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Public Art: Living Values in Stone
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14097 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1988 |
3,107 Words |
| Author
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James F. Cooper
James F. Cooper is editor of American Arts Quarterly and art
critic for the New York City Tribune. |
In the year 1924, Homer Saint-Gaudens, then director of fine arts at the Carnegie Institute, addressed an audience of prominent citizens of Pittsburgh assembled in the institute's vast lecture hall. He was trying to summarize the great classical traditions that had guided his famous sculptor father Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) in the creation of so many memorable American public monuments.
Homer Saint-Gaudens grappled earnestly that November evening with such concepts as Beauty, Truth, and Courage, sensitive to the fact that some in the audience were fidgeting in their seats. By then many of them were already aware of the new cultural influences from Europe, and the lecturer's ideas sounded quaintly old-fashioned.
Seated among the audience was an elderly sculptor, F.W. Ruckstull (1853-1942), a former friend of the deceased sculptor and himself the creator of many illustrious public monuments in Washington and New York. For Ruckstull, the speech afforded one last reaffirmation of the classical principles that had guided his own hand for so many decades.
Few among that audience, indeed in America, comprehended the danger that Ruckstull perceived so clearly in that distant year of 1924. To the great sculptor it appeared that a moral darkness was descending over America, a darkness that threatened to "smother the lamp of Beauty and Truth." To Ruckstull that darkness was Modernism, and in place of Beauty and Truth it offered Nihilism and Ugliness. During the decade following the New York Armory Exhibition of 1913, he had put aside his work in order to alert the public through his writings of the dangers of the coming cultural
... (1989 of 19031 Characters)
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