Dusty Art

My prior Art posts can be found HERE.

How do we move away from being a civilization that produces art that causes comments like, “my five year old could make this,” back to being one that creates beauty and inspires deep questions? We must reject modernity and embrace tradition. To embrace tradition, we must first learn about it..

Let’s study art history together.

Abraham Lincoln (The Lincoln Memorial)

Artist	Daniel Chester French
Year	1920; 105 years ago
Type	Georgia marble (Murphy Marble)
Dimensions	580 cm (228 in)
Location	Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., U.S.
	38°53′21.4″N 77°3′0.5″W

This statue, inside the Lincoln Memorial monument, is one of the most famous statues of any world leader in history. The Abraham Lincoln is symbolic of the United States itself, and Washington D.C. in particular.

The statue is enormous. The seated figure of Lincoln is 19 feet tall and is made of Georgia marble weighing 170 tons. Lincoln in death became a figure larger than life (often regarded as the greatest president in the history of the U.S.) and his statue is designed to reflect that. Set just inside the stately Beaux Arts monument, it succeeds.

Daniel Chester French was the artist behind the statue, and he was already famous for earlier works – including another Lincoln statue in Lincoln, Nebraska. French’s seated Lincoln conveys the idea of a man who is a giant, but a seated one. Something in the sculpting conveys somber thoughtfulness, restraint, and reflection. If it were possible to ask, one might have gotten a lively answer from a Southerner a century ago as to whether he or she views Lincoln as a restrained man.

Perhaps the power of symbols on the mind, and of art and architecture in general, are why you would have to go so far back to ask the question expecting a different answer about America’s 16th President. And perhaps that is why art – especially grand public art – should be made and displayed with caution and care. If you want to affix an idea in the minds of the public, using marble, chisel cautiously. However, if that idea is true and important, chisel boldly, too.

(More on the statue, via wiki)

Abraham Lincoln (1920) is a colossal seated figure of the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), sculpted by Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) and carved by the Piccirilli Brothers. Located in the Lincoln Memorial, constructed between 1914 and 1922 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the statue was unveiled in 1922. The work follows in the nation’s Beaux Arts and American Renaissance-style architecture traditions.

Description

The 170-ton statue is composed of 28 blocks of white Georgia marble and rises 30 feet (9.1 m) from the floor, including the 19-foot (5.8 m) seated figure (with armchair and footrest) upon an 11-foot (3.4 m) high pedestal. The figure of Lincoln gazes directly ahead and slightly down with an expression of gravity and solemnity. His frock coat is unbuttoned, and a large United States flag is draped over the chair back and sides. French paid particular attention to Lincoln’s expressive hands, which rest on the enormous arms of a semi-circular ceremonial chair, whose fronts bear fasces, emblems of authority from Roman antiquity. French used casts of his own fingers to achieve the correct placement.

History

In 1914, Daniel Chester French was selected by the Lincoln Memorial Committee to create a Lincoln statue as part of the memorial to be designed by architect Henry Bacon (1866–1924). French was already famous for his 1874 The Minute Man statue in Concord, Massachusetts, and his 1884 John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard on the campus of Harvard University. He was also the personal choice of Bacon, who had already been collaborating with him for nearly 25 years. French resigned his chairmanship of the Fine Arts Commission in Washington, D.C., a group closely affiliated with the memorial’s design and creation — and commenced work in December.

French had already created (1909–1912) a major memorial statue of Lincoln—this one standing—for the Nebraska State Capitol (Abraham Lincoln, 1912) in Lincoln, Nebraska. His previous studies of Lincoln—which included biographies, photographs, and a life mask of Lincoln by Leonard Volk done in 1860—had prepared him for the challenging task of the larger statue. He and Bacon decided that a large seated figure would be most appropriate for the national memorial. French started with a small clay study and subsequently created several plaster models, making subtle changes in the figure’s pose or setting. He placed Lincoln not in an ordinary 19th-century seat but in a classical chair, including fasces, a Roman symbol of authority, to convey that the subject was an eminence for all the ages.

Three plaster models of the Lincoln statue are at French’s Chesterwood Studio, a National Trust Historic Site in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, including a plaster sketch (1915) and a six-foot plaster model (1916). The second of French’s plasters, created at Chesterwood in the summer of 1916 (inscribed October 31), became the basis of the final work, which was initially envisioned as a 12-foot (3.7 m) bronze. In deciding the size of the final statue, French and Bacon took photographic enlargements of the model to the memorial under construction. Eventually, French’s longtime collaborators, the firm of Piccirilli Brothers, were commissioned to do the carving of a much larger sculpture in marble from a quarry near Tate, Georgia.

French’s design took a year to transfer to the massive marble blocks. French provided finishing strokes in the carvers’ studio in The Bronx, New York City and after the statue was assembled in the memorial on the National Mall in 1920. Lighting the statue was a particular problem. In creating the work, French had understood that a large skylight would provide direct, natural illumination from overhead, but this was not included in the final plans. The horizontal light from the east flattened Lincoln’s facial features—making him appear to stare blankly rather than wear a dignified expression—and highlighted his shins. French considered this a disaster. In the end, an arrangement of electric lights was devised to correct this situation. The work was unveiled at the memorial’s formal dedication on May 30, 1922.

Legends

It is often said that the Lincoln figure is signing his own initials in the American manual alphabet: “A” with his left hand, “L” with his right. The National Park Service is at best ambivalent toward the story, saying, “It takes some imagination to see signs in Lincoln’s hands.” French had a deaf son and had depicted Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet signing in the manual alphabet.