people in town on business or for conferences, so maybe we weren't assigned the snazziest digs. But it was okay; no complaints from a guy who spent three years of his life in army barracks and troop ships.

What interested me were the public areas that differed considerably from the drab exterior. I don't know if these were part of the original package or added in later years. They certainly have the appearance of having been re-done in recent times.

Let's look:

Here is how the hotel looks from the street. A large parking lot with room for large tour buses connects the street with the entrance. Note the exterior's hotel room floors. It was probably at its best in the architect's presentation rendering.

The lobby presents a contrast. The reception desk is at the rear to the right. The rest of the scene is occupied by a lounge area. Nice polished stone floors, carpets, wood trim and other touches of a warm variation on modernism. Not nearly as stark as the exterior.

Yet another contrast. This is the restaurant. Many of the larger hotels I've experienced in the British Isles feature traditional (Edwardian?) style restaurants, and so does the Burlington. This room makes me suspect that it wasn't part of the original modernist package.