In the winter of 1893-1894 we organized in California the Association for the Preservation of the Franciscan Missions, founded or built by the followers of Junípero Serra. In preparing for that work I made a trip to Spain and spent a year there studying the Spanish civilization and securing the records of Junípero Serra’s work in the New World, some original publications and the records of the building of the missions.
On my return I recovered and re-established the boundaries of perhaps the most beautiful ruins in America, San Juan Capistrano, thirty or forty miles from Los Angeles and the only mission I hold that is comparable to the San Jose Mission near San Antonio, Texas. With the help of Indians who carried the dirt on their backs, I removed the debris from the dome of the main church which had fallen in during the earthquake of 1812, destroying some life. Under the debris we found diamond-shaped flagging that formed the floor. I made careful drawings of all the buildings, the pilasters and cornices in place, cut beautifully by the Spaniards, much of it of limestone.
In this work we came suddenly face to face with the very serious question of how far we could go in the matter of reconstruction—what constituted human rights in the work of restoration, retouching and rebuilding, how much of our work would immediately become vandalism—how far could we go without meddling with the form and design and the actual work of the men who built these fine structures. After much debate, the kind of debate that took place in Rome many years later, it was determined that we must do nothing more than save and preserve the work as we found it.
Where we found a stone that clearly had fallen out and where it was recognizable, we might replace it. But to rebuild or in any way reconstruct or restore what we conceived might have been the character of the building at the time, all agreed would be vandalism. There is no question that the Franciscan missions are still a live subject of interest because they are not buried under modern debris of cement and make-believe restoration. The late Charles F. Lummis, president of the association since 1894, was adamant in his resolution against any meddling with the ancient methods of the work.
Of his art studies during this formative period Gutzon wrote:
As I became acquainted with the masterpieces in the fine arts, I soon became aware that a landscape painter could not draw or paint horses, cattle or sheep; that a cow painter could not paint a convincing landscape equal to his cow painting as a matter of creative production. The same applied to figure painting. I made up my mind that I should master each of these subjects, and I began at once. As I painted and drew almost exclusively in my first twenty years of art work, I drew and painted incessantly dogs, cattle, horses, portraits, figures, and never had to turn to a fellow artist and ask him to draw my figure or cow or horse or sheep.
Reflection on this caused me to note that most men, as well as artists, were one-track minded—that the average layman knew nothing of art, nor the place in civilization held by the masters of the fine arts, or even that civilization in its crudest forms was solely the product of the arts, or that the reaching urge in all civilization was the expressed mood of nature, seeking through them an outlet.
The reaching, enveloping soul of musical harmonies is the prelude to an understanding of the creative impulse. And again, who is insensible to the tremendous power of words? The marriage of words? The Milky Way of words which language conjures up and creates? Who has not been conscious of the strange beauty of words ancient as Lancelot—of heart, love, soul loneliness, craving and conflict? And as these thoughts grew on me I became aware that the circle of any human group was too small to live deeply within; that all moods of life were something alive in the cosmic in which the creative mind moves in limitless orbit, sensitive to every impression; that the larger the spoken language, the greater, more comprehending became one’s expression.
Gutzon, in this period, was no finished sculptor. He did some work with stone and metal—but sporadically—for some three years. He painted tirelessly. He was back at Sierra Madre, and life was placid and pleasant.
His friends made much of the Baldwin ranch. Mrs. Frémont had already sent to him there, before he went abroad, young Philip Rollins, who became his lifelong friend. Rollins was much interested in horses and in pictures. He had seen a painting of Gutzon’s in Mrs. Frémont’s possession which he said was worth a thousand Corots. “I have never looked so far into the sky in any painting,” he said. And he brought that admiration into his friendship.
In San Francisco Gutzon had a little trouble with the estate of Leland Stanford. Mr. Stanford, during his lifetime, had ordered three pictures from Gutzon, who was then in Paris. One of these was a small canvas priced at $500, accepted and paid for. The others were larger. Stanford accepted them but died before any payment had been made.
Rollins brought suit against the estate for Borglum, but the claim was rejected. The widow declared that there was no written contract. Mrs. Frémont was much incensed and wrote Gutzon a very gossipy letter about the worth of widows who needed written contracts.
