MEŠTROVIĆ AS A SCULPTOR IN
AMERICA**
LAURENCE SCHMECKEBIER
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Journal of Croatian Studies, XXIV,
1983, – Annual Review of the Croatian Academy of America, Inc. New York, N.Y.,
Electronic edition by Studia Croatica, by permission. All rights
reserved by the Croatian Academy of America.
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The virtue of this particular
seminar is that it provides a new look at a distinguished personality from
strikingly different viewpoints. The participants are conditioned by a variety
of language and nationality traditions. They approach the subject with the
different scientific disciplines of their respective professions as historians,
political scientists, literary critics, and art critics.
And the times are different. The
literature on Meštrović is vast, but it stems largely from the first half
of this century. The significance of Meštrović, the Sculptor and Patriot[1]
that I was able to present a generation ago offers a challenge even more
meaningful in these threatening years of the 1980's than during the
revolutionary events of the war and post-war period. In reviewing both periods
this man towers as one of the great artistic personalities of this century. Not
only did he have a major influence on the culture and politics of our time, but
he remains as the embodiment of an ideal in which the artist is conceived not
as the Romantic individualist, sufficient only to himself, but is an integral
part of society and responsible to the spiritual needs and welfare of mankind.
Meštrović's career as an artist reveals an almost superhuman effort to
achieve that ideal. In this he belongs in the realm of the greatest:
Michaelangelo, Bernini, Rodin.
To judge Meštrović the sculptor
it is perhaps more useful to look at his work in terms of his competitons
rather than artistic traditions and influences in which he was involved. His
spectacular career in Europe from 1904 until 1946 is clear and established; his
sixteen years as an artist in America were dramatic and frustrating. Both
phases seem to reveal that enigmatic quality which Rodin once characterized as
"Meštrović the Phenomenon".
From the beginning, Meštrović
dealt with no small ideas, but great ones of stature and profound significance.
In the spirit of the Paris Pantheon and the German Valhalla at Regensburg, his
Kosovo monument was conceived as a national shrine and tribute to the heroic
folk tradition. The architectural plan of the concept remained as an idea and
model, seemingly unattainable because of political and economic circumstances,
but the sculpture he carved, literally/with his own hands, strong and
invincible. And they retain that power to this day. Compare this idea and these
figures with what his contemporaries were doing in Vienna, France, and Germany:
Kaufman's "Vaterlandslied" (1903) and Metzner's
"Niebelungen" fountain in Vienna (1904), Bourdelle's "Monument
to the Dead" in Montauban (1902), Vigeland's unparalleled "History of
Man" sculptures in Frogner Park, Oslo (1905) and the colossal "Battle
of Nations" monument (1906-13) near Leipzig. These all were works which
Meštrović certainly knew. While the ideas and motivation might be
comparable to what he was thinking, and the scale equally gigantic, the figures
themselves in those works were weak, mannered and, as sculptural forms,
ineffective. Only Rodin was able to embue the forms with the inner spirit and
power of a great idea as seen in the richly expressive figures of his Gates of
Hell (begun 1890) and the dramatic Citizens of Calais (1884-86).
There were colossal single figures
in the tradition of the classic Athena Parthenos, all with their political and
national associations: Ludwig von Schuvanthaler's "Bavaria" in Munich
(1843-93), Johannes Schilling's "Germania" (Niederwald, overlooking
the Rhine, 1883) and of course our own Statue of Liberty in New York harbor
(Bartholdi, 1886). Meštrović certainly knew them and I am sure he was not
impressed. His answer is to be seen in his own work: the 1928 Victory Monument
in Kalemegdan Park in Belgrade and the magnificent "Gregory of Nin"
(1929) before Diocletian's Palace in Split.
