Straus Memorial: OMOM Essay 46

"About the Sculpture" is an exercise in working out the identity of a sculpture when it's not immediately obvious. I also make the point that learning to look systematically at a sculpture allows you to spend far more time than you might have expected with art that appeals to you. For more on that, see my article "Getting More Enjoyment from Art You Love," The Objective Standard 1:2 (Summer 2006).

"About the Subject" in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan is on Isidor and Ida Straus. Rather than dwelling on their deaths on the Titanic in 1912, I focused on Straus as an early co-owner of Macy's department store.

For February 2007, the Forgotten Delights calendar has a close-up of the Straus Memorial along with Robbie Burns's charming poem "O My Luve's Like a Red, Red Rose."

Firemen's Memorial: OMOM Essay 45

In "About the Sculpture" I examine how the bronze relief and two groups of marble figures combine to make a vivid statement about the excitement and hazards of firefighting. Then I suggest that the reader imagine how extraordinarily inexpressive this memorial would be were it only a list of names. In my Battery Park podcast, I argue (with additional examples) that for any memorial, including the World Trade Center memorial, representational sculpture is more evocative than a list of names set in landscape architecture.

"About the Subject" surveys major fires in New York from 1776, when Nathan Hale (Essay 8 of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan) was arrested as a possible arsonist, until 1908, when the death of a 35-year-veteran of the New York Fire Department inspired the creation of this memorial.

For the Sidebar it amused me to use a few lines from my favorite song from The Scarlet Pimpernel in a very literal sense.

Below: the Vitruvian wave is usually a simple running spiral, but on the Firemen's Memorial, flame and smoke lick its edges.

Joan of Arc: OMOM Essay 44

"About the Sculpture" discusses why a basic knowledge of Western civilization is a requirement for looking at Western sculpture. An early draft also included quite a lengthy description of the process by which I identified the theme of Joan of Arc. For the sake of better flow in the main text, most of that description was eventually shifted to "How to Read a Sculpture" (Appendix A in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan) as a practical demonstration of how to work out a theme.

"About the Subject" sketches Joan's role in the battle between the French and English kings in 1428.

This is another difficult sculpture to photograph. From the hillside below one can barely see Joan's face, and her sword - a crucial element in the composition - tends to disappear against surrounding trees and buildings. After dozens of attempts at various times of day and year, I finally happened to take the photo that appears in the book, in which the light hits her sword and makes it stand out from the background.

Alexander Hamilton (Central Park): OMOM Essay 43

In “About the Sculpture” I consider why Manhattan has four sculptures of Hamilton (d. 1804) - more than of any other person, including George Washington - and how the fact that this one is of granite rather than the usual bronze or marble affects what the artist could do and how we perceive it.

“About the Subject” in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan compares Hamilton’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas of “big government.” Times do change.

A couple years ago I gave a walking tour of the Hamilton sculptures, of which you can read the opening pages online. Click here for information on purchasing a copy of the whole essay in PDF format.

Theodore Roosevelt: OMOM Essay 42

I was surprised to learn that President Theodore Roosevelt (d. 1919), soldier, politician and hunter, was also very interested in art. He wrote a perceptive review of the Armory Show of 1913, at which America was introduced to “modern” European art such as Cubism. “About the Sculpture” focuses on his cooperation with Augustus Saint Gaudens (Essays 19 and 31 of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan), then America’s most prominent sculptor, on the design of the $20 gold piece. TR suspected the design of the new Double Eagle (see photos below) would get him impeached: "About the Subject" in tells why.

In “About the Sculpture” I pull back again to look at the big picture: the setting in which Roosevelt was meant to be seen, which included part of the east facade of the American Museum of Natural History and an enormous plaza (never constructed) that would have spread into Central Park.

Verdi Monument: OMOM Essay 41

After hours of cranking through microfilm copies of Il Progresso Italo-Americano, whose editor spearheaded the fundraising for the Verdi Monument, I had found no explanation for why Aida, Leonora, Othello and Falstaff were chosen over Verdi's other characters to be represented on the Verdi Monument. At that point John Haralabopoulos, opera buff and member of the Forgotten Delights update list, became fascinated by the question, and did far more research than I would have had the knowledge or patience to do. I greatly enjoyed his reports of his findings at Lincoln Center and elsewhere.

“About the Subject” in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan focuses how Verdi came to write “Va, pensiero" and why it became an Italian "national" anthem by the mid-19th c., decades before the peninsula was unified and independent.

Above: Aida. Below: Falstaff, Leonora, Otello.

Eleanor Roosevelt: OMOM Essay 40

The surprise in writing this essay was how intensely I came to dislike Eleanor Roosevelt. “About the Subject” originally focused an action that made my blood boil, which occurred during her tenure as assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense. The amorphous aims of the OCD (established by FDR in May 1941) included protection of the civilian population, maintenance of morale and promotion of volunteer involvement in defense. Director Fiorello LaGuardia (Essay 9), juggling his OCD and mayoral duties, focused on basics such as air raid procedures and black-out drills. Mrs. Roosevelt, however, allotted OCD funds for day-care and health services. Not long after Pearl Harbor she added long-time friend and professional dancer Mayris Chaney to the OCD payroll: rhythmic and folk dancing, she told the New York Times, had proved in England to have "a definite part" in war-time programs. Even after a furor that led to her resignation, Mrs. Roosevelt reiterated her belief that "better nutrition, better housing, better day-by-day medical care, better education, better recreation for every age" were essential to national defense. A couple months after I'd submitted the manuscript of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan - when I was already deeply involved in another project - my editor at New York University Press pointed out that the tone of this "About the Subject" was far more polemical than anything else in the book, and just didn't fit in a guidebook with excursions into art theory. Once he pointed it out I had to admit he was right about the tone, but since I couldn’t find any anecdotes on Mrs. Roosevelt that made me like her, I settled for compiling a biographical sketch. I consider it one of the most insipid sections of OMOM. “About the Sculpture,” on the other hand, was interesting to write because it tackles the issue of evaluating a sculpture philosophically, as opposed to philosophically evaluating the person represented. Eleanor Roosevelt is the most recent sculpture to appear in OMOM, having been dedicated in 1996. Other representational sculptures have been dedicated in New York since then that don’t appear in the book, for example the under-lifesize portrait of Benito Juarez in Bryant Park. The blog gets no photo of this sculpture, because I forgot to ask the sculptor for permission to use images on the web as well as in the book.