In 1896 Borglum left California again, expecting to settle in England. His last act before leaving was to model a bust of his dear friend and patron Mrs. Frémont. A photograph of the bust is the frontispiece of Mrs. Phillip’s biography of Mrs. Frémont and is credited to “John Gutzon Borglum, 27 years old, painter and sculptor, recently returned from Spain, following his triumphs in the Paris salons of 1891 and 1892.”
What Borglum thought of this credit he does not say. He was headed for a permanent berth in a foreign country, and for once he didn’t seem to be quite certain of where he was going.
CHAPTER SIX
ENGLAND
There are not many people alive in the United States today who remember “the panic of 1893” and the “hard times of ’94, ’95 and ’96,” but the histories point out briefly that they were with us. Depression had begun to spread in 1890. The banking house of Baring, badly entangled with Argentine investments, closed its doors. The British began to dump American securities. The gold reserve began to disappear. And, in general, that is how things went for five or six years.
Nowhere in Gutzon’s record of the times is there much mention of panic or money shortage. This may be a good place to record that in London he did show some concern about dollars—what they were and how they were kept. One gathers, indirectly, that he liked to be working. That he really enjoyed the pleasure of others in the things that he painted or carved was fairly obvious. Against that, he knew all that was to be known about hunger. His movement to England at a time when living in California was beginning to look difficult may indicate that somebody was taking thought.
Life in England appears to have been no complete idyll. Gutzon himself was quite happy. There was work for him to do and he had plenty of English friends, but one gathers that Mrs. Borglum found the exile a bit painful.
In 1897 Jessie Frémont wrote this to him:
If you come away or go away from London, I shall be sorry and disappointed in you. English people demand stability. And there is to be no talk even of preference for any other place. The time will surely come when you can put your preferences into execution, but it does chill and turn away interest to have a vanishing prospect.
Mrs. Borglum has too much sense and far too much affection for you not to see that this is for your true interest. You cannot re-cast a national mold and England is set to its “slow-and-sure,” sure being its complement to slow. I do not blame Mrs. Borglum’s American impatience, but “stay where the money is.”
The artist’s prevailing mood during 1897 seems to have been one of profound melancholy and disillusionment regarding Europe. He kept a diary at this time which, with his letters from Mrs. Frémont, is the chief source of information concerning his life in England.
Mrs. Frémont’s letters gave him great cheer and comfort. General Frémont had an artistic and sensitive nature with frequent ups and downs of mood. Circumstances beyond his control had ruined his dreams for developments in California. The United States government itself had taken land from him for war purposes in 1861, and he had never been paid for it. His widow was still hoping to have her claim settled thirty-six years later. She knew the value of money, the need for patience and diplomacy; and she could sympathize with a struggling artist in language that he could understand.
Gutzon’s diary opens with an indication that he needed the sympathy. He begins:
Now, at last! I feel some—enough—desire to make notes of steps and landings in this, this curious life that we are doomed for a certain time to bear. I must be honest with myself—else why record? Lies, trivialities and the daily doings of the body are not worth thinking of much less making memoranda of. But it’s not
for the public—not for one single soul. For I am alone and who would understand?
Six years ago I said to myself, “I’ll be great at thirty, or never.” I am thirty. I have had the disturbing pleasure of being called “master” by the French critics and some Americans, yet at the moment I cannot spend sixpence without wondering where the next one will come from. Art is not self-sustaining until it becomes commercially valuable, and a man is not to be counted until he is in popular demand.
Gutzon’s reach was far beyond his grasp, and his Heaven was far away. Undoubtedly he was extravagant. He loved beauty and costly things, rare books, rich stuff and tapestries. But the problem of where the next dollar was coming from began to worry him less and less. He got big commissions in America, in England and all through his life. His trouble was not that he failed to make money but that he never learned how to keep it.
He never seemed to know the value of a dollar, nor did he care. His real extravagance was in putting into commissioned work added richness of detail or extra figures that he thought would add to the effect. That was why he rarely came out of an undertaking with any great profit to himself and was hounded by debt all his life.
He rarely spent money on his person, except for small lovely things that he could carry in his pocket. He often had holes in his shoes, and his unpressed clothes were always a distress to his friends. To emphasize the sacrifices of a struggling artist, he used to tell of buying baked potatoes on the street corners of London to keep his hands warm. The potato-buying story was undoubtedly true, but it was hardly a record of a typical condition.