Meštrović in America after
his arrival in 1946 is a story yet to be told. Following the miseries of war and
exile, ill health and frustration, he was received in this country with honor
and acclaim, great publicity, and an unprecedented retrospective exhibition at
New York's Metropolitan Museum. While there was much talk about commissions and
teaching positions for the distinguished refugee, it was Chancellor William
Pearson Tolley and Syracuse University who took him in. The situation for
Meštrović, however, was anything but ideal. Funds were limited, work
facilities inadequate, students ill-prepared to think and work on the
monumental scale of the master, and universities at that time were still not
ready to assume the responsibilities of patronage and practical support of the
artist.
Whether it was the genius of the
artist, they sculptor's capacity for hard work, or the simple faith of the
Croatian peasant which he always maintained, Meštrović managed to work his
way through to a solution which, while tragic in many ways, still remains a
source of inspiration and satisfaction.
This is his own personal achievement,
not society's nor the patrons', the Church, or the Government. Perhaps one
could claim that it was the University which made Meštrovie, the sculptor in
America, possible, but at both Syracuse and Notre Dame this was a slow learning
process. The idea of an "artist in residence", in the one case to
provide inspiration for aspiring young artists, or a famous master to teach
religious art for the Church in the other, was hopeful, but naive, and became
effective only through years of patient and creative effort. Today, twenty
years after his death, the two centers of Meštrović influence and the
greatest collections of his work in America are located at Syracuse and Notre
Dame Universities.
To clarify Meštrović's
historical position as a sculptor in America, one might again compare him and
his point of view with that of his competitors here. He knew about our great
national monuments. What his reaction was when he saw them has never been
recorded.
With his background he certainly
was sympathetic to the ideas and motivation of the Statue of Liberty, but its
sculptural form he would just as certainly have recognized as empty and
lifeless. In the nation's capital there were the famous monuments to our
national heroes: the Washington obelisque, the Lincoln and the Jefferson
memorials. Big and impressive as they are, with their superb and elegant
materials and beautiful park settings, from his point of view they were little
more than over-blown cemetery monuments.
During those years there was much
publicity about Gutzon Borglum's gargantuan Mount Rushmore Memorial in the
Black Hills of South Dakota. Billed as "The Shrine of Democracy", the
"World's Greatest Sculptural Work", it involved the serene
portrait-busts of America's greatest heros on a scale unprecedented in the
history of mankind (the 60-foot heads are proportionate to men 465 feet high).
What a magnificent idea — to carve a mountain of gleaming, ageless granite into
heroic figures as a shrine for the edification of future civilizations.
Michaelangelo and his patron Pope Julius II were in-spired by that kind of
idea. So was Meštrović in his Kosovo project.
But what was the result? As one
drives along the winding, picturesque highway leading to Mount Rushmore, one
discovers the figures as part of a relief carved into the mountain,
rather than the elementary concept of the mountain as a total form out of which
the figures are released. In spite of their tremendous size, the busts have the
essential character of old-fashioned salon or mantel-piece sculpture.
This is the concept that
Meštrović had in mind when he heard Bourdelle's boast that he — Bourdelle
— was the one who executed most of Rodin's late sculpture while he was working
in the master's studio as assistant. "Ha!" said Meštrović,
"you should tell that to a sculptor!"
The other basic factor in the
understanding of Meštrović in America is that by the time he arrived here
the general trend in contemporary art had moved overwhelmingly toward the
modern point of view in the United States as it had in Europe. By this is
meant, not only the interest in abstract art, but the basic emphasis on the
artist's means of expression — his constant search and experimentation with new
forms, new materials and new techniques. The artist is beholden neither to patron,
church, or government, but only to himself and the spiritual drive for
expression which he incorporates.
Meštrović seldom criticised
abstract artists or the modern point of view. He had always gone his own way
and for fifty years had remained far ahead of his time. For him art was a means
to an end, not an end in itself. In post-war America there were indeed
monumental projects under way. Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Jacques
Lipschitz, Picasso, Dubuffet, many of them gigantic structures fabricated by industrial
means on the basis of small models or maquettes.
The only comment I ever heard
which might reflect Meštrović's attitude on these matters was in response
to my enthusiastic description of a large, primordial-type reclining figure by Henry
Moore. He looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder and shook his head as he
smiled. "Mr. Schmeckebier, when an Englishman goes crazy, he's really
crazy."
