Brandon Vermont Civil War Monument: Solitary Soldier Stands Guard

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Brandon Vermont Civil War Monument: Solitary Soldier Stands Guard 

by Samuel D. Gruber

I've posted several examples (from Detroit & Troy) of a the big "wedding cake" type Civil War monuments popular in cities in the late 19th century.  More common, of course, are the many smaller monuments to found in almost every town in new England and Upstate New York - and throughout, I am sure, all of the Union states.

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

These monuments are memorials to the fallen as much a celebrations of any victory.  For the most part they were erected a generation after the war, when many of the soldiers who fought had reached maturity, and now occupied leading positions in government and business.  During the sometime disillusioning decades of Reconstruction, these monuments affirmed the value of sacrifice.  A good recent article by Nancy Price Graff discusses the ubiquity and similarity of Civil War monuments in Vermont - where one sixth of all Vermonter who fought in the conflict died on the battlefield or of wounds and disease.

The monuments tend to be sober and often somber.  The monument of Brandon, Vermont (where I recently visited friends) is a good example.  An an important intersection in the town a single uniformed, mustachioed, Union soldier stands on sentinel duty - guarding the town so to speak - and perpetuating the memory of his fallen comrades, the 54 men of Brandon how died in the war.  (This type of memorial is timeless, and recalls to me especially (albeit dressed) the steady repeated pose of Greek kouroi, possibly set up - at least sometimes - as funerary monuments.

The Brandon monument was inaugurated in 1886.  It is made by the White Bros. of Barre, Vermont granite. The sculptor is unknown, but this particular model of Civil War soldier is frequently found on monuments across the country.   

The memory of the Civil War lasted long after the fighting stopped.  In fact, the war remained a vivid part of family and civic culture for decades, really until the generation that experienced the fighting and loss was gone.  Though the country's last union soldier (Albert Woolsen) did not die until 1956,  the major generational passing took place after fifty years, just in time for a new set of memories - those of World War I - to take center stage in public life (and monuments).

 You can see pictures of many other Vermont Civil war monuments here.

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Like its contemporaries in Detroit and Troy, the smaller Brandon monument plays an important role in the townscape.  It is immediately visible upon entry to the town from the south (Route 7 from Rutland), and stands of the junction of several important roads and streets, especially Park Street, with its many fines houses four the 1830s and following.  Like similar monuments, it is hub around which this part of town revolves.

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Names of the dead. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Brandon, Vermont. Civil War Monument, 1886. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Memorial to Munich's White Rose Resistance Group - This Week is the 70th Anniversary of their Last Act, Trial and Execution
by Samuel D. Gruber (all photos Samuel D. Gruber 2006)

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the resistance, arrest and trial of the White Rose group in Munich, Germany - one of the only (the only?) public acts by Germans in Germany of Nazi power and policy.  You can read a detailed account of their resistance and fate here. 

An article in the JTA today recalls the group and lessons that should be learned. 

The events and the brave young perpetrators are well known in Germany where the group has (justly) achieved hero status.  Their moral courage acts as a reminder of all that other Germans did not do - and acts as a cover and solace in Germany today for the the apathy, neglect, ignorance and fear of many, and the full-throated support of Nazi policies of so many more during the 1930s and the war years.  Streets and squares have been named after White Rose group, and the group has been the subject of many movies. 

The most interesting memorial to their action is installed around the Ludwig Maximilian University building in Munich, where on Feb 18th, 1943, they scattered leaflets before their arrest.  Today, one can find memorial traces - in metal - set into the pavement of the area in front of the University building where the leaflets fell and scattered.  This space is now named Geschwister Scholl Platz (Scholl Sibling Place).  Included are portraits, biographies, leaflets and a farewell letter from White Rose member Willi Graf. 

Two large fountains dominate the space outside the University building in which the commemorative plaques are intentionally set - though seemingly haphazard.  In good weather these are popular places for students to sit and socialize - no doubt the White rose monument is walked over in haste, but it also must be much noticed by today's student generation.

At present (Feb 2013) I do not know the artist who designed this memorial, or the circumstances of its installation.  So far, the descriptions of the monument that I have consulted do not give this information.

In the atrium of the main university building, where the group distributed their sixth leaflet on February 18, 1943,  there is a small exhibit about the group  This is a bronze relief (1953) by Lothar Dietz that commemorates the group's executed members: Willi Graf, professor Kurt Huber, Hans Leipelt, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, Hans and Sophie Schol.  More information (in German) here.  There is also a bronze bust of Sophie Schol alone.

There are several other markers and memorials throughout Munich commemorating the White Rose group.  A listing of these can be found on the webpage White Rose Walking Tour.  More information about traces of the Nazi era in Munich can be found on the webpage Traces of Evil: remaining Nazi Sites in Germany.