Building was his chief delight—always. In London, after he had lived for months in a studio apartment in West Kensington, he rented a villa in St. John’s Wood and proceeded to make repairs and additions to it, regardless of cost. The villa had a rose garden, and he frequently talked of how he mowed the lawn early in the morning before starting the day’s work. All his life he enjoyed the work of beautifying his surroundings. During the years he built at least six other studios and houses for himself without ever being satisfied. His ideal home, which he was always ready to describe in detail and with feeling, was a fabulous sort of place that existed only in his restless mind.
In his diary he mentions having gone shopping with the painter Frank Brangwyn to consider taking over Sir Edward Leighton’s studio. They decided it was too pretentious. In Paris he rented a studio in the Boulevard Arago. He still found some of his old friends and business acquaintances in the neighborhood when he visited it in 1931, thirty years after he had moved out of it. It was a place of rare memories. He had fitted the little stove with a red isinglass front, and he had burned a solitary candle in it in those freezing days to give the illusion of rosy warmth.
In Gutzon’s reminiscences it seems always to have been cold in the neighborhood of Boulevard Arago. A sculptor, living in one of the garrets with which the region seems to have been plentifully supplied, fashioned a masterpiece. It was still in the wet clay when the thermometer dropped below freezing. The artist was frantic. In the bitter cold of night he began to fear for his statue. He got up and wrapped it in rags of clothing and finally in his only blanket to keep the ice away. He died of the cold. But the statue for which he froze to death now reposes in warm, serene quarters in the Luxembourg.
Frank Brangwyn, some of whose work may be seen in Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, was the one artist who made a deep impression on Gutzon in England. The Borglum diary is filled with notations such as this: “November 19, 1897—Short half hour with Brangwyn.... He belongs to art and will do work that will live.” And the feeling was mutual. In later years Brangwyn wrote, “I admire those strong virile things of yours. It is like a strong sea breeze on a hot and listless day to see your honest works....” Each foresaw for the other a greatness that he could not hope for himself.
The sculptor met Ruskin briefly and was so impressed with his features that he made a statuette of him. The figure is seated with a rug over the knees and was one of Borglum’s most successful pieces. A copy of it is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
He also met George Bernard Shaw, although little of art figured in their association. In a letter years later he mentioned Shaw’s attendance at meetings of what he called the “Kingsley Society.” “This,” wrote Gutzon, “was a lively debating society and we visited once a week at one another’s homes. I debated with Shaw on ‘The Ignorance of Educating Me.’ I forget which side. Shaw likes to play smart, but at heart he is a serious, lovable, great man.”
Gutzon may have been right about most of these points, but he made an error in naming the club. It was probably the Fabian Club. Shaw denied that he had ever heard of the “Kingsley Society,” and mentioned that for that matter he had hardly heard about Kingsley.
Gutzon remained in England until the turn of the century which, considering the intensely modern impact of his life, seems like a long time ago. The days of quick success had become fewer in 1897, and they lessened rapidly thereafter. There was trouble on the horizon and the people of England were uneasy and crotchety.
In the controversy preceding the Boer War, which broke out in 1899, he was loudly critical of the British for their oppression of “the intrepid band in the Transvaal,” and freely forecast that they would pay for it dearly. And they did. General Baden-Powell, another of Borglum’s friends, was besieged with his troops in Mafeking, a little town north of Kimberley. There, holding what appeared to be a hopeless position, they came closer to starvation daily while England prayed.
Years afterward, in an article about the Boy Scouts, which Baden-Powell founded, Borglum recalled the turning point of that war:
I was in London. I was sitting in the New Globe theater. Duse, the magnificent, was giving one of her superb performances. And during one of the curtains the director came onto the stage with an announcement.
At first he said, “I hope that everyone will remain in his seat. I hope that you will be quiet and let the play go on.” The audience was dead still, trying to understand. And then the man said: “Mafeking has been relieved.”
The play ended right there. I never saw a sedate audience so completely surrender to joy. Believe it or not, every man everywhere in the theater kissed the others, kissed the women, shouted and cried. They poured into the streets and jumped up and down. They crawled onto the tops of buses and danced. And then and there Mafeking became historic.
