Politics reigned as the anti-blacks who prevailed locally considered the Allen tribute a stain on their perfect plan. In April, they denied it a permanent location, although they granted permanence to the Presbyterian and German tributes. The production contract went to Cincinnati architect Alfred White. White was English-born and likely a crony of some politician. He employed an English sculptor named John Rowe.[598] Some modern historians theorized Edmonia created the marble bust and the marble bas-reliefs for the statue’s pedestal.[599] Archives at the Schomburg Center in New York confirm White created the bust.[600]
The Official Catalogue, prepared in advance, promised the Allen Monument would be sixteen-feet high on a six by six-foot base.[601] The marble then was delayed at sea. The AME Church postponed the scheduled celebration from Independence Day to September 22, the date Lincoln issued the initial Emancipation Proclamation.[602]
In September, a railroad accident that sent sixteen railroad cars into the Chemung River destroyed the monument proper.[603]
Near the November closing of the Centennial, the larger-than-life marble bust was finally unveiled atop a hastily prepared granite pyramid. As if to dramatize the disappointments that ground down years of anticipation, the sudden cancellation of its invited speaker, John Mercer Langston, and a cold rain marred the ceremony.[604] The bust then disappeared for over one hundred thirty years, returning to public display in 2010.[605]
Meanwhile, a controversy arose among colored leaders, decrying the use of white material. They called for use of the more natural shades of bronze – as originally conceived.[606]
Tears
Edmonia worried most about the treacherous Committee. Charged with acceptance and placement of art, the Committee could suddenly refuse her Cleopatra based on some technicality. It could accept the work but relegate it to a location so inappropriate that art lovers would never find it. It banished Thomas Eakins’s grisly Gross Clinic (1875), to the section on medicine. It broke Margaret Foley’s heart by exiling her first large work – an elaborate fountain – to decorate flower gardens far away where art critics might not notice it. Critics did notice, but when Foley died the following year, her friends said the bitter disappointment hastened her death.[596] Even Vinnie Ream worried about the Committee and took unusual steps, as described below, to assure placement of her work.
Learning when the Committee would see her work, Edmonia hurried to Fairmount Park. She needed to see her statues safely installed. Visualize her as she waited patiently, standing within earshot of the Committee as it passed on submissions.
Vigilant and flushed with anxiety, she saw the Committee reject work after work. Each elimination tore at her heart. She stood as quietly as she could, smaller than small, trying not to stare, not to make eye contact. Her strong fingers trembled as they gripped her purse, touched her hair, straightened her garments... Her mind surely raced. Were they aware of her standing there? Did they know who she was? What would she do if they rejected her work? Would she be able to speak, to argue some appeal? Would anyone be her advocate, come to her aid? Where was that commissioner? She covered her mouth as she nervously cleared her throat. At last, they brought in the “Dying Cleopatra” and uncrated it.
Like one of her own clay bozzetti, she stood soft, vulnerable, and damp, away from the sparkle of the spring day. “I scarcely breathed,” she recalled to the New York Times. “I felt as though I was nothing.
“They opened the box, looked at the work, talked together a moment, and then I heard the order given to place it in such and such a position.”[607] She was in! She “swallowed her sobs for a moment and then went home and had a good cry all by herself.” Tears of joy. Sighs of relief. Prayers of thanks. Surely she penned a note to her brother to share the good news. He cared so much for her success.
Now she could worry just a little more. What else could go wrong? What would the people say? What would the critics write? She would spend every minute with visitors judging her work – blacks and whites, tourists and locals, critics and correspondents – especially those who respectfully wondered who she was and how a colored person could create original sculpture. These people were so important. She was tense with anticipation, apprehension, and hope.
The Exposition
A week after her arrival, the Exposition erupted into months of excitement. For the first time, the United States invited the countries of the world to share technology and culture in the New World. With speeches and band-playing, President U. S. Grant opened the flag-bedecked show. Frederick Douglass had a ticket to sit with the senators and other dignitaries. The police barred his entry. Finally, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York came to his aid, and he was able to take his seat.
