Before his death in 1917, acquaintances sometimes asked Henry Adams’s advice for creating their own family cemetery memorials. He unfailingly recommended that the patron develop a central concept to pass on to his or her chosen artist. He had proposed to Saint-Gaudens the idea of combining the “calm reflection” of Buddhist teachings from Asia with the “peace of God” more familiar to Western cultures. Many years later Adams advised fellow Washingtonian Florence Boardman Keep: “The conventions” may be the artist’s, but “the feelings must be yours.” He continued: “A monument is a symbol, and the symbol should be your’s. If there is a single one in the whole innumerable catalogue of symbols, since the creation, that you feel, you should give that to the artist to put in form.”1 He seems to have given similar advice to John Hay’s widow, Clara, who chose the idea of an armed “Peace” for her husband’s memorial in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio. The stone archangel honoring Hay, a colossal winged figure with helmet and sword, was ultimately completed by sculptor James Earle Fraser. These patrons were among numerous members of social and economic elites who sought monuments that might match or rival the power of the great memorials of the late nineteenth century. The resulting sculptures became a collective elegy to the hopes and fears of the Gilded Age generations and to their achievements.
For his part, Saint-Gaudens in his last years had begun work on a final funerary memorial for a different kind of patron, banker George Fisher Baker, who “had come to him asking for a seated figure that should carry something of the same feeling as that brought by the one at Rock Creek.”2 The sculptor had also been engaged in creating a monument to pastor Phillips Brooks for installation at Boston’s Trinity Church, which included a depiction of Christ, and so he proposed to Baker a seated figure of Jesus flanked by angels (Figure 82). Despite Saint-Gaudens’s own earlier aversions to the Catholicism in which he was reared, his son Homer wrote: “Now, as he gave the subject more and more individual thought, Christ no longer stood to him as the head of a cult that announced bewildering self-contradictions and endless punishment of sin, but became the man of men, a teacher of peace and happiness.… Saint-Gaudens began to express a genuine faith in his conception of the physical image of Christ as a man, tender yet firm, suffering yet strong.”3 For the Baker commission, Homer said, his father felt “impelled to express still further his new sense of the beauty of Christ.”4 The final heroic-sized bronze, which was completed by an assistant after Saint-Gaudens’s death, appears to have been set in place by September 1911 (Figure 83).5 It is seated on a rock like the Adams figure, with the inscription above the figure and two bas-relief angels: “BLESSED ARE / THE PURE IN HEART / FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD.” It combines suggestions of a vision of God and of Christ as teacher and exemplar bound to earth via the rock he sits on, as the bodhisattva Kwannon was linked to nature in his/her desire to aid man.
Figure 82.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, drawings for the George Fisher Baker Memorial, 1906–7. Augustus Saint-Gaudens Papers. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.
Figure 83.
George Fisher Baker Memorial, completed after the death of Saint-Gaudens and installed in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York, 1911. Photo by Lee Sandstead.
While Adams was one of the last of the great amateur historians and scion of a leading Boston Brahmin family, Baker came from another background, anchored in commerce. He had secured the respect of Gilded Age tycoons for his financial management skills, accruing a fortune said to have been worth $200 million at its height and serving on the boards of scores of corporations. With this wealth, he decorated his houses in New York City and Tuxedo, New York, with expensive, carefully selected art objects, including paintings and tapestries, deemed commensurate with his financial success.6 At the same time, a privately printed biography of Baker, commissioned by his family, stressed his qualities of fairness, frugality, good judgment, caring family relations, modesty, and self-restraint. After his wife’s death, Baker, sharing the growing uncertainties of his age about individual immortality, institutionalized memories of his public virtue by increasing his philanthropic giving, especially for educational projects. His philanthropic decisions may have been influenced by the example of other “self-made” men of his ilk, like Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and J. J. Hill.7 These captains of industry, pushing out the older aristocracy like the Adams family to become the new role models for leadership, found art collections and “artistic taste” a crucial way to affirm their status and the virtues of their systems for producing wealth. But they also had new avenues for their philanthropic dollars, making contributions to museums, symphony orchestras, universities, and libraries as leisure activities changed and “culture” became more hierarchically organized at the end of the nineteenth century. The high-style cemetery monument was another insignia of rank and an argument for the retention of economic leaders as moral and civic leaders, but philanthropic goals competed with it and began to overshadow it in importance for many.8
Others, including the businessman John Erastus Hubbard in Montpelier, Vermont, tried to use monuments and philanthropy to repair reputations. After having been vilified during his life for wresting his aunt’s fortune from the city in a legal battle, he left the bulk of his wealth to Montpelier for a park, library, and other public services along with a handsome amount for a cemetery memorial to himself. The administrators of his estate commissioned sculptor Karl Bitter to design a memorial filled with suggestions of redemption (Plate 8). Completed in 1902, it stands out among all others in the rugged, spectacularly beautiful landscape of Montpelier’s Green Mount Cemetery. The five-foot seated bronze figure, with lips parted and eyes closed, is covered with drapery that swirls in a serpentine configuration like a winding sheet. On the curving walls of the granite exedra radiating out to both sides are lines from William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis, saying that he did not go from the world “like the quarry slave at night scourged to his dungeon” but had lived in virtue and died “sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust.”9 Bitter went on to produce some of the most beautiful cemetery memorials of the era, including his monument to Henry Villard in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York, which he described as a more “modern” sculpture influenced by the symbolic work of George Gray Barnard and Charles Grafly and sculpture at the 1901 Buffalo world’s fair. Another important sculptor of funerary subjects was William Ordway Partridge, who made the beautiful Kauffmann and Pulitzer monuments in Washington and New York. Most sculptors of Saint-Gaudens’s generation ultimately completed some funerary work as part of their oeuvre. Together their work formed a stylistic grouping of bronze high-style Beaux-Arts memorials around the turn of the century sought by patrons seeking to express their membership in an elite, creative community replete with civic and individual virtue. They changed the face of the urban American cemetery, primarily in the Northeast, where they had the greatest influence.