Mafeking had been relieved, and that relieved the heart of Great Britain. The siege, with General Cronje commanding the Boers, had lasted about six months. It was lifted by Lord Methuen and sixteen thousand troops, and it brought a new day to England....
Gutzon’s work in England was widely talked of though little of it now remains. One of his principal commissions came to him after he had left the country, and the work was executed in the United States. A somewhat incongruous product of the Thirty-eighth Street studio, it was a series of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England, nearing completion with advertising accompaniments that said it would be the finest in the British Isles. The order, placed by the Midland Railway Company, owners of the hotel, was remarkable in that it broke what had long been considered an untouchable precedent. It was the first large order for fine art work ever placed by England in America, and brought the painter wide publicity at a time when it seems to have been considerably needed. Twelve panels were included in the series, and the Midland Railway Company agreed to pay $25,000, a sum almost incredible in those hard times; but the fee was payable on delivery.
The Midland’s art committee knew what it was getting. In 1898 Borglum had painted a series of panels for the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, another property of the railroad. They were a graceful, joyous group, and Gutzon admitted in his diary that he was a little proud of them.
They represented the four seasons with lithe, slender maidens as the central figures. They were pleasant-looking and the critics liked them. For “Spring,” they danced with garlands of flowers, the trees and background shrubbery in harmony with pale spring colors. For “Summer,” the same girls were shown relaxed on the bank of a bubbling pool with young Pan playing his pipes for them. The “Autumn” panel pictured them dancing out the juice of the grapes. And in “Winter,” Pan, now old and gray, sat on a bleak shore gazing at the hardly visible wraiths of the maidens as they pirouetted away over the ocean. These panels are still extant.
The group of murals for the Midland Hotel in Manchester was finished in 1903, and it seems to have pleased the critics even more than it did Borglum, who admitted that he was pleased with it.
The central figure in a panel twenty-seven feet high showed Sir Lancelot escorting Guenevere to King Arthur’s court. Lancelot, “the chief of knights and darling of the court,” and Queen Guenevere, the loveliest of the ladies, were in the foreground on horseback, traveling through a leafy English wood. Mounted men in armor followed at a distance.
The eleven paintings that accompanied Lancelot and Guenevere back to England were scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Queen Titania asleep with Oberon’s love potion in her eyes; Titania’s encounter with Bottom, the weaver; her adventures with Quince, the carpenter, Starveling, the tailor, Snout, the tinker and Flute, the bellows-mender—all in a fine, fantastic humor. Gutzon was still at work on this group on June 30, 1903, which was the day before he started for England to make delivery and supervise installation. He was very ill with typhoid fever that year, and his cash had disappeared. Friends about the studio took up a collection to pay his steamship fare to Liverpool.
Borglum’s last years in England were marked by a tremendous emotional depression. His journal, in places, becomes almost incoherent as he attempts to analyze mental suffering. He found relief in work, and he worked incessantly.
He painted murals for private homes and made the illustrations for at least two books, The Spanish Main, with pictures of old war galleys, and King Arthur, with especially fine drawings of oak trees a thousand years old. He had some success as a portrait artist. He painted the likenesses of a large number of the aristocracy at whose country houses he was entertained. One of these was the portrait of Lord Mowbray, which was exhibited at Liverpool with the Lord Mayor taking part in the ceremonies. He mentions in his diary the painting of the composer, Clarence Lucas, who thought it a good portrait “that possibly might also be a work of art.”
There is also some evidence that during the late nineties he was doing more and more work with sculpture. In his journal he mentions a lost piece, “The Return of the Boer,” which brought considerable attention to his carving. It showed a man on horseback returning to his ruined home. He was a figure of complete dejection, his shoulders drooping, his head bent down. His rifle was before him across the saddle. The horse was sniffing at the burned bits that remained of a house. The statue brought plenty of criticism and discussion but no money. The Parisian who cast the group said it was trop personnel to be a financial success. Gutzon’s only copy of it was borrowed by the dancer Loie Fuller for an exhibition and later left by her in a New York bank as security for a loan. Presumably it lies forgotten in some vault.