Over the following months, more than eight million Americans, many riding on reduced railroad fares, poured into the Exposition’s glass and cast-iron halls. Once there, they scrutinized craftsmanship, horticulture, the revolution of steam- and electric-powered machinery, and more fine art from all over the world than ever assembled before.
Figure 42. The Death of Cleopatra, 1876
Kept secret for years leading up to the Centennial, Edmonia’s main entry caused a sensation after its unveiling. Later, it was lost and found, as described in the Epilogue. Now, even after restoration, its original polish remains eroded, having suffered the harsh Chicago weather and innocent attempts to pretty it with paint. Photo courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois.
Fine art filled Memorial Hall, the first American art museum built in the Beaux-Arts style.[608] Together with an equally large Annex, built at the last minute to accommodate the surprising number of entries, the world’s greatest art show required more than three acres.
Edmonia must have walked eagerly through the assembly of masterworks from around the world – portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, John Gibson’s tinted Venus (ca. 1851-1856) from England, Rosa Bonheur’s painting of Oxen Plowing (1849), and many other works. It was an astonishing array. There were famous works and beautiful examples from Europe and the Americas – with more outside and in outlying buildings. The exhibitors numbered more than ten times the hundreds entered in Paris nine years earlier.
Europe was still the center of culture for the Western World. Classical and continental themes were everywhere in the mass array. At a time when Victorian modesty required covering all flesh but face and hands, acres of artful nudity lured crowds the way Monte Carlo drew gamblers.
Meanwhile, another revolution was in progress. For the first time, Americans realized they inspired artists. They were better subjects, some thought, than literary themes so rare that only scholars knew their meaning. One of the statues collecting crowds was Daniel Chester French’s iconic plaster Minute Man 1775 (1875). It honored the Battle of Concord, which opened hostilities more than a year before the Declaration of Independence.
In spite of efforts by the Centennial managers to block unwelcome politics, the exhibition catalog reveals a number of artists who referred to slavery. Andrea Malfatti and Vincenzo Ragusa of Milan both offered sculptures called Emancipation in the Italian section. A chromo-lithograph by Levi F. Smith of Philadelphia, presented The Proclamation of Emancipation. An oil by a French painter and a furniture design from the University of Cincinnati depicted fugitive slaves.
The Christian Recorder critic waxed ecstatic over a carving from Milan, Italy, titled simply, The Slave, by Michele Buoninsegna. The critic raved that it surpassed Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave:
It represents a young girl beautiful as the day and she discloses her … story effectually, without the accessories of whips and chains. You can almost discern the blush upon the expressive countenance and the action of the figure, is so marvelously graceful, that our pity and admiration are irresistibly excited.[609]
More notably, for our narrative, an Austrian[610] entered a life-size bronze of a colored man celebrating his broken chains. Its realism attracted considerable abu
se from people like Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells. A Midwesterner who had backed Lincoln, Howells nonetheless wrote, “one longs to clap him back into hopeless bondage.”[611] The New York Times contended the model was a seaman later hanged in New York for murder, and “not at all like a Negro from the Southern States.”[612] The Christian Recorder critic also scolded, reproaching its realism and the choice of an unheroic-looking model for this “noble subject.” He summarized, “[it] causes one to regret that it is formed of such enduring material.”[613] With comments that match Mrs. Child’s objections to Edmonia’s Freed Woman, the critic seemingly wished he could have defeated it while in clay. How can art inspire noble thoughts with imperfect faces and bodies?
A more upbeat coverage featured the work in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, where an artist depicted it surrounded by well-dressed colored visitors.[614]
Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Hiawatha[615] also crossed a color line, but with restraint. Here was a nearly nude, perfectly “Greek” young man with only a quiver of arrows and longish hair to indicate he was a Native American. He sat deep in thought, absorbed in contemplation of something unseen. Many visitors could recall Longfellow’s lines depicting Hiawatha, “Pondering, musing in the forest / On the welfare of his people.”