Mestrovic and Job in Paris and Syracuse

Paris, France. Job  by Ivan Mestoric (1945) on view at the Musee Rodin.  Supplicant Persephone (1945) can be seen standing in the court in the bottom image.  All photos: Samuel D. Gruber 2013

Mestrovic and Job in Paris and Syracuse
by Samuel D. Gruber

Visiting the Musee Rodin in  Paris a few weeks ago brought me face to face with an old friend - Ivan Mestrovic's agonized bronze statue of a crouching, suffering Job.  The work, completed in 1945 in Rome finalized a vision of Job that Mestrovic first conceived when in a fascist prison in Croatia in 1941.  Both Job and a companion piece of a Supplicant Persephone were exhibited at Mestrovic's one-man exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947 (the first such show the Met had ever mounted for a living artist).  Today, the works face each other across a small courtyard at Syracuse University, where I pass them almost every day.  Both these works are presided over by a larger relief of Moses, a bronze made in 1990 from Mestrovic's plaster version designed for the un-built monument to the Six Million designed by architect Erich Mendelsohn, which was planned for Riverside Park in New York City but never built (more on that work in a future post).

Syracuse, NY. Job by Ivan Mestrovic (1945) in the Shaffer Sculpture Court outside of Bowne Hall. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2012.

Versions of Job and Persephone from the Ivan Meštrović Museums in Croatia were both installed in the Court of Honor at the Musee Rodin, as part of small but powerful exhibition of Mestrovic's work  coinciding with festival Croatie, la voici. 

Syracuse, NY. Supplicant Persephone by Ivan Mestrovic (1945) in the Shaffer Sculpture Court outside of Bowne Hall. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2012. 

In Syracuse these works are among the very best figurative sculptures in a city that boasts an impressive collection of public bronzes. I teach these works in my Holocaust, Memory and the Visual Arts class.  In Paris, however, despite that fact that I was in the midst of exploring the city's commemorative landscape, these works took on - in the context of Rodin's work - a different, but related, meaning.  The anguish expressed by both figures was still powerful, but due to their museum siting it was dissipated.

On the other hand, since the works were in only a stone's throw from Rodin's great group of suffering figures, the Burghers of Calais (Les Bourgeois de Calais), and also of bronzes of all the constituent figures in the that work (the work has been cast twelve times in all, and can be seen in various configurations in different cities), the line from Rodin to Mestrovic was very clear.  The mix of defeat, anguish, anxiety in the posture and gestures of the Burghers of Calais figures, laid over expressions of nobility, made this an exceptional public monument when it was unveiled in 1889 and still today. As with Mestrovic's Job, Rodin's work has inspired any number of subsequent commemorative depictions of victims - especially Holocaust victims.

Paris, France. Musee Rodin.  The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber 2013.

Both the preliminary designs for Job and Persephone express Mestrovic's personal anguish as a prisoner in 1941, when he expected death at the hand of Italian Fascists.  His political stances from the First Wold War period (in defiance of both Austria and Italy) and his refusal in the mid-1930s to accept a Nazi invitation to exhibit his work in Berlin, which Hitler himself would open, made him a persona non grata in occupied Yugoslavia.  Subsequently, these works as executed in bronze have been accepted as larger expressions of pain, remorse and despair in the wake of all the destitution in Europe brought about in World War II.   Mestrovic's first wife Ruza was Jewish and she died in Zagreb in 1942 and at least 30 members of her extended family also died in the Holocaust.  But Mestrovic knew many people - Jews and Christians - in artistic, political and others circles who suffered and died in the war.

Not surprisingly, Mestrovic was not the only artist of the time to use Job as a symbol of the suffering during the war.  Coincidentally, probably the best known painting of the theme, Francis Gruber's Job of 1944 from the Tate Galley in London, is also on view in Paris in the important - though rambling - exhibition L'Art en Guerre: France 1938-1947 on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne (through February 17, 2013).  Gruber (no relation to me) painted his Job for the Salon d'Automne (the so-called Salon of the Liberation) of 1944,  just after the Liberation of Paris.   Gruber's Job is a naked, forlorn and vulnerable man seated on a stool by a broken gate or fence.  According to the Tate online catalogue "Gruber painted this picture ... to symbolise the oppressed peoples who, like Job, had undergone a great ordeal of suffering. The inscription on the paper at which the figure is looking reads: 'Maintenant encore, ma plainte est une révolte, et pourtant ma main comprime mes soupirs'. This is taken from The Book of Job, 23.11"   This Job is essentially passive - there is none of the animal anguish Mestrovic brings to the subject. 