Another bronze group, “Apaches Pursued,” had greater public appeal and was exhibited in several shows in Europe. It was decidedly popular in Turin, and a copy was bought for Kaiser Wilhelm II. It shows two horses in full gallop, one of the riders holding to a third man whom he has lifted off the ground in his flight. The critics were pleased by its composition, which was as striking as its animation.
Oddly enough, this group came back into public view in 1946 in an art dealer’s window in Fifty-seventh Street, New York City. It was found to have been purchased by a Philadelphian at an auction sale of the effects of “Diamond Jim Brady.” A copy made from this is now in the Witte Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.
All in all, in 1900 Gutzon Borglum was one of the most popular artists in England. He lived in a comfortable villa, he had plentiful work, and what he did was enthusiastically received. And mental dejection did not keep him from having a rather full and varied social life.
In a letter to Mrs. Frémont he mentioned meeting a Madame Helen Bricka, who brought his work to the attention of the Duke and Duchess of Teck of whose household she was a member. Gutzon visited the Duke and Duchess and so met, and threw into the air, a little boy who grew up to be the Duke of Windsor and, for a time, the King of England.
Through Madame Bricka he was summoned by Queen Victoria to bring his work, both painting and sculpture, to Windsor Castle for an exhibition. But for a young man born on the shore of Bear Lake, Idaho, the invitation was not clear enough. One may be permitted a bit of speculation as to what might have happened if he had caught the meaning—if he had paraded with his work under royal patronage before the aristocracy of Great Britain. But it is futile thought. He sent his art to Windsor for an exhibition, but he never met the queen. It never occurred to him that a queen might want to see him.
He had a very successful one-man show at Macmillan’s in Bond Street, and he made many friends in England and France, some of them American artists. Some of these appeared later in his life and in his correspondence in the United States. One of them was Carl Sobieski, descendant of the famous Polish general. Another, who noted his experience entertainingly, was the writer R. M. Eassie. He told Gutzon of hearing of his connection with the Angels of St. John the Divine, in the heart of Africa, thirty-five miles from the nearest whites.
One of Gutzon’s last entries in his London journal tells of a party in 1901 at his home, “Harlestone Villa,” in St. John’s Wood. It is worth mentioning in that it honored Isadora Duncan and marked her debut as a dancer.
Gutzon had known the Duncans in California. Isadora’s father had recently been in London and was on his way back to America when his ship, the Mohegan foundered off the Irish coast. The sculptor had gone from England to take charge of Duncan’s body and to see that he was properly buried.
Isadora, her brother and sister had come from California after their father’s death. August Borglum, Gutzon’s brother, was a guest at the party and always recalled the impression Miss Duncan made as she danced out from the studio onto the lawn, scattering red rose petals that she had been gathering in the villa garden. Isadora, Gutzon observed, brought an active revival of memories from home. “The fresh western breeze that came with her,” he said, filled him with nostalgia.
Very likely it did. Shortly afterward he had gone over to Paris and was standing idly on a street corner. It was a day like any other in his life except that he had had a brief meeting with a casual American tourist in a café, and that there was an unusual amount of cash in his pocket.
Suddenly there came to him an irresistible urge to return to the United States—to go home. All his pent-up irritation over spiritual repressions and his grievance over decadent art conditions in Europe surged over him at once. He leaped at a passing
cab, offered double fare if he could get to the Gare du Nord in time for the boat train ... and so, presently, he had passed through Cherbourg and was on a ship headed for America.
This ended an era in his life and marked, definitely, the beginning of another. He was never to return to Europe except for the placing of work he had produced in the United States.
CHAPTER SEVEN
QUIET IN NEW YORK
The first thing Gutzon Borglum did in New York was to join—or, perhaps, originate—a movement whose object was to make American art distinctive and national. This was a bit out of the ordinary. Gutzon, so far as he had expressed himself, hadn’t much concern about American art. What he had seen of it annoyed him, and he didn’t intend to give much time to its promotion. He was presently to return to England ... but somehow he could never find time to book a passage.
In the early days of the twentieth century his journal mentions, and many of us unfortunately remember, European and classic influences were dominant in art. Our public buildings were often Greek or Roman temples adorned with sculpture right out of Homer’s mythology. In New York the extreme example of this tendency was a building erected by some art society on Lexington Avenue which was decorated across the front with a frieze from the Parthenon in Athens. The New York version of the frieze was so exact as to include all the mutilations that the march of hundreds of years had inflicted on the original.
