Page 23 - Studio International - January 1968

America by designing bronze doors for the Capitol in Chester French and Frederick MacMonnies, persisted
Washington, elaborating a dull historical composition until it was superceded by that of Rodin. Art Nouveau,
upon an academic grasp of Ghiberti. too, began to make itself felt; on the eve of the First
There was an American subject matter for sculpture, of World War, we see it in the work of the young Paul
course—cowboys, Indians, animals, and statesmen; often, Manship. The fact is, American concern then was with
the end product was mere photography in bronze or style as the determining and controlling device in the
stone. (Frederick Remington is the outstanding isolated realization of form (style was not, as it ought to have
exception in giving artistic life to some of these subjects.) been, the result of formal attack, but an end in itself).
And there was the sculpture, as elsewhere, of wider That, anyway, seemed to be the American sculptural
public tribute, the grand memorial based upon a notion heritage; it led either to pastiche or to oddity.
of classicism, and the sculpture of classical or mythological It led, for instance, in the 1920s and 1930s, to a man-
subjects made coy or grotesque by inappropriate senti- nered, rhetorical public sculpture with a mythological or
ments. Saint-Gaudens, whom we now recognize as a folk subject matter, size without sufficient scale, and
transitional figure, looked a radical to his contemporaries consciously simplified or mock-archaic form. The Yugo-
simply for breaking away from the rule of Canova and slav Ivan Mestrović and the Swede Carl Milles produced
Herbert Serber Thorwaldsen. many works in America of this order of banality. Man-
Environmental sculpture
Twentieth-century sculpture in America presents a ship himself evolved a related style of vacant grandeur, a
1961-67
more chequered history. The influence of Saint-Gaudens fair example of which is Comrades-in-Arms (1953), a com-
at Rutgers State University,
New Jersey. and of the Renaissance-oriented sculptors, Daniel memorative group in the American Cemetery, Nettuno.