Sculptures such as the Adams Memorial and The Angel of Death and the Sculptor, and others like the Hubbard Memorial and the Marshall Field Memorial completed by Daniel Chester French to honor the department store mogul in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, helped to inspire this continuing, evolving interest in museum-quality symbolic figures created by fine artists in cemeteries. French went on to be the great maker of angels and memorials, heightening the significance of funerary sculpture both in his art-making and his museum activities. But these styles waned after World War I.
In 1917 the Gorham Galleries in New York advertised its ability to put prospective patrons “in touch with sculptors of sympathetic insight and artistic perceptions, who have the ability to interpret” memorial subjects “in harmony with the highest ideals of the profession.” Its paid promotion in Arts and Decoration magazine noted, “In recent years, people of discernment have devoted thoughtful attention to symbolic figures and monuments as memorials, engaging sculptors of recognized ability, in place of the mediocre talent formerly employed.”10 This ad featured a photograph of Solace (1911), an elongated two-figure group by Isidore Konti (Figure 84). But the taste for figurative memorial sculpture, its function and styles were rapidly changing in the twentieth century, and the Gorham Galleries ad was in reality a plea not to abandon an already fading tradition. The heyday of the Beaux-Arts monument was over.
Figure 84.
Gorham Galleries advertisement for modern monuments in Arts and Decoration 7 (March 1917): 277.
The excesses of the Gilded Age and corporate culture had created concern about too much concentration of America’s wealth and helped to spur the passage in 1913 of the sixteenth amendment giving Congress power to levy an individual income tax. During World War I and afterward, a heavy income tax was applied to the nation’s richest people, reducing the amounts of wealth held in private hands. At the same time, more than 100,000 American troops were among the 10 million people who died in the war. Social changes accompanying the military draft in 1917–18 and a continued distancing from death transformed the desires and expectations Americans brought to the cemetery. The war added an increased emphasis to the heroism of self-restraint in the face of a community of death. In a 1916 article entitled “The New Mien of Grief,” for instance, the Literary Digest quoted the inspirational writings of the Reverend Archibald Alexander, a British writer popular in the United States, about the “new etiquette of sorrow with the washen face.” Alexander celebrated the legions of uncomplaining parents, wives, and children who “have made a new virtue of cheerfulness” and brave smiles in the face of bereavement, seeing it as their duty to efface as far as possible the signs of woe. “What fills one with reverent admiration is that so many of those whose hearts we know have been so cruelly wounded have set up a new and noble precedent in the matter of courage and self-control.… They wear their hurt gently like a flower in the breast.… Out from the secret chambers they come, with washen face and brave lips to do their duty and refrain themselves. How beautiful it is!”11 The realities of war contributed to a rising tide of secularism as questions arose about how a beneficent God could have allowed such tragic events. The stock market crash at the end of the 1920s and the Great Depression further damaged the monument market, and the Tiffany studios soon shut their doors.
As cities continued to invest in urban parks where residents could stroll and picnic, and then in neighborhood parks, the cemeteries lost their early function as important places to interact with nature. Other options for outdoor recreation now existed for city dwellers. A shift also occurred in the landscape philosophy of many cemeteries, with the arrival of the “memorial park” aesthetic in such places as Forest Lawn Cemetery near Los Angeles, begun in the 1910s and highly influential by the 1930s. The large family monument was unwelcome in these parks, which emphasized standardized, ground-level grave markers that were commercially manufactured.