It is significant that Gruber and Mestrovic both chose the figure of Job to channel their fears and faith about World War II and its aftermath.  For Jews and Christians alike, Job was the Biblical figure who embodied universalism.  Rabbis debated who he was, when he lived of if he was real at all.  Many saw him as the archetype Righteous Gentile, others a fictional device for teaching the love and fear of God.   Still, both Jews and Gentiles took him for their own, and his suffering represents the suffering (and hope) of all.  For Christian artists especially Job was an appropriate subject, that could linked to Jewish tradition (and contemporary suffering), but could also be interpreted in many other ways.

Job by Francis Gruber (1912-1948). Tate Museum, London. Photo: Courtesy of the Tate Museum

How did Job and Persephone get to Syracuse?  Mestrovic was born in Croatia in 1883 but by the 1920s he was very popular in the United States, where he had a successful exhibition at Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1924, which led to his commission for giant Indians (Bowman and Spearman) in Chicago,  installed in Grant Park in 1928.  In 1947 Syracuse University Chancellor William P. Tolley arranged for Mestrovic to come and teach at Syracuse University, where he stayed until 1955 before moving on to Notre Dame, where he taught until his death in 1962.  He brought many of his recent and in progress works to Syracuse, where he worked on them, and trained a generation of young sculptors. You can read about Mestrovic at Syracuse here, and in a longer article by David Tatum here.  Notre Dame hold a large collection of Mestrovic papers, the finding aid is here.

George Washington in Paris

Paris, France. George Washington Equestrian Statue at Place d'Iéna by Daniel Chester French (1900). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (Dec. 2012)

George Washington in Paris
by Samuel D. Gruber


I came to Paris and saw old friends - people and monuments.  Americans are common, in flesh and bronze, and their comings and goings over two hundred years can often be traced in the many commemorative plaques one finds attached to buildings walls, and in a series of monumental statues placed around the city, but especially in the 16th arrondissement. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin are fixtures in the neighborhood.

Paris, France. George Washington Equestrian Statue at Place d'Iéna by Daniel Chester French (1900). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (Dec. 2012)

George Washington never came to Paris in his lifetime, but he is here bigger than life dominating two public spaces, and his image can probably be found elsewhere throughout the city.  Once (at the Place d'Iéna) he is carried on a feisty horse, and once (at the Place du Etats-Unis) he carries, together with his bon ami and protege Lafayette the banners of liberty the flags of the United States and France.

Both works are by sculptors well-known to Americans.  The bronze Equestrian Statue of a very marshal George Washington is by Daniel Chester French, known for his monumental Lincoln Memorial statue, and about whose Richard Morris Hunt monument I recently wrote.  The Washington statue was inaugurated July 3, 1900, the gift of a committee of American women. The text of the statue reads: "gift of the women of the United States of America in memory of the brotherly help given by France to their fathers in the fight for Independence."

 At the Place d'Iéna Washington raises his sword - presumably to advance into battle.  But mostly he combats of the thousands of cars that circle past every day.  Fortunately, horse and rider are raised on a high base, so Washington always rises above the fray. 

Paris, France. George Washington Equestrian Statue at Place d'Iéna by Daniel Chester French (1900). Photos: Samuel D. Gruber (Dec. 2012)

Washington and Lafayette are the work of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, creator (with Gustav Eiffel) of the Statue of Liberty.  Apparently newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer was so  impressed by Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty that he commissioned a statue symbolizing French-American friendship to be installed in Paris. It was dedicated in 1895 at the Place des États-Unis (a replica later erected in Manhattan's Morningside Park, New York).  

Here, Washington is in a quieter setting, set upon a green rectangle at one end of the Place des Etats-Unis.  In the center of the long narrow place is a playground, and several other monuments with American associations are place at other parts of the square.  The square is lined with impressive mansions.  Only a short distance from the much busier Place de l'étoile and the Arc de Triomphe. 

Paris, France. Washington and Lafayette Status by Bartholdi (1895). Photos: Samuel D. Gruber Dec. 2012)

Paris also has a Rue Washington that connects with the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.  It was named after the  American general and president in 1889.

  

Another Architect Remembered: Andre Le Notre Monument in Paris

Paris, France.  monument to landscape architect André Le Nôtre at the Garden of the tuileries.  Photos: Samuel D. Gruber (2013)

Another Architect Remembered: André Le Nôtre Monument in Paris

by Samuel D. Gruber
I wasn't consciously looking for architect monuments when recently in Paris, but en route to an exhibit at the Orangeries I encountered famed French landscape architect André Le Nôtre (1613-1700) captured in bronze at the edge one of his most trafficked (and much altered) creations, the Gardens of Palais des Tuileries.  This monument can keep company in this blog with that of Richard Morris Hunt in New York, which is fitting, as Hunt most certainly spent time strolling in  Le Notre gardens during the years he spent in France.

