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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/GaLz2IC3-fQ.

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 four posts in the series looked at sculptors who were famous in New York City and throughout America: John Quincy Adams Ward, Augustus Saint Gaudens, Frederick MacMonnies, and Daniel Chester French.

In this post (the second of two), we look at an assortment of sculptures that show the same subjects we’ve already seen – but with important differences. World War I led to massive death and destruction. The Old Guard, the old ways of doing things, were perceived to have failed: what else could be responsible for the 17 million military and civilian casualties, including 100,000 Americans? In the war’s aftermath, artists as well as many others displayed a sharp change in political attitudes and sense of life. Jazz music became the rage, along with short skirts, fast cars … and the sort of modern art that was introduced to the American public by the Armory Show of 1913. (On the Armory Show, see here, here, and here. We will look at the abstract descendants of the Armory Show in passing and askance in the final post of this series.)

Military Heroes

After the Civil War, nineteen memorials were erected in New York City to the leaders and soldiers who fought in the war. It was a way of showing that such men were gone but not forgotten.

The 100,000 American deaths in World War I inspired another series of memorials. From 1920 to 1937, thirty-four of them were erected, ranging from full-size figures to reliefs, obelisks, and flagpoles. Many of these were on a small scale, erected by neighborhoods to the husbands, brothers, and fathers they had lost.

In keeping with the change of attitude toward the Old Guard, almost all the memorials of World War I were anonymous soldiers or allegorical figures, rather than military leaders. Among the most stunning memorials are the Prospect Park World War I Memorial (1921), the Abingdon Square Memorial (1921), the Washington Heights-Inwood War Memorial (1921), the 107th Infantry Monument (1927), and the Flanders Field Memorial (1929).

The few sculptures honoring specific men include one to John Purroy Mitchel (1928), the “Boy Mayor” of New York City who died while training to fly airplanes, and one to Father Francis P. Duffy (1937), who served as a chaplain.

By 1945, when World War II ended, Robert Moses was in charge of the New York City Parks Department. He decreed that no local memorials would be erected anywhere in New York City; instead, each borough would erect one large monument. The only one of those erected was the Brooklyn War Memorial, dedicated in Cadman Plaza in 1951. Its allegorical figures are rather bland. Much more evocative is the East Coast Memorial in Battery Park (1961) with its angry, swooping eagle. It honors more than 4,600 servicemen who died in the Atlantic during World War II.

The Korean War was memorialized in 1991 (almost forty years after it ended) with one monument: not an anonymous figure, but the silhouette of an anonymous figure. The New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1985, has no image at all. It consists of a map of Vietnam, a list of names, and fragments of soldiers’ letters. Do you see a pattern here?

For more on the progression of war memorials in New York City, see From Portraits to Puddles: New York’s Memorials from the Civil War to the World Trade Center Memorial ( original blog posts here).

A few years after the Vietnam memorial came the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial (1991), an actual narrative … whose story makes one want to weep. Twice a day, the figure in the water is completely submerged, except for that one desperately reaching hand.

Figures in the arts: literature, music, theater

Two dozen or so sculptures erected after World War I honor figures in the arts. The most unexpected are four figures in niches on the south facade of 1552 Broadway. In 1928 Israel Miller, a Polish immigrant who specialized in shoes for theater people, ran a public contest to find America’s best-loved actresses. He used sculptures of them to decorate the second-floor façade of his new headquarters in Times Square: Ethel Barrymore (drama), Marilyn Miller (musical comedy), Mary Pickford (movies), and Rosa Ponselle (opera).

Authors and subjects of children’s books are commemorated with several lovely sculptures in Central Park: one honoring Frances Hodgson Burnett (1936), one Hans Christian Andersen (1956), and one Alice in Wonderland (1959).

Only two memorials stand to philosophers in New York City. (I’ve put them here because literature is the closest category I could think of.) Not coincidentally, both philosophers are Greek and both sculptures stand in Astoria, New York’s largest Greek-American neighborhood. The elegant sculpture of Socrates (1993) was created by a member of the talented Frudakis family, who make one hopeful for the future of figurative sculpture.

Businessmen

We looked at Samuel Rea in our earlier post on businessmen. He’s the last specific businessman to be honored with a sculpture in New York City. (The Financial Capital of the World, for heaven’s sake!) Later tributes to business were either allegorical (Youth Leading Industry, 1936) or anonymous (Double Check, 1982; Taxi!, 1983).

Mythological and allegorical figures

Classically draped allegorical figures are used on many World War I memorials: see this one in Greenpoint, for example. But by the 1920s, the City Beautiful movement in architecture was fading, and Art Deco was taking its place. Art Deco used far less figurative decoration, and when it was used, the figures tended to be stylized. Most of the sculptures at Rockefeller Center (1930s) fall into this category, including the 15-foot-high Atlas (1937) that faces St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. These and other sculptures such as the Bailey Fountain (1932) in Brooklyn show the obsession with muscles that comes into vogue with the Social Realism style of the 1930s.

Among my favorite works from the Art Deco period are the reliefs in the lobby entrances of the Art Deco Chanin Building (1929) at Lexington and 42nd. According to a contemporary account, the reliefs tell “the story of a city in which it is possible for a man to rise from a humble station to wealth and influence by sheer power of his mind and hands.” (C. Adolph Glassgold, “The Decorative Arts,” The Arts, 15 [April 1929], p. 273; quoted in the Landmarks Preservation report on the Chanin Building.)

Incidentally, the grills in the lobby of the Chanin Building (each unique) are gorgeous examples of non-representational design put to functional use.

And finally in the category of allegorical figures in Art Deco style: the small but elegant Spirit of Achievement graces the Park Avenue entrance of the Waldorf Astoria (ca. 1930-1931).

Next week: the conclusion of the series: abstract sculptures and my favorite outdoor sculptures in New York City.

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.
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