It is possible Edmonia had seen his work before, although she avoided the studios of male artists. More likely, Saint-Gaudens had heard about and seen hers. He started his “pondering” hero in 1871, right across the street from Edmonia’s best-selling Hiawathas in Rome.[616]
Years earlier, William Story had shepherded his Cleopatra and Libyan Sibyl at their London debut. He now stayed in Rome, hosting aristocrats and celebrating his daughter’s wedding. He did not visit America until the following year, after the expo was done. His entries rested under the magnificent dome in the main building’s Grand Central Hall. Medea,[617] larger-than-life, thoughtfully held the dagger that would slay her children. Cleopatra, Libyan Sibyl, and Semiramis (1874)[618] did not appear.[619]
Nearby, Cleopatra busts by Foley and Haseltine debated modesty vs. nudity, respectively. The central object under the dome was a terra-cotta reproduction of the colossal group America (1865-71), bison included, by John Bell, imported from London’s Albert Memorial. Nearby, visitors found Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington (1796), the only portrait painted from life, and more than forty sculptures by American artists. Like Edmonia’s literary Indians, Randolph Rogers’ best-known work, Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii (1853-54), was based on a best-selling book, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Vinnie Ream’s Miriam, The West, The Spirit of the Carnival, and her bust of congressman Daniel J. Morrell sat in the Grand Central Hall. In order to assure positions equal to male sculptors, she had written “obscene” letters, marked “personal” and sent to Morrell’s hotel.[620] The lusty politician was chairman of the Centennial Committee on Selection.
Edmonia’s life-size Death of Cleopatra dominated the well-lit southwest gallery.[621] It sat amidst dozens of other works of art, mostly small sculptures and a few pieces of stained glass. There medallions by Foley; there a bust of a child by Ream. Crowding made it impossible to fully view the queen’s face, yet the work drew intense interest as she proudly stood nearby.
One lesson Edmonia had learned well at the Paris Exposition was how best to display important statuary. Their monochrome makes them bland in contrast to colorful paintings. A large hall full of marbles, bronzes, and terra cottas creates a confusing clutter. In Paris, each major sculpture was set apart by high colored drapes that created an alcove, defining its space and focusing its visual impact. Edmonia’s magnum opus sat under a brilliant canopy of gold. Supported at four corners by ebony spears, it professed to screen the queen from the hot African sun. The huge swatch of color caught every eye at a distance. It dramatically distinguished her work, making it brighter, taller and larger. No one could miss it.
Expo Visitors
American racism knew few bounds in 1876. Common decorum was a far cry from today’s protocols of civility and respect. Groups of boys and men heckled visitors even from Turkey, Egypt, Spain, Japan, and China.[622] Nothing in the day’s rhetoric of freedom and equality had real meaning to them.
Vigilant, Edmonia entered the fray. She stood and sat for hours, knowing her presence shocked and mortified anyone who counted on the invisibility of colored Americans. Those who realized she was the creator of an important work saw her as an intruder. Some glared, reddened, and turned away. Others let her know, goading her, spitting, even striking her, as they had done and would do again.[623] They would never accept her talent or her claim to rights. False ideas, born of generations of greed and rivalry, were too emotional, too deeply rooted to change.