Paris, France.  monument to landscape architect André Le Nôtre at the Garden of the tuileries.  Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2013)

The monument lists André Le Nôtre greatest works.  He Transformed the gardens of the Tuileries Palace, first laid out in the mid 176th century, into a grand formal garden that stretches between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, opened to the public in 1667.  Since the 19th century, it has been a primary place for Parisians to gather to relax and celebrate.  I don't know when this monument was installed near the entrance by the Place de la Concorde, but it appears to be fairly modern.  The bust was clearly made after an earlier sculpted commemorative portrait of Le Notre by Antoine Coysevox.

Paris, France.  Bust of André Le Nôtre from Tuileries monument (photo: Samuel D. Gruber)  and marble bust by Antoine Coysevox reportedly at the church of St. Roch. (Photo: http://www.art-prints-on-demand.com).

The park has undergone many transformations and many classically-inspired statues were added throughout the 19th century.  In recent decades more modern works have also been included on both permanent and temporarily basis.

Paris, France. View from near the Le Nôtre monument looking out of the Tuileries Gardens toward Place dfe la Concorde. What would Le Nôtre have thought (and does it matter)?. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2013).

Remembering an Architect: The Richard Morris Hunt Monument in NYC

 

New York, NY. Richard Morris Hunt monument. Fifth Avenue at 70th Street.  Daniel Chester French, sculptor.  Postcard view, early 20th century (above) and recent photo (Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2012).  The monument is a time portal, unchanged in a hundred years. 

 Remembering an Architect: The Richard Morris Hunt Monument in NYC

Poor architects, I think they rank  behind soldiers, politicians, writers, artists and a host of other notable professionals when it comes to being commemorated in marble or bronze, or any other permanent material.  Of course, an architect will always say his (or her) buildings are monuments enough.  Maybe true - but I've met very few architects without healthy egos, who would say no to a monument like the one for 19th-century America's leading academic and society architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895).  Charles Follen McKim of McKim Mead and White only got a plaque in the pavement at Columbia University, which he designed.  (What's your favorite memorial to an architect?)

 

 New York, NY. Columbia University. Charles Follen McKim commemorative pavement. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber

Hunt's monument is lovely.  Sculpted by Daniel Chester French and unveiled in 1898, it is dignified, but intimate; architectural; but sliding into the cityscape/landscape of Fifth Avenue against Central Park like the planting of an appropriate tree.  The monument is designed as a free-standing semicircular portico (an exedra) with a curved bench at the center of which is a bronze portrait bust of Hunt beneath which is inscribed:

 

RICHARD MORRIS HUNT
October 31, 1828
July 3, 1895
In Recognition
Of His Services To
The Cause of Art
In America
This Memorial
Was erected 1898 by
The Art Society
of New York

Two allegorical statues of Architecture and then Painting and Sculpture stand guard at the ends of the colonnade. The names the organizations in which Hunt played a major role are inscribed.

New York, NY. Richard Morris Hunt monument. allegorical figures of Architecture (top) and sculpture and painting (below).  Daniel Chester French, sculptor.  Photos: Samuel D. Gruber 2012.

Hunt was a pivotal figure in American architecture.  He bridged high Victorian art and French-inspired classicism, and he laid the foundation for and academic architectural training in architecture in America  that shifted emphasis from engineering to art.  Hunt's aesthetic led to the integration of architecture, sculpture and painting at the end of the 19th century the defined the design goals of the so-called Amerasian Renaissance.  The sculpture of the monument, Daniel Chester French play a major role in this movement, and it explains the prominent given to painting and sculpture in a monument to an architect. This integration of the arts is also central to the conception of the Metropolitan Museum of Art facade, which Hunt redesigned in 1895, shortly before his death, and which was completed in 1902.  

New York, NY. Metropolitan Museum of Art facade. Central part designed by Richard Morris (1895) and completed by Richard Howland Hunt (1902). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2007

Despite his fame in his lifetime, only a small number of Hunt's buildings still stand.  In New York City, the best known of these is the central block of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, facing Fifth Avenue just a half mile north of the monument. Hunt was the favored architect of the wealthy Vanderbilt family and while the Fifth Avenue Vanderbilt mansion has been demolished, the great Newport, Rhode Island mansion known as The Breakers, completed just before his death, as well other great houses, are today popular tourist attractions.  The enormous Vanderbilt mansion known as Biltmore in Ashville, North Carolina also survives. 

Newport, Rhode Island. The Breakers. Richard Morris Hunt, architect (1895). Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2008

Newport, Rhode Island.  The Breakers, detail of mosaic floor.  Richard Morris Hunt, architect. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2008.

 New York, NY. Richard Morris Hunt monument.  Mosaic decoration recalls Hunt's work. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2012.