Artists—painters, sculptors, musicians alike—had to have studied abroad before they could get a hearing in America. But, unfortunately, most of the people who patronized art learned about the subject from a few simple home rules. They were breaking out of the awesome, gewgaw-enveloped homes of the eighties and nineties and moving into chateaus imported by the boatload from France. But there is no record that any art dealer ever succeeded in selling an American house to some customer in Paris.
It often happens that a convert to a religious sect is more fanatical in his beliefs than one born into the fold. Gutzon’s father had come to the United States from Denmark to escape the ancient fetters of thought, and Gutzon himself had become thoroughly disillusioned by his years abroad. He considered America to be the last stronghold of freedom for the spirit. And he believed that the time had come for the country to express itself culturally. He had a theory that many people are born Americans though their physical birthplace might have been Denmark or Poland or Timbuktu. He insisted that although America was comparatively a young nation, the significance of her discovery, colonization and development offered rich sources for the painter or sculptor seeking decorative themes. He wanted architects to stop copying classic models.
He was a great admirer of Louis Sullivan’s individual art, and he understood it. Once, driving through a small town in Ohio that he had never seen before, he suddenly stopped the car and went back to look at a red-brick building. “Built by Sullivan,” he said. And so it was.
The subject of the Prix de Rome scholarships, in his opinion, was debatable. He thought it a mistake to send talented young artists to Rome during their most formative period and expose them to the overpowering influence of the great masters. He lived his theory, for he did not see Italy until late in life, rather than lose his individuality in the presence of those giants, Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Donatello, whom he deeply revered.
Borglum came to America a sculptor. He painted very little after 1901. Among his first direct contacts with American art methods on the Atlantic coast was a competition for an equestrian monument to General Grant to be placed in Washington. He devoted a great deal of time and thought to the making of a model and worked it out in fine detail. Grant and two other officers on horseback were mounted on a high pedestal, Grant a little higher than the other two. Around the base of the pedestal and extending out on both sides was a rich frieze of figures more than life-size, showing events leading to the Civil War, the struggle itself and the period of reconstruction.
Gutzon was told afterward that Augustus Saint-Gaudens, all-powerful in the selection, had thrown out the model because he felt that no sculptor in America could carve so elaborate a frieze and that he suspected foreign help.
Subsequent steps in the contest are interesting as an indication of how memorials were sometimes produced in those days. The jury could not decide which of the two remaining models was best, so each sculptor was asked to submit a second model. It happened that Solon Borglum had made the horse on which the principal figure was riding in both models. The two sculptors called for help and Solon said that he would do what he could for whichever one got to his studio first.
The disappointed contestant went to Gutzon and asked him to provide a horse, but Gutzon refused to compete with his brother. As it turned out, the one who received Solon’s help a second time was given the commission.
Neither of the brothers thought that Gutzon’s unwillingness to enter a contest was anything but routine. Solon and he were devoted to each other. Gutzon had called him away from ranch life to develop an art sense that became remarkable. Gutzon had instructed him personally and had helped to finance his career in Cincinnati. He believed himself personally responsible for giving Solon a chance at a sculptor’s career; he could never consider himself free to accept any commission in which he thought that his brother might have an interest.
Only once again, in Cuba, did Gutzon Borglum enter a competition. He steadfastly refused to accept attractive offers on the ground that the principle was wrong. A sculptor, he said, should be selected for his known ability to do what was asked of him and should be allowed to offer a variety of designs, if necessary, until he produced one that was satisfactory to the committee. He declared flatly that it was unjust to ask an artist to risk his best effort on a gamble, to ask him to spend his time, energy and money on something that might only be thrown away. It is interesting to note that his ultimate declaration on this subject was made after his Cuban experience. That was something that he failed to talk about.
The question of talented artists losing their identity in work for other artists, sometimes of less or even mediocre ability, was a grievous one to him and caused many heartaches with which he frankly sympathized. Often talented artists could not even get a job in another studio, no matter what their ability. Such a one was Paul Nocquet.