For the new world of the post-war
era, Meštrović's most positive statement appeared in the various studies
for a projected monument to the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
From his own background of heroic tragedy which we have followed from Kosovo to
the studies of Job done while languishing in prison, he conceived a gigantic
figure of Moses striding forward as leader pointing to the Way of the Future,
against a vast panorama of Migrating Peoples in relief. After years of work in
the old tudio-barn at Syracuse, the project was lost in the bickering of
committees and fund raisers and the full-scale models still remain crated in
tragic storage.
Today, as we look back on the
sixteen years of Meštrović's career in America and the twenty years since
his death, we could admit that perhaps he was one of those who, like Thomas
Mann, were "survivors from a nobler era," that the New World and the
revolutionary culture of the later Twentieth Century have no use for the ideas
and accomplishment of Meštrović, the Phenomenon.
Yet, look again. The political and
social tensions of this century are still with us, changed, expanded into
global proportions and even more awesome than before. The economic boom and
prosperity of the past generation has begun to wane and one faces a new
depression, on a world-wide scale.
Here the peasant stone cutter from
the granite mountains of Croatia still has a message. It is the artist's
doctrine of hard work, great ideas, and the dream of salvation through love and
sacrifice. The story is told in his writings and his life as a political
activist, but it is also told with superb conviction in stone and bronze.
To a new generation of modern
artists, that message has a particular meaning. After a century of experiment
and probing into hitherto unknown forms of expression, young artists have
appeared with even bolder fantasies, comparable in many ways to Sputnik and the
epochal trip to the moon. Look, for example, at Christo's Valley Curtain
project in Rifle, Colorado — a gigantic red curtain stretched across a mountain
valley, built at a cost of $800,000 over a five-year period, with no other
purpose than to prove it could be done. Or again, his Running Fence,
twenty-four miles of white plastic fabric strung on a twelve-foot structure
from the mountains north of San Francisco, California, down into the sea.
"It's beautiful!" said one of the workers, "no one ever thought
of an idea like that."
With this enthusiasm, the highly
sophisticated technology, and the many social, political, environmental and
human factors involved, "Just think," said Christo, "what would
happen if I could accomplish the building of a Running Fence from West to East
through Berlin in divided Germany: such an idea would be much more powerful
than the brutal reality of the present stone wall."
Works of similar scale and
audacity appear in recent ventures in "Earthworks," such as the
gigantic Spiral Jetty built in Great Salt Lake, Utah, by Robert Smithson in
1970, and the Robert Morris 1979 project for the reclamation of a huge
abandoned gravel pit in King County, Washington, where strange and seemingly
quixotic concepts suddenly became involved with vital problems of environment.
Thus, vast areas of deserts, swamps and industrial wastelands can be
manipulated back into aesthetically meaningful living space. Similar directions
involving large-scale environmental projects appear in the work of SITE, an
acronym for "Sculpture in the Environment," a group headed by James
Wines, who is a well-known sculptor and architect and who had been one of
Meštrović's most talented younger students at Syracuse. The emphasis here
is more on architecture and large-scale site planning, but the motivation is
much the same.
Working in a parallel, though
slightly different direction, are the Utopian dreamers such as the
artist-engineer-philosopher Buckminster Fuller with his space-enveloping
Geodestic domes, and the architect Paolo Soleri, whose fantastic project for a
"town on a table mountain" for two million inhabitants, and theories
of the Metropolis of the Future (as published in his "Arcology, the City in
the Image of Man," 1969) caused a sensation in the 1970's.
Meštrović was indeed a
survivor from a nobler era, but for the cultural historian the period of his
activity in America is one of transition. The American accomplishments in all
branches of the arts since 1946 are stupendous, but they lack the sense of
direction, stability and responsibility that characterize the great cultural
epochs of the past. The renewed study of the career, the ideas, the writings,
and above all the sculpture of Ivan Meštrović will serve to clarify this
slow drive to cultural maturity.