I have to give three talks in the coming weeks as part of the dedication of our new sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the National Military Park and Visitor Center in Gettysburg Pa. You’d think this would be an easy thing, since I do a lot of talking about the experience of making objects/storytelling, but it’s turned into something of an ordeal. As I start gearing up to write something I keep receiving drafts of documents that others who are participating in these events are sending to me. I am discovering that much of what we discussed and therefore much of what I might have said is now at least partially contained within the documents of others with whom I will share a podium in just a few weeks. I don’t mind, mind you; I’m delighted that people think enough of our conversations to want to incorporate bits and pieces into talks to a wider audience, but it has left me slightly bereft of something to say, especially when you consider that there are more than 15,000 volumes in print on the subject of Lincoln. You might think this makes it easy- so much material to work from - but actually it’s just the opposite – the sheer volume of material suggests how little you probably know about the man, his life & his deeds and his political footprint. But I do know something about developing an image of mythic individuals like Lincoln. We start with some basic questions, metrics and measurements if they are available; in Lincoln’s case they were. We measured some of his clothing and measured the iconic hat at the National Museum of American History. Profile of Lincoln Feb. 1864, measuring his top hat and frock coat We developed a drawing of what the sculpture could look like, and then created a working model to inform an enlargement that would ultimately take months to develop at full scale.
Working drawing and the beginning of a scale clay model of Lincoln circa November 1863 But these beginning steps do not account for the difficulty that lay ahead. It is one thing to sketch it is quite another to “render.” As you define the essence of your subject you begin wrestling with a newly created reality at hand.
Life mask of Lincoln made by Volk in 1860. When I examined the mask I discovered tiny words inside of the eye cavity, and surmise that this was a transfer from the newsprint used to plug the holes when the plaster was poured into the mold. The photo of Lincoln is Feb. 5, 1865 by Alexander Gardiner
Dr. Amy Gumaer writing for the forthcoming exhibition Lincoln One Man Two Views , opening February 2010 at Montgomery College in Maryland said this: “The difficulty of capturing Lincoln’s likeness in painting and sculpture has been the subject of much discussion. Walt Whitman famously observed, “I know of no satisfactory picture of Lincoln. All sorts of pictures exist—many of them good in themselves, good as pictures—yet all of them wanting in the last, the essential touch.” Writing about the painter Marsden Hartley’s fascination with Lincoln, art historian Randall R. Griffey noted that it was “the president’s perceived enigmatic personality” that drew many artists, including Hartley, to the subject of Lincoln; yet as Griffey further observed, “[The] flood tide of likenesses deprives any single image of Lincoln the honor and authority of capturing the ‘real’ man. Thus his image betrays the inadequacy of representation as an index of truth; that is to say, Lincoln himself may have been ‘honest,’ as one of his popular nicknames suggests, but individual images of him are not, at least not entirely.” Noted Lincoln historian Carl Sandburg, who wrote extensively about the President’s life, commented on the complexity of Lincoln’s character in the address he gave to the Joint Session of Congress on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1959. In that address, Sandburg stated, “Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.” In our own day, leading Lincoln historian Harold Holzer has observed that it was Lincoln’s friend and private secretary, John G. Nicolay, who remarked that “[N]o photograph or painting… could render even an approximate representation of [Abraham Lincoln]. Lincoln’s features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait. [Artists] put into their pictures the large, rugged features, and strong prominent lines; they made measurements to obtain exact proportions; they ‘petrified’ some single look, but the picture remained hard and cold… This was not he who smiled, spoke, laughed, charmed… There are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him.” Tools of the trade and the full size Lincoln sculpture –early days in clay
The completed sculpture as seen below left in clay, and in wax on his way to bronze.
In the 19th century, indeed well into the 20th century, sculptors would also have gone a long way in terms of furthering their careers by producing important Lincoln sculpture commissions. No matter who they were, they exhausted one Lincoln storyline or another – a direct function of the times they lived in, and the accepted attitude about Lincoln at the time; i.e. The Great Emancipator, which ends as sculpture genre when reconstruction ends –giving rise to Lincoln the Savior of the Union.
Of the more than 600 sculptures devoted to the American Presidency, more than a third of that number are of Abraham Lincoln - and of that number app. 27 have been produced since the year 2000. This is an astonishing fact, and I think this herculean effort sculptors make in their devotion to Lincoln is what historian James Percoco calls the development of “public memory. “ Interestingly enough, public memory can, in the fullness of time, also become “popular memory,” which is an interesting distinction, and one that begs continued study, even in the case of Abraham Lincoln.
Lately, I’ve been musing about something which isn’t funny at all. This year on 9/11, sitting in the studio in NYC, I listened to a radio broadcast coming from lower Manhattan, now an annual event, of the reading of the names of those who perished on that terrible day. I was struck by something as I heard all of those family members and loved ones reading the names of those who were lost. There was an almost palpable need to speak directly to the dead. I know it sounds a bit odd, but the entreaties by the hundreds nearly broke my heart and all I could think was that those left behind, and the nature of sudden death, cause us want to continue a conversation with those who are lost to us.
In a similar way, I think we continue a conversation with Lincoln. The tragic nature of his death and indeed physical deterioration in life suggests something I think we, as a nation, continue to be at least a little haunted by. Perhaps more importantly, we have made him our leader for all time- We the people seek something in our leadership that is rarely satisfied – and in the long dead Lincoln we can safely bundle hopes and dreams with our own idea of national virtue and safely say “He’s the one!”
The Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White said “Inspiration descends only in flashes – to clothe circumstances.” I’m sure this can be said of the work we produce, and I wonder if this wasn’t also the case in Lincoln’s life?
No recent President, with the possible exception of the deeply flawed but hugely popular war time Prime Minister Winston Churchill, evokes a national pride equal to that of Lincoln – and maybe the reference to “war time” is key to the whole thing..
This sculpture is meant to render Lincoln in November of 1863 seen with the full burden of war on his back – I’ll leave it to you to decide if we even came close in our attempt.
A final note, the commissioning of this sculpture, again quoting James Percoco was certainly an act of deliberate engagement, and I would like to thank the Gettysburg Foundation and Robert H. Smith for their support throughout this process.
Ivan Schwartz
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