Paul Nocquet was a Belgian of real ability who had known Gutzon in Paris and had come over to be near him. Eventually he lost his life in a balloon ascension which he had undertaken in sheer despair. In an open letter to the Evening Sun he called attention to the humiliating role played by unrecognized artists in this country, all of which gave Gutzon Borglum new voice. Borglum wrote:
I have read with astonishment and pleasure the letter by Paul Nocquet pleading for the sculptor’s art in America. It is no exaggeration to say that a large part of the sculpture in this country is produced under false pretenses. Much of it is from the studios of celebrities, the labor, the thought and even the basic ideas of poor devils who are paid so much a day.
That the abuses Mr. Nocquet speaks of exist, there is abundance of proof. A glamor has been thrown about sculpture here that is not deserved. For a century the bulk of us have ambled along timidly, following a single lead, sniffing the trail, only to assure our questioning souls that we were on the beaten path. We fear a new lead. We placard our homes with safe, old sentiments. We permit no passion, no action, nothing to disturb the even tenor of a puritanism that has hardly warmth enough or blood enough to produce great sculpture and that rarely ventures beyond the meaningless nudes that disgrace our museums.
If this were not so, Mr. Nocquet would have no complaint. If character and individuality were even tolerated in American sculpture, our production by proxy would cease in a fortnight. Let the people have what they feel the need of. There is something deep in the souls of all of us which seeks the real thing. Then our ideals, our lives and our passions will be expressed in our art. When that is done each man will express himself, and a new value will be placed on every work of art.
Such outspoken criticism inevitably brought from the caves all the winds of controversy. They merged in a tempest in 1908 when the sculptor wrote in The Craftsman:
With the passing of Saint-Gaudens the standard of good work was taken from us.... Not great work, for he was not a great artist like Rimmer, Rodin, or Meunier, nor was he a great poet. Nor was he a great technician like Falguière or a dozen other Frenchmen. But he had a quality that persisted to the end and wrought, with few exceptions, something beautiful, often noble, something that left the whole world better because it was made. He gave us Farragut (in Madison Square) and one or two other great statues. Then he dropped to the architect’s standard, the lay figure, and there he remained. Curiously his Farragut contains figures in the base that appear to have been made years after the figure of the Admiral, so quickly does he seem to have lost his youthful spontaneity.
Saint-Gaudens’ sense of refinement led to conventions, and his lack of imagination to a repetition of these conventions. Another thing—I do not recall in all his work one single group of creation that may be called a “pipe dream.” In other words, I do not know of one work of Saint-Gaudens that was not commissioned, that was not suggested to him and produced for another.
I speak thus because I believe few people realize how little sculptural art is shown in this country that is purely the output of the sculptor’s imagination, produced creatively because the sculptor has something he must say. Saint-Gaudens, master that he was, was a great workman; he was not a creator. It is but natural that his following should, in their effort to catch his spirit, acquire only his style. His reserve becomes in their hands more reserved, his architectural and impersonal manner more mannered, and we have a pseudoclassic school which for dull mediocrity is without a rival in the whole field of art.
This analysis of another man’s work did incalculable harm to Gutzon’s position in New York art circles. The controversy became nationwide when the newspaper headlines announced, “Borglum Attacks Saint-Gaudens.” Partisans joined the argument with more zeal than discretion, and the wrangling went on without end.
Another controversy that swirled about George Gray Barnard and his undraped figures on the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg caught up Gutzon in its progress. Borglum had a wholehearted respect for Barnard and took up cudgels in his defense, thus further antagonizing the “sourdoughs,” as he called the Academicians.
Long afterward when Barnard was excluded from his studio on the Billings estate, which had been bought for a public park, Gutzon offered him his Stamford studio to work in and, at Barnard’s request, appeared before the New York City Board of Aldermen in an effort to iron out his troubles with the city.
Barnard’s “Two Natures” and Gutzon’s “Mares of Diomedes” were the first pieces of American art purchased for the Metropolitan Museum. Of the former, the sculptor wrote:
“The ‘sourdoughs’ took ‘Two Natures,’ perhaps the finest marble in its dimensions by an American in our country, and as quickly and quietly as possible relegated it to the basement. Not long after my ‘Mares of Diomedes’ followed the same descent.”
