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About this series

This occasional series of blog posts will highlight the most important of the outdoor sculptures in New York City and provide some historical and art-historical context. To read other blog posts in this series, click on the New York City Sculpture tag. For photos of all outdoor sculptures in New York City in chronological order, see my Instagram page.

This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/vpgntbDk3WA.

Posts 1-7 looked at the subjects of outdoor sculptures, in the order in which they appeared. In the first, we saw sculptures of animals and politicians. In the second, we saw our first military and literary heroes. The third post included a list of memorials to the Civil War, and the fourth post, figures active before 1800, including Founding Fathers. The fifth was on businessmen. The sixth was on figures in the arts. The seventh included allegorical figures through 1918.

The next few posts in this series look at sculptors who were famous in New York City and throughout America. Our earliest was John Quincy Adams Ward, followed by Augustus Saint Gaudens. With this post, we move on to Frederick MacMonnies, who created two of my favorite outdoor sculptures in New York City.

This post is based on the chapter on MacMonnies in Artist-Entrepreneurs: Saint Gaudens, MacMonnies, Parrish. I’ve abridged it to focus on works by MacMonnies in New York City.

Frederick MacMonnies: early works

Born in Brooklyn in 1863, MacMonnies left school to earn a living at age 13, when his father’s business failed. By age 17, he was working as an apprentice in the studio of Saint Gaudens (15 years his senior) and taking drawing classes at night. In his early twenties, he studied in Paris and Munich. Like Saint Gaudens, he gained a thorough knowledge of drawing, sculpting, anatomy, and ancient and modern sculpture.

Sculptures of the goddess Diana by MacMonnies and Saint Gaudens – created a year apart – epitomize the differences between these two artists. MacMonnies’s Diana was created as a stand-alone piece for exhibition at the Paris Salon. It’s a virtuoso work full of movement and energy, with a complex pose and outline.

Saint Gaudens’s Diana, which was set atop Madison Square Garden a year later, is austere. It has a simple, easy-to-read outline, suitable for viewing from thirty-two stories below. They’re both wonderful works, but they have very different styles and moods.

MacMonnies’s first widely known work was an image of Nathan Hale for New York’s City Hall Park. The commission was awarded to thirty-year-old MacMonnies at the urging of Saint Gaudens.

Hale, a school-teacher, was twenty-one in 1776, when he was executed as a spy by the British. No portrait of him survives. MacMonnies created an imaginative, idealized version of Hale, stating:

I wanted to make something that would set the bootblacks and little clerks around there thinking, something that would make them want to be somebody and find life worth living.

—Quoted in Gayle and Cohen, The Art Commission and the Municipal Art Society Guide to Manhattan’s Outdoor Sculpture, p. 41

For more on how MacMonnies, achieved that, see this post.

In 1893, MacMonnies created the Ship of State, one of the centerpieces of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The ship was 50 feet long, with 8 rowers, 3 passengers, and and 18-foot-tall Father Time at the rudder. Although it was made of perishable materials (as were many of the buildings and sculptures at the Exposition), some 20 million people saw it during the fair. MacMonnies gained a nationwide reputation.

A year later, MacMonnies gained nationwide notoriety with Bacchante with Infant Faun. Bacchantes and fauns are followers of Dionysus, Greek god of wine. MacMonnies gave the bronze sculpture to Charles McKim, an architect who had helped MacMonnies early in his career. McKim donated the sculpture to the Boston Public Library, which he had designed. That happened two years after Saint Gaudens’s Diana (see above) was raised atop Madison Square in New York City.

But some Bostonians were scandalized that the Library would be home to a figure of a woman who was happily inebriated, and who was a recognizable woman rather than an idealized figure. McKim finally withdrew his gift and presented the sculpture to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (For why I love this sculpture, see Artist-Entrepreneurs.)

Mid-career: a diversion

The high point of MacMonnies’s career came in 1900, when the International Exposition in Paris had on display several of his major works: the Bacchante, a pair of Horse Tamers for Prospect Park, Brooklyn (1898), and the groups representing the Army and the Navy for the arch at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn (dedicated 1901).

As the creator a major sculpture for the Columbian Exposition, MacMonnies was in on the ground level of the City Beautiful movement. That was a boon to his career, but perhaps not for his oeuvre. He stopped doing single figures such as Nathan Hale and Bacchante with Infant Faun, and focused on creating huge monuments such as the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch. But those monuments required major funding and working with committees, which MacMonnies disliked intensely. In 1900, the year of the International Exposition, he announced that he was temporarily giving up sculpture for painting.

MacMonnies painted competent portraits in a style influenced by the Impressionists. But he never made as much money painting as he had sculpting. By 1904, he had returned to sculpting.

Later works

In 1914, MacMonnies was chosen to create sculptures for the magnificent Fifth Avenue façade of New York Public Library. He created two fountain sculptures that were placed in 1920, after a delay due to World War I. One of the fountain figures is a simpering female, the other a tired old man. At first MacMonnies called them “Philosophy” and “Thought”; later he renamed them “Beauty” and “Truth”. Without inscriptions, they’d be unidentifiable. As works of art, that makes them weak. It’s difficult to believe they’re the work of the same man who created Nathan Hale twenty years earlier. Most people who’ve seen the façade don’t even remember that they flank the stairs to the main entrance.

The other late works by MacMonnies have similar problems: their subjects are difficult to discern, which lessens their emotional impact. See my discussions of Civic Virtue and the Princeton Battle Monument.

But aside from MacMonnies’s dislike for working with committees, there was another reason that MacMonnies’s production of sculpture tapered off. The City Beautiful movement with its classical architecture reigned supreme for the thirty years following the 1893 Columbian Exposition. After that, Art Deco architecture began coming into fashion. Art Deco buildings had far less sculptural decoration than buildings in the classical style. Civic Virtue, dedicated in 1922, was one of the last large allegorical sculptures erected in New York City.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, MacMonnies lived lavishly in France. Later he lived lavishly in New York City, until the stock market crash in 1929. During his years in New York he produced a few small works, such as a bust of the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

When MacMonnies died in 1937 of pneumonia, he had produced no major works for a decade or so. The newspapers wrote of him in glowing terms after his death.

MacMonnies: Evaluation

What’s the distinguishing characteristic of MacMonnies’s works? That changes over the course of his career. In the 1890s, his works are full of energy (graceful, tense, or violent), and show innovation and remarkable technical skill. In the early twentieth century, his work trailed off into rather boring, uninspired pieces.

Given the quality of MacMonnies’s later work, I can’t rank him as an artist as highly as I do Saint Gaudens. But his Nathan Hale and Bacchante are two of my favorite sculptures of all time.

Next in this series: Daniel Chester French.

More

• My Instagram account shows every outdoor sculpture in New York City, since in chronological order, with a short blurb on the subject and/or artist of each.
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. More here.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my free Sunday Recommendations list and my Patreon page (free or by subscription): details here.