Ignoring them, she greeted friendly visitors warmly. By all accounts, she was as proud as modesty allowed, sometimes referring to herself in the third person as ‘the artist’ and helping visitors with quiet charm. She handed out an updated version of How Edmonia Lewis Became an Artist.[624]
A progressive reporter from out-of-town quickly noted, “except The Forced Prayer by [Pietro] Guarnerio, The Death of Cleopatra excites more admiration and gathers larger crowds around it than any other work of art in the vast collection of Memorial Hall”[625]
She could point out there were other renditions of Cleopatra, a sly way of inviting comparisons.[626] The Albany (NY) Sunday Press emphasized Story’s work lacked “that exquisite faultless genius she has exhibited.”[627] Another interviewer more than a dozen years later recalled the effect if not every detail: “its conception differs essentially from that of Story. The dead Queen lies back in her chair of state holding the poisonous cup. Much breadth of handling and delicacy of treatment is shown in this effort.”[628]
Hundreds of long-time abolitionists and admirers of Edmonia’s portrait heroes attended the celebration. She must have met old friends of Harriot Hunt and of Charlotte Cushman, both of whom had passed away. The avuncular Thomas Ball, vacationing from Florence with his family but not exhibiting, may have paused to exchange greetings. Soon after the opening, Col. Forney surely welcomed her and introduced her to his entourage. Her brother likely appeared, eager to praise her success.[629]
One visitor gave a rare impression of her to the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury: “She is about medium height, with a pretty and interesting face. Her soft brown eyes are an index of a pleasant, and her smiling face of a merry, disposition. Her manners are unaffected and charming, while her conversation is bright, affable and witty. She is quite an accomplished linguist, and is remarkably shrewd and intelligent.”[630]
Another writer took satisfaction in the San Francisco Pacific Appeal, “the white man … despite his prejudice has to concede a niche in the column of Fame a suitable place for the representative of the colored race, and is forced to judge the articles on exhibition, not by color line or prejudice, but by intrinsic value.”
A measure of her standing with a progressive audience may be the relative coverage allotted by the Centennial Publishing Company of Chicago, rushed into print to capture tourist sales and marred by errors. Writing under the pen name Ben Beverly, John Thomas Dale gave the comparatively unknown Edmonia Lewis nearly two times the words used for W. W. Story:
Here is a wonderful statute [sic statue] of “Media,”[sic Medea] who in ancient mythology, was a princess famous for her skill in sorcery. She became the wife of Jason, and helped him to obtain the celebrated golden fleece, but was afterwards deserted by him, and in revenge, murdered their two children. The statue represents her as if in meditation before the bloody, and unnatural crime was committed, – holding the dagger in her right hand, the left upraised as if nervous and irresolute, – her head downcast as if in deep thought, her beautiful face expressive of intense anger, and yet doubting whether to gratify her revenge. Her wavy hair is thrown back, and bound in place; her flowing robes fall in the most graceful folds, and the position of the body is singularly easy and natural. Altogether it is a triumph of art, an
d is the work of W. W. Story, the famous American sculptor, now at Rome.
Miss Edmonia Lewis, the colored artist, has a full length figure in marble, entitled “Cleopatra in Death,” which attracts much attention. The figure is reclining in a royal chair, the body thrown back, and the head resting on one side, as if tired of life. The face has strongly marked features, and wears a wearied, desperate expression. In her right hand she holds the asp, which is writhing in her grasp, but her disgust and weariness of life is so intense, that she is indifferent to its poison and fangs and does not even notice its angry struggles. Her face represents a cruel, sensuous, and restless nature, without any satisfaction in the past, or hope for the future, and determined to cast away the precious boon of life, as if it were a bauble not worth the having, and thus quench the pangs of remorse and disappointment.
But here is a colossal bust that would attract notice anywhere. Shaggy hair and beard, a noble brow, large full eyes, a large well shaped nose, a firm and decided mouth, and an expression of strength and will, that would resist the power of worlds sooner than succumb; it is such a face and head as we might suppose would belong to one of the earth’s noblest heroes. And in the light of history, who shall say it did not, for it belonged to a man, who though misguided in judgment, sacrificed his life for a principle, and was actuated by the most sincere of convictions of duty, – John Brown.[631]
Most Americans carried little knowledge of art, but they knew what they liked and responded viscerally. Most were taught to sentimentalize mortality and to revere noble suffering. Some preferred the frozen state of other Cleopatras.
The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis Page 26