His antipathy to the National Academy was based on his observation that there was too little fraternity about it and always a lack of esprit de corps. It followed too much the general tendency of all academic organizations against anything new, he said. It was probably his undiplomatic manner of expressing his convictions that aroused the enmity of the older set, who successfully kept him out of any monumental work in New York City.
One grievance the younger artists did have. There was no place where they could exhibit their work. In harmony with Gutzon’s desire to establish a fairly representative American art was his crusade to obtain a fair deal for young American artists. In 1912 he helped organize a new Association of American Painters and Sculptors which would provide exhibition space for new and unknown youngsters.
A novel feature of the constitution of the new society was that it declared against juries. Every member was entitled to exhibit; only the amount was to be decided by a committee. A certain amount of space was reserved to invited work and no work not invited might be shown. Should any member wish to invite the work of a nonmember and fail to get the approval of the committee, he was permitted to give up some of his own space to the stranger.
Gutzon was delegated to publish this statement of the principles of the organization:
We have joined together for the purpose of holding exhibitions of our own work and the best procurable examples of contemporary art, without relation to school, size, medium or nationality.
We shall make our exhibitions as interesting as they will be representative of American and European Art activities.
We have no canons but honesty and ability to express one’s self. We do not believe that any artist has ever discovered or will discover the only way to create beauty.
Unfortunately, at its first exhibit the association was split on the very rock that was to have been its bulwark—the representative quality of the work. This was the exhibition, at the Armory, made famous by the “Nude Descending a Staircase,” in which neither the nude nor the staircase made much difference. The painting was an orgy of color and distortion.
Gutzon had no quarrel with that. He lived by Voltaire’s principle: “Sir, I absolutely deny the truth of your statement, but I shall defend to the death your right to make it.” What hurt and angered him was that, by election, he was responsible for the exhibit, and that the committee had rejected work which he had approved and had accepted work that he had not even seen. Their excuse was, “We don’t care about the constitution. We are trying to get up an exhibition.” Sadly the sculptor resigned saying that no other course remained to him.
He came home to Stamford profoundly dejected. After a silent dinner he remarked: “I wish I had a million dollars in cash.”
“What in the world for?” Mrs. Borglum inquired.
“I’d shut all those struggling young painters in a room and throw it at them,” he replied. “It would keep them while they were hunting up something to do besides art.”
He told of some of the studios he had visited while organizing the new association and of the hard time some of the students were having. Nearly all successful artists have been through such trials but not many of them remember.
The National Sculpture Society had elected Gutzon to membership in 1903 shortly after his return from Europe. Here, too, he found among the younger set a feeling of revolt against the older members. He suggested changes in the constitution that enlisted strong support from some of the members. However, President J. Q. A. Ward took exception to this threat to his power and refused to let the report of the committee favoring changes come to a hearing. Promptly the sculptor denounced such tactics as “unfair and discourteous,” which did not add to their friendship. Most of the reforms were later adopted.
With the National Arts Club his relations were more pleasant. When the club had to move to other quarters he helped make the selection of the Gramercy Park site and was given full charge of the food department which had fallen deeply into debt. Under his personal management the dining room soon showed a profit—a most difficult thing to achieve in any art club.
Borglum belonged to the Salmagundi Club, to the Fencers, (where he used to take lessons from a Cuban fencing master in the studio) and to numerous flying clubs. His lifelong memberships in the Players of New York and the Metropolitan of Washington gave him constant pleasure and satisfaction.
He taught one year at the Art Students’ League in New York and returned the fees he received for teaching as prizes to his pupils, several of whom are now outstanding sculptors. At the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906, he joined with other New York artists in donating works to a public auction for the relief of artists caught in the disaster.
Through his old friend Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, he got the fund through to California in record time. Another of his old friends, Arthur Matthews, San Francisco painter, was the custodian of the money. He did so good a job of spending it that a considerable sum was left over. The balance lay in a bank for forty years until it was turned over to a new committee by the State Banking Commission in 1946. The chairman of the committee was William B. Faville, the architect, another good friend. But by that time both Arthur and Gutzon were gone.
The sculptor became involved in so many outside matters that one wonders how he could have found time for them. His answer was that life and art are inseparable.
He wrote for a magazine in 1908 that the three elements absolutely joined for the production of great art are sincerity, individuality and reverence. He said: