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Liberty: Bartholdi's Quest for a Visual Metaphor
| Article
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10810 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1986 |
2,621 Words |
| Author
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June Hargrove
June Hargrove, associate professor of art history at the
University of Maryland, is the American commissioner for
Liberty, the French-American Statue in Art and History, an
exhibition at the New York Public Library. She is indebted to
Janet Headley, the research assistant for the New York Public
Library, for help in gathering this material. |
Charged with myth and laden with history, the Statue of Liberty at its centenary has such potency for us as an image that we can scarcely imagine the challenges that confronted its creator, August Bartholdi. We take the statue's form and iconography for granted, as if it were obvious to the artist, who had only to occupy himself with its realization. Indeed, the public drama of the two nations' campaigns for funding, fraught with tensions and crises, has overshadowed the artistic struggle that Bartholdi himself experienced. Clearly, the French sculptor had to be a gifted entrepreneur and a consummate politician to see his vision of a colossal monument to French-American friendship realized, but the creative demands on Bartholdi to design an appropriate form, to infuse it with meaning, and to insure its structural stability are no less remarkable.
For Bartholdi, the colossal in sculpture was not so much a style as a mode of thinking. Vast scale was to evoke the sublime. His earnest desire to create monuments of "great moral value" reflects his heritage as a son of the Enlightenment, which generated the notion that public sculpture has a didactic mission to instruct us in secular virtues. In Bartholdi's mind, the loftiness of the ideal of Liberty warranted a grandiose expression, one that would captivate the beholder with its sublime nobility.
From his first major work, the larger-than-life-size statue General Rapp, exhibited at the 1855 World's Fair, the sculptor manifested his penchant for the colossal. He made two pilgrimages to Egypt, in 1856 and 1869, to admire such colossi as those at Memmon and the Sphinx at Giza (the source of Bartholdi's colossal Lion of Belfort). The latter voyage was further motivated by his hope that the khedive, the ruler of Egypt, would commission an anthropomorphic lighthouse, Egypt Bringing Light to Asia, to be built at the mouth of the recently completely Suez Canal. Ismail Pasha's refusal was a bitter disappointment for the artist, but happily one which was to turn his gaze toward America.
Across the Atlantic, a colossal allegorical figure who steps out of the shackles of bondage at her feet to illuminate the world with the torch of freedom inescapably connoted emancipation and the preservation of the union. The American Committee, under the leadership of William Maxwell Evarts, soon to become secretary of state in the Hayes administration, was the counterpart of the French-American Union. The members, whose nucleus was the Union League Club, were equally anxious to accept the gift as a reminder of the common bonds of a prewar heritage that applied as much to their fellow citizens as
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