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Saturday, March 21, 2020

Paris: Observations on Jacob Epstein's Sculpted Tomb of Oscar Wilde

Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908 Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.
Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908-1912. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris: Observations on Jacob Epstein's Sculpted Tomb of Oscar Wilde

By Samuel D. Gruber

[cross-posted from Samuel Gruber's Jewish Art and Monuments]

Here is one more post about the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. I've already written about some Holocaust monuments and graves of 19th-century Jewish notables. But there is at least one more sort-of Jewish monument that deserves a look--that's the boundary-breaking sculptural tomb of Oscar Wilde carved by the young American-Jewish sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), who beginning in 1902 made his life and career in England, where he became a citizen in 1911.

The circumstances of Wilde's death in exile in 1901 and the commissioning of the tomb are well known. I am indebted to the excellent catalog essay by Evelyn Silber, "The Tomb of Oscar Wilde,"(in Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989, pp. 124-131).

George Bernard Shaw had introduced the young sculptor to Robert Ross, Wilde's literary executor, in 1905, while Ross was still publishing Wilde's works and paying of his debts. Wilde, the Anglo-Irish writer who was in the 1880s and 90s the chief spokesman for the Aestheticism Movement, was at the time of his death widely reviled in England for dandyism and homosexuality. He was, however, still revered by a loyal literary and artistic public, and a small circle of friends were dedicated to perpetuating his literary and critical work. Wilde was able to find a resting place in more forgiving Paris, where he had moved after his release from two years in prison in 1897. At Pere Lachaise, he joined other esteemed writers in eternal repose. He would be later joined by American writer Gertrude Stein, whose modest grave and marker are not far away.

Still, when Epstein's large Hoptonwood stone sculpture was installed in 1912, the work caused quite a scene, and stirred memories of Wilde trial and conviction in England for "gross indecency."

Jacob Epstein in his London studio with the Tomb of Oscar Wilde, 1912. Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), fig. 45.
I've written before about Epstein's life, work and influence; he was a pioneer of modern sculpture. Here we can take a closer look at one particular work for which he was both notorious and celebrated.

Born in the United States, Epstein was the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants and he grew up on the Lower East Side, where he got his first artistic training at a Settlement House. His first significant commission was to illustrate Hutchins Hapgood's Spirit of the Ghetto, for which he produced a series of naturalistic street scenes of mostly Jewish characters and life from the world he knew well. As young man he would also have been familiar with the art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he moved to London in 1902 he frequented the galleries of the British Museum. When he turned his hand to stone carving he was much impressed by the Assyrian sculpture at the museum.

The flying figure on tomb of Oscar Wilde draws on subject and forms familiar to Epstein from ancient Near Eastern art, especially the great Assyrian Palace sculptures excavated by Austin Henry Leyard in the mid-19th century, parts of which were on view at the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum and the Louvre.

Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.
A Lamassu, from the entrance into the kings private apartments in Nimrud; 865–860 BC. British Museum (London). Photo: Wikipedia.
Frederick Charles Cooper. Drawing showing the winged bulls found by Layard at Nimrud. Watercolor on paper, mid-19th century. Photo: British Museum.
Study for the Tomb of Oscar Wilde, ca. 1909. Pencil, 50.8 x 35.6. Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), fig. 47.
Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908 Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris, France. Père Lachaise Cemetery. Tomb of Oscar Wilde. Jacob Epstein, sculptor, 1908 Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.
Silber has noted that the Evening Standard, which had previously attacked Epstein's work was much more enthusiastic about the Wilde tomb sculpture, praising the artist's "regard for his material, and its purpose. The work ... is as reserved in execution as it is monumental in conception so that nothing destroyed the effect of a rectangular block of stone which has felt itself into expression". 

The Pall Mall Gazette enthused:
Mr. Epstein is a real sculptor — a carver not a modeller — but he is also a Sculptor in Revolt . . . This brooding, winged figure, born long ago in primitive passions, complex and yet incomplete, is a child of the marble, and not an enlarged copy, by some other hand, of a highly finished plaster model . . . This is Mr. Epstein's commentary, serious and profound, unobscured by conventional formulas, and inspired by an acute necessity for utterance. "Go and see it at once", is my urgent advice to all who are interested in sculpture, and think of it, if you can, on a hilltop in Pere Lachaise, dominating all those tawdry memorials of the easily-forgotten dead.
One of Wilde's most famous poems is "The Sphinx." It  was begun when Wilde was a student at Oxford, and then rewritten in Paris in 1883, and worked on until publication in 1894. It begins with a raven-like sphinx in the corner of the poet's room and "proceeds through a series of imagined scenes in which the sphinx is depicted as a goddess, a prophet, and a lover." (Poetry Foundation).

Epstein's figure is a cross between a sphinx and an angel. The sphinx (and the related cherubim) as described in the Book of Exodus, was frequently depicted in antiquity, and it was revived and popular by the symbolism writers and artists. Perhaps the best known images is the 1864 painting by Gustav Moreau of the Oedipus and Sphinx in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moreau's imagery was an influence of Oscar Wilde. Moreau's Sphinx, however, is decidedly female, and she thrusts her breast at the nude male Oedipus. Epstein's figure is male, and it the prominently dangling testicles  provoked a response and calls of "immorality" (in some drawings, however, the testicles are not so pronounced).


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Gustav Moreau. Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1864. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.
Jacob Epstein. Study for Tomb of Oscar Wilde and a frieze, ca. 1910. Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), p. 128.
Silber quotes a letter from Epstein to Francis Dodd describing his encounter with local authorities who were hell-bent on censoring the sculpture and literally "covering up" its "immorality":
...Imagine my horror Dodd when arriving at the cemetery to find that the sex parts of the figure had been swaddled in plaster! and horribly. I went to see the keeper of the cemetery and he tells me that the Prefect of the Seine and the Keeper of the Ecole des Beaux Arts were called in and decided that I must either castrate or fig leaf the monument! What am I to do? Here is the Strand business all over again. You cannot imagine how terrible the monument looks now. The work is nearing completion and the inscriptions will begin tomorrow. I am going to get of course Leon Bakst and any other influential people I know here to stop all this miserable business. I feel quite sick over it but ridicule will do the work I think. Imagine a bronze fig-leaf on the Oscar Wilde Tomb. For that is what the guardian of the cemetery suggested might be done . . . This is a mad world.
Yours ever Jacob Epstein>
Four studies for the Tomb of Oscar wilde, 1908-1910. Pencil, 50.8 x 35.6. Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), p. 125.
Of course, the figure is also a stylized version of the common winged victory known from ancient Roman triumphal monuments and sarcophagi, and these figures are the precursors of the ubiquitous winged angels of later Christian art. In both cases the figures can refer to an earthly triumph, but also a spiritual one over death.

Rome, Italy. Winged victory from Arch of Septimius Severus, dedicated 203 C.E. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2010.
Gubbio, Italy. Detail of Roman Sarcophagus showing clipeus supported by winged figures, 3rd century C.E. Palazzo dei Consoli Museum. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2019.
Jacob Epstein or Charles Holden. Study for Tomb of Oscar Wilde, 1909-10. Walsall Museum and Art Gallery (Garman-Ryan Collection). Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), p. 130.
Jacob Epstein. tomb of Oscar Wilde, as reprodiuced in The New Age (June 6, 1912). Photo: Jacob Epstein: Sculpture and Drawings (Leeds: Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1989), fig. 48.
Epstein’s powerful and "primitive" (in the parlance of the day) work was not immediately appreciated by many other artists and architects at the time, but within a decade, after the horrors of World War I, his approach was widely adopted, and one can see something of the legacy even in Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where the war memorial for Belgian soldiers who died fighting for France, was dedicated in 1922, and designed in similar squat, blocky and massive and almost chronic style.
Paris, France. Pere Lechaise Cemetery. Belgian Soldiers WWI Memorial, dedicated 1922. Henry Lacoste, architect, with a bronze bas-relief door by sculptor Charles Piot. The names of 103 soldiers are engraved on the rounded pillars. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.
Just at the time of Oscar Wilde's exile and death, the winged figure as guardian or messenger, became very popular in the form of cherubim (k'ruvim). The word comes form the Akkadian Karubi, which means intercessor, an the notion of cherubim entered the early Israelite religion from contemporary pagan polytheistic religions. These winged figures are widely known from Assyrian and Egyptian art, and are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 3:24, and described in some detail in Exodus 37:7–9, when Bezalel is instructed to sculpt a pair of the them for the lid of the Ark of the Covenant, and in 1 Kings 6:27, when enormous cherubim are described filling the space of the Temple's Holy of Holies.
Ivory cherub from Arslan Tash, Northern Syria,  possibly early 1st millennium BCE. Photo: Hamblin & Seely, Solomons Temple, fig. 24.
Just around 1900 we see them increasingly represented in historical and religious art, such as James Tissot's famous painting The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, painted between 1896 and 1901, when it was exhibited in Paris with his other Old Testament scenes.
James Tissot, The Ark Passes Over the Jordan, btw. 1896-1901.
Cherubim are adopted as a possible wall decoration of the ancient Temple; the reconstruction of the interior of the Temple by Charles Chipiez was widely reproduced by the turn of the 20th century.
Temple reconstruction from Chipiez, Charles and Perrot, Georges, tLe Temple de Jérusalem et la Maison du Bois-Liban restitués d’après Ezéchiel et le Livre des Rois (Paris, 1889). This illustration was reproduced in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (New York, 1905).

Temple reconstruction by Chipiez and Perrot reproduced in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 12 (New York, 1905).
In part because of the cherub's mystical appeal but also because of the curving grace of the form, cherubs and other sorts of winged angels were popular - like the Sphinx - with the symbolist artists, and especially with artists working in the Art Nouveau style. A good example of this, from 1909, just as Epstein is designing the Wilde Tomb, is the silver model of the Ark of the Covenant by the Danish artist Joan Rohde.

Johan Rohde, Ark of the Covenant, silver case lined with cedar wood. Copenhagen, 1909. Danish Jewish Art, p. 5.

Monday, January 7, 2019

A Dance of Death: Vancouver's Canadian Pacific Railway War Memorial (1922)

Vancouver, BC, Canada. Winged Victory World War Memorial, detail. Coeur de Lion MacCarthy, sculptor (1922). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2018.
Vancouver, BC, Canada. Winged Victory World War Memorial. Coeur de Lion MacCarthy, sculptor (1922). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2018.
Vancouver, BC, Canada. Winged Victory World War Memorial. Coeur de Lion MacCarthy, sculptor (1922). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2018.

A Dance of Death: Vancouver's Canadian Pacific Railway War Memorial (1922)
by Samuel D. Gruber  

As I've paid more attention in the last few years to World War I memorials, I've noticed that in addition to the expected public monuments erected by government and civic associations in cities, towns, and villages across Europe and America, there are also more private memorials installed or erected by many institutions - businesses, lodges, churches, synagogues, and so forth. Among the most prominent of these are memorial created and by railroad companies and other transportation organizations in memory of their many fallen workers who went off to fight the war. I've see these markers and monuments in grand train stations and subway/metro/U-Bahn stops from New York to Berlin.

Berlin, Germany. Nollerndorfplatz U-Bahn station. World War I Memorial for employees. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2016.

One of the grandest of these - and the most dramatic in its representation - is the bronze memorial sculptural group created by Montreal sculptor Coeur de Lion MacCarthy (1881-1971) for the Canadian Pacific Railway, of which three castings were made and installed at train stations in Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Montreal. I recently saw the Vancouver version firsthand outside the classical style Waterfront Station (opened 1914) These representations of the "Angel of Victory" (also called "Winged Victory", who lift up a fallen Canadian soldier, were made to commemorates 1,115 CPR employees killed during the Great War and installed from 1921 to 1923. Subsequently, the inscription was changed to also include CPR workers who died in the Second World War, too.

Vancouver, Canada. Unveiling of the Memorial. Photo: City of Vancouver Archives.
Vancouver, BC, Canada. Winged Victory in original state. Photo: Vancouver Public Library Accession Number: 21265.
MacCarthy came from a family of artists and was the son of sculptor Hamilton Plantangenet MacCarthy (1846-1939) (I just love this family's names!). Born in London, he moved with his family to Canada in 1885, and learned the art of  sculpture in his father's studio.  Both father and son created many memorial works throughout Canada. Coeur de Lion MacCarthy set up a studio in Montreal in 1918, and was especially active in the  decade following World War I, when in addition to the Railroad monuments, he created Montreal's Monument aux braves de Verdun Monument to the Valient of Verdun.


Montreal, Canada. Monument aux braves de Verdun, Cour de Lion MacCarthy, sculptor, 1924. Photo: Wikimedia.
For the Canadian Pacific Railroad memorials MacCarthy borrowed from the iconography of Roman victory monuments and Catholic imagery and the ascending form familiar from Art Nouveau sculpture. This is a sort of vertical Pietà, with the solider as Jesus. But it also an Assumption of sorts as the Winged Victory seems to resurrect the fallen soldier and (perhaps) to carry him heavenward. But the Victory must be careful. The bronze soldier is heavy, and looks like he might fall on a passerby. 

Compare this with two other monuments World War I monuments I've posted about, the Doughboy in Gloversville, NY and the 107th Infantry World War I Memorial, Central Park, by Karl Illava, (1927) at the border of Fifth Avenue in New York City.  Both of those monuments show better the soldiers' life - in repose/despair (perhaps eternal), and in active combat. These all may just be variations on the memorial theme, or they may represent different view from Canada, which fought the war for so much longer than the U.S.A., and America.


Vancouver, BC, Canada. Waterfront Train Station, opened 1914. The monument is at the far end if this building (right end). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2018.
The popularity of the Vancouver monument has waxed and waned with the changing tastes of the time, and attitudes toward war. The dramatic sentimentality was typical of a certain class of monument of the time, and also played to public taste informed in part by the legacy of Romanticism and the over-acted melodrama of silent films. But modernism, abstraction and minimalism were on the horizon, so in the post World War II years the monument was harshly criticized.

A post on the excellent blog greatwar100reads quotes a 27 July 1963 column in the Ottawa Citizen, by Carl Weiselberger who detests the statue, and calls it "candy art":
It is that monument showing the limp body of a dead soldier complete with puttees, hobnailed boots, lifted by an angel (or is it victory?) – a kind of Canadian Valkyrie, carrying a Canadian soldier into a kind of Canadian Valhalla. It’s the worst kind of candy art applied to a great human drama, a desecration of art and taste to such a degree that a super-sensitive passenger might flee from the station to take the nearest bus …
We might agree with Weiselberger (who was writing in the heydey of abstraction) about the art, but as a monument the work does more than most static statues of the time.  If it was better sited or if the pedestal was lower to allow closer engagement, the monument can work - despite is saccharine celebration of sacrifice - and patriotic death. 

The soldier and Victory are doing a dance, a funerary waltz, which I also see as a 20th-century Dance Macabre. If the work could be experienced more fully in the round it could activate almost any space, as the Montreal version did in its original location in the Windsor Street Station, and in its new placement there.

But stuck on the corner, overlooking but not part of a busy street, the statue has been treated badly. The Victory’s wreath is broken and the bronze patina was removed with wire brushes in the 1960s, in a misguided attempt to clean the work, and the monument now is set up again a barrier and tables and chairs from bar/cafe located in the station but with access to this outdoor space.

Vancouver, BC, Canada. Winged Victory Waorld War Memorial. Coeur de Lion MacCarthy, sculptor (1922). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2018.
For more on Canadian War Memorials see Monuments of the First and Second World Wars.

Read some of my other posts about World War I Memorials:

Gloversville's "Thinking Doughboy": A Quiet Yet Powerful World War I Memorial (August 20, 2017)

USA: Lee Lawrie's Striking - Yet Modest - World War I Memorial at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan (July 1, 2017)

A Little Known Reminder of World War I: The Split Rock Explosion Monument (July 14. 2017)

For Veterans / Armistice Day: More Monuments of Jews who Died in World War I (Nov. 11, 2012) 

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Paris, France: Mauthhausen Memorial at Père-Lachaise Cemetery

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.
Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Paris: The Mauthausen Concentration Camp Monument at  Père Lachaise Cemetery
by Samuel D. Gruber

[Cross-posted form Samuel Gruber's Jewish art & Monuments]


A a recent visit to Paris I spent much of the day at the enormous Père Lachaise Cemetery, which besides begin a 44-hectare cemetery is also one of Europe's great outdoor sculpture museums. The list of famous people buried there is very long, but I was most interested in seeing monuments erected in the past 70 years commemorating victims of various Nazi concentration and death camps.

These monuments, which now number more than a dozen, have been erected by camp survivors, political organizations, and other other associations beginning in 1949, when memorials to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau (June) an the camp at Neuengamme (November) were dedicated. Since then additional monuments to victims of the camps at  Ravensbrück (1955), Mauthausen (1958), Buchenwald-Dora (1964), Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen (1970) Dachau (1985), Flossenbürg (1988), Buna-Monowitz Auschwitz III (1993), Bergen-Belsen (1994), Natzweiler-Struthof (2004) have been erected. In addtion there is a monument (2006) to the deportees of Convoy 73  which took Jews from Drancy to the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, Lithuania.

I was especially interested in the 1958 Mauthausen (also referred to as Mauthausen-Gusen) memorial, which I include in my class.  This memorial is of note for many reasons. It is if high artistic merit, but also its location, materials, explicit narrative, and inscriptions all have meaning in relation to the rest of the cemetery, the history of art, and specific acts of Nazi cruelty. As of August 2018, I found the monument, which was created by sculptor Gérard Choain (1906-19880, in restoration.  Choain himself was a wounded veteran and was a prisoner of war in German camps from 1939 to 1945. After the war he created several memorial sculptures.


Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Announcement of the design in the 1957 newsletter of the sponsoring survior's group, Amicale de Mauthausen,
Formally, the monument is designed for its context in the Père Lachaise cemetery. It is located near an a corner in section 97, and its tall granite architecture stands above many of the nearby tombs. At first, the form of the granite appears similar to an obelisk or tower, which are frequent motifs employed throughout the cemetery, against which a stone or bronze allegorical figure are often placed. A good example is the towering granite  tomb of Jacques Léon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte (1875) created by architect Georges-Ernest Coquart and sculptor Louis-Leon Cugnot. This monument, like many others in the cemetery, presents a triumphant interpretation of death and entombment.

Paris, France.  Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Mauthausen Memorial. Gérard Choain, sculptor (1958). Photo: Samuel Gruber 2018.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

Gloversville's "Thinking Doughboy": A Quiet Yet Powerful World War I Memorial

Gloversville, NY.  Doughboy World War I Memorial by Karl Illava, 1923. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.
Gloversville, NY.  Doughboy World War I Memorial by Karl Illava, 1923. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.
Gloversville's "Thinking Doughboy": A Quiet Yet Powerful World War Memorial
by Samuel D. Gruber

I've been reading Herbert Engel's Shtetl in the Adirondacks: The Story of Gloversville and Its Jews (Purple Mountain Press, 1991), so I took a detour from the New York Thruway the other day to visit Gloversville, which sits at the southern edge of the Adirondacks and was once the glove-making capital of the world. The town was so invested in its glove making that it changed its name in 1828 to reflect its status. In 1890–1950, 90% of all gloves sold in the United States were made there.

My goal in Gloversville was to search for traces of industrialist-financier-politican-philanthropist Lucius N. Littauer who in the first half of the 20th century came to be styled  "The Jewish Carnegie". An impressive Gloversville synagogue, mostly paid for by Littauer and modeled on the then-recently built Carnegie Library no longer stands but is remembered in postcards, and a commemorative statue of Littauer by Austrian sculptor Victor Frisch still looks out at the intersection of North Main Street and Prospect Avenue. I'll write more about Littauer's legacy on my other blog Samuel Gruber's Jewish Art and Monuments.

A pleasing surprise to me on the visit was the World War I Memorial situated about twenty feet away from the Littauer statue. Until recently, a High School stood behind these statues, providing a more impressive backdrop.

 While Littauer stands assertively at the corner, the Gloversville's Doughboy, sculpted by Karl Illava (1896–1954), is set back back several paces from the roadway, in a quiet almost recessive pose. It is one of the most psychologically reflective War Monuments I've encountered. Long before depictions of typical Vietnam "grunts," this serious and sensitive depiction of an American World War I soldier at rest captures the heroic - but exhausting - life of the everyday soldier.

I immediately thought of ancient prototypes such as the Hellenistic Terme Boxer (Box at Rest), discovered in Rome in 1885, and now on view at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, and was recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (see video and history).

Gloversville, NY.  Doughboy World War I Memorial by Karl Illava, 1923. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.
Rome, Italy. Terme Boxer. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2003.
The Bronze Doughboy statue was sculpted by Karl Morningstar Illava (1896–1954), cast by the American Art Foundry (NY), and dedicated on Nov. 12, 1923.

It sits on a granite base inscribed with the compelling and somewhat ominous words:

 Lest We Forget

It Ye Break Faith With Us Who Died
We Shall Not Sleep
1917-1918
Gloversville, NY.  Doughboy World War I Memorial by Karl Illava, 1923. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.

Not much information is readily available about Illava, who studied and worked with Gutzon Borglum before the war, and afterward made several monuments and submitted other designs in competitions. Curiously, given my interest in Jewish artists, it is happily coincidental that Illava was Jewish through his mother Judith Eugenia Salzedo Peixotto, a descendant of some of America's oldest Jewish families. Whether he was a practicing Jew or identified as Jewish or not, his name is listed with those of Jewish soldiers in the American Jewish Yearbook of 1918 (p. 208), where he is named as a lieutenant in the cavalry. His brother Percy Piexotto Morningstar was a lieutenant in aviation.

Gloversville, NY.  Doughboy World War I Memorial by Karl Illava, 1923. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.
Gloversville, NY.  Doughboy World War I Memorial by Karl Illava, 1923. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2017.
This monument is very different from Illava's much better known dynamic group of World War I soldiers in Central Park donated by the Seventh Regiment New York 107th United Infantry Memorial Committee and dedicated a few years later, in 1927.  That group of “doughboys” is comprised of  active poses and seems to advance out Central Park at East 67th Street.  Illava knew the life of the active and restful soldier firsthand.

New York, NY.  107th Infantry World War I Memorial, Central Park, by Karl Illava, 1927. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2005.
New York, NY.  107th Infantry World War I Memorial, Central Park, by Karl Illava, 1927. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2005.