Arts and Letters

In George Grey Barnard we are confronted with the life of a very exceptional sculptor, quite as far removed from the commonplace as the mystic William Blake with whom he had certain characteristics in common. An individualist in the highest and best sense. Following as he did "The Triumvirate" in American sculpture, as we were wont to call St. Gaudens, Ward, and French, both he and Frederick MacMonnies, his contemporary, were brilliant stars in our art life and the more interesting to contemplate together because MacMonnies translated his emotions into form with the eye of an eagle while Barnard, seeing with the inner eye, gave us a new note of deep meaning to conjure with in the realm of form expression. I say conjure because when he first exhibited in America his work was so "out of the ordinary" that only the few elect recognized the poetry and power in his work. His work did not quite fit with our practical American natures.

I am reminded of an incident that occurred to another American sculptor who had lived abroad and sensed the admiration of Latin peoples for beauty. On his return to America he was making a memorial. Working on a ground floor in summer time, the door being open, workmen during rest periods would peer in and mutely watch the process of modelling in clay. Finally one of them expressed himself with the remark: "Say, Mister! Is it on wires that's did?" Fresh from the Latin country where the remark of the onlooker would most likely have been "Quanto bello," was it any wonder the contrast of our practical natures struck home? However, Barnard shortly convinced America. He was given the sculptural decorations of the Harrisburg Capitol to do and although it was not in his nature to be bound by architectural limitations, he achieved through great political and financial stress remarkable groups flanking the entrance. Mass and carrying strength at a distance as well as subtle evanescent modelling when viewed closely is rarely so effectively accomplished.

His birth occurred in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, in '63. But he was brought up in the West during the period of our great national strife—one section warring against another. In his early years the air must have echoed with the strife that was going on and that must have made a lasting impression on this youth, seared it into his soul, as it were. Through his own early struggles working at jewelry, at which he excelled, to get his daily bread, he craved a larger outlet. Was anything more natural than that he should continue with forms of a greater size and of infinite possibilities? It took courage for one who knew privation intimately to leave his livelihood and try to make good in an unknown field where there was no demand. But, as Elihu Vedder once said: "A man will do what he will do," and Barnard did just that. He left his jewelry work and went into the Art Institute of Chicago to study sculpture. Again he went through years of struggle of a most austere kind to achieve what was in him, to express life as it came to him. Born of a preacher, youth during the Civil War and its aftermath, hard physical struggle for a livelihood, these were the youthful beginnings. Is it any wonder these three conditions gave a lasting bent to his whole being?

From then on through his long life of magnificent productions, his work (always of a high artistic import) was chiefly the outpourings of this vigorous manly soul. Michael Angelo was his one great precursor and Rodin, his contemporary, whom some thought at times he imitated. But Barnard had greater poetic power.

Barnard's first great work, "The Two Natures," now in the Metropolitan Museum, was the keynote for his life's work. Like love, beauty, or art, it is untranslatable into words, incapable of being expressed by them. Yet, because of its power, Artist, Preacher, Philosopher as well as layman have to talk because the contemplation of it touches their very souls. An original conception thoroughly adapted to its medium of marble, Mr. Barnard worked on this group, clay, plaster, and marble, from 1888 to 1894. We do not quite agree with Lorado Taft's finding lack of grace or charm of expression in this group, yet gladly quote his otherwise admirable description when he says:

In the conventional sense it is not even a good composition for it looks more like an accidental grouping than like a carefully adjusted harmony of lines. Perhaps it is this very lack of convention which fascinates one against his will, which draws and holds, though it may not persuade. Mr. Barnard's thought is too powerful, his expression too original, to strike responsive chords at once. How could it? What is there within us to respond to such notes as these?—what in our daily humdrum lives to bring us into tune with such Titanic dreams of struggle? And yet there is something of the force—shall we say the uncouthness?—of nature about this work which is irresistible. It is unique and reminds one of no other; nor can one in its presence look at aught else until he has made the circuit of all its extraordinary views. It is the manly and not less artistic expression of conflict, in form so new and yet so intelligible that its primary significance cannot be mistaken nor its intensity ignored. It is the work of a man who is first of all a sculptor.

With all its rugged unrest of line, the group offers absolute repose, though indeed it is the feverish repose of breathless men who must stop for an instant or suffocate. The shadow of the struggle is over them still; the fearful embrace again so near at hand that we do not at once recognize the absolute immobility of the moment. In its every member the composition shows the fervid fancy of a strong man who has felt the whole scene. It is almost superfluous to point out the poetical advantage of this quiescent moment over any incident of the actual struggle. To have recreated "The Wrestlers" of antiquity, the usual "Jacob and the Angel," or those bloodthirsty men of Copenhagen, would have been to remove the whole thing from the realm of spiritual interest and to have made of it a prize fight. It would have been an error almost as fatal as to transform this impressive group into a conventionally unified and balanced composition with its comfortable dénouement assured by every well-established line.

In its very incompleteness, in the lack of finality of composition, the artist has made appeal to our emotions. He leaves us in suspense. The uncertainty of the outcome is written in the fundamental lines of the group. The issue, as with each of us, is unknown to the end. Herein lies much of the universality of its significance and the potency of its appeal.

His "Brotherly Love," made about this time, ordered by a Norwegian, very definitely shows again this searching of his soul into the unknown. W. A. Coffin says of it: "The 'Brotherly Love' violates some of our traditions, but it is beautiful and possesses a weird, indescribable charm. It is a group intended for a tomb, and shows the figures of two nude young men whose heads are partly buried in the roughly hewn marble which forms the bulk of the monument, and whose hands seem to have forced their way through it and to be searching each other's grasp. I suppose that the marble mass may typify rock or darkness, or eternity, or something else tangible or intangible, and that the brothers are groping through it to join each other after death."

And Mr. Taft truly adds: "It has been said that a poet is entitled to credit for anything that his poems suggest. If the same applies to sculpture, Mr. Barnard may claim on this work a bountiful royalty, for it has been interpreted in many ways: 'Life drawn unto Death,' 'Life reclaimed by Relentless Matter—Earth,' 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face,' 'Sympathy,' and the like. The original idea of the artist was, however, 'The Unseen Giver,' one who extends a helping hand without hope of recognition or reward."

In this work particularly, some critics in France were stirred to criticize Barnard because he made use of undeveloped or unformed rough marble, as Rodin and Michael Angelo sometimes did. The best answer to that is that the import of these figures would have been expressionless without the unfinished block to grope in, the nebulous effect of a rough block being quite similar to the "atmosphere" in a painting. However, in the Champ de Mars in 1894 Barnard at thirty-one placed before the critic and public the results of his efforts to date in the yearly Salon-Champ de Mars. He was immediately elected an Associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. Artists and critics united in proclaiming his work the sensation of the year and the sculptor now "made" and famous was fêted and entertained by the great art patrons of Paris.

From now on he made New York his home. Work after work emerged from his hands—impelled by and expressing the deep-toned soul that could not rest. His great humanitarian nature led him to center his interest more and more in a profound study of our President Abraham Lincoln whose nature he thoroughly searched and sensed, and he has left us numerous records of his physiognomy that will probably never be excelled. Of his heroic, much-discussed statue of Lincoln, it is doubtless true that he sought too strenuously to show the elemental, even uncouth rather than the nobler aspect of the man, but nobody can say it was done without profound thought and consummate skill. His last herculean endeavor, unfortunately left unfinished at the time of his death, "The Rainbow Arch," was again the outpouring of his soul toward humanity. Rarely does the record of a life leave us with impressions of such consistency, originality, and power as that of George Grey Barnard.