At Forest Lawn, planner Hubert Eaton eliminated the central family monument in favor of individual bronze markers flush to the ground in cemetery sections with ecumenical themes appealing to the middle class and allowing room for diversity of faith and ethnic origins. Copies of high-art monuments from the past, such as a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David, were featured, to be shared by all. A new emphasis was also put on the placement of ashes of the cremated, and cemeteries erected columbaria. The retreat from sentimentality begun in the last century was extended in the new “cemetery without gloom.” As urban areas developed, they also pressed closer to the cemeteries’ once-rural locations and limited the scenic views beyond. The cemetery became a less and less meaningful place to visit.12
Amid all of these changes, the integrity, “moral beauty,” and “moral earnestness” that writer Adeline Adams described in the Beaux-Arts sculpture of artists like Saint-Gaudens—what she saw as their stand against the superficiality and emptiness of American culture—became outdated.13 The era of monumania ended, and the world’s fairs of 1893, 1901, 1904, and 1915 turned out to have been the high point and then turning point for training public sculptors. By the 1920s Beaux-Arts ideals and French-influenced styles were challenged or met with indifference, and the idea of the sculptor’s role as a teacher of both good design and moral values, allied goals, changed amid a breakdown in belief systems.14 A new generation of sculptors was also interested in working in less naturalistic styles and in experimenting with a greater variety of materials than the standard academic bronze or marble. Garden sculptures, sun dials, and decorative commissions, such as reliefs and gates on mausoleums, often provided work for them in the cemetery. This reflected general trends in American sculpture, which included smaller objects for the interior, more suitable for the museum and private collector than the grand-scale public monuments for City Beautiful exteriors and outdoor spaces.15
Modernist experimentation, based on European developments like cubism, futurism, and dada, was slow to appear in the essentially conservative cemetery, where the need for durability and limited range of themes restricted choices. Yet a simplified symbolic mode, usually still based on figurative personifications, was often adopted with roots in art deco or a more geometrical classical revival, such as the Greek sources tapped at times by Paul Manship. A more streamlined form emerged, and materials such as cast concrete/cement and different metals were used. There was also a return to carved stone amid the general new interest in materials and process.16
Beaux-Arts memorials in cemeteries, which had once stood for the newest aesthetic styles, eventually became visual symbols for older modes of mourning, and the public had difficulty at times differentiating them from baby lambs and Victorian sentiment and the iconography of monument companies. Their emphasis on moral commentary and their fusion of real and ideal could be seen as parody or even hokeyness by new generations in the context of the mixed and overlapping styles found in the cemetery. Over time, the original landscaping was sometimes stripped away to conform with the new more open cemetery aesthetic.
Academic sculptors from the Beaux-Arts tradition mourned the passing of a taste for their style of figurative cemetery art. An aging generation of sculptors was left with unused models. In a 1934 interview with American Cemetery magazine, for example, Augustus Lukeman, a protégé of Daniel Chester French, appealed to cemeteries to encourage the reintroduction of sculptural memorials. He cited the Adams Memorial as the symbol of a type of memorial art that he and others wished to continue making. “The average person is decidedly not enticed by the idea of visiting a burial place, as such” these days, he commented. But then he asked his interviewer, “You have been to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington?” Americans were still making pilgrimages there to see the Adams Memorial, which had made that cemetery “a national landmark,” Lukeman commented pointedly. He showed his interviewer a design he had made for a monument featuring a cloaked, seated figure with one hand to its face. Lukeman said he and other artists had such models ready, left begging for places. He suggested that the “group monument” idea central to the newer memorial parks could be a cost-effective way to continue injecting sculpture into the cemetery. Philanthropists had stopped making cemeteries the objects of their generosity, preferring other cultural and educational institutions, he noted with distress. He proposed that memorial parks call on the wealthy to make such investments again in gardens of community remembrance.17
Monumental News, losing faith in cemetery sculpture as a steady source of income, however, slashed its sections about high-art sculpture in the cemetery after World War I, filling its issues instead with discussions of how to make and sell the new styles of grave markers. Cemetery art reportedly was specifically excluded from some 1930s fine-arts exhibitions in New York as incompatible with notions of the “modern.”18 By the end of the Great Depression a generational shift had also occurred. After World War II, art and architecture styles changed dramatically, and art deco forms were replaced by the International Style, using the shape of the building itself as the primary means of decoration.
As the years passed after the war, the memory of the Adams monument, The Angel of Death and the Sculptor, and the Story angel was preserved, however, in poems, art history textbooks, encyclopedias, and even advertisements. Individuals continued, and continue, to make pilgrimages to these sites, while the Duveneck Memorial is primarily noticed by museumgoers in Boston, Cincinnati, and New York. The Adams Memorial remains the most celebrated of the nineteenth-century memorials.
One famous visitor and chronicler of the memorial was author John Galsworthy, who first saw “St. Gaudens statue of grief” on April 29, 1912, when he proclaimed it in his journal “the most beautiful piece of sculpture since the Renaissance.” He returned in 1919 and 1920.19 He incorporated his admiration for it in the opening pages of “Passers by,” a portion of Two Forsyte Interludes, where the narrator noted that it was something beyond the power of commerce, writing: “Apart from the general attraction of a cemetery, this statue awakened the connoisseur within him. Though not a thing you could acquire, it was undoubtedly a work of art, and produced a very marked effect.… That great greenish bronze figure of a seated woman with in the hooding folds of her ample cloak seemed to carry him down to the bottom of his own soul.”
One of the Adams Memorial’s most celebrated visitors, Eleanor Roosevelt, took a sad look back on her life when she invited a journalist to accompany her to Rock Creek Cemetery in the 1930s. Mrs. Roosevelt had repeatedly retreated to the Adams Memorial in 1918 to meditate in the months after learning of the extramarital liaison between her husband and her social secretary, Lucy Page Mercer. She seemed then to see the monument as the representation of another wronged woman who had suffered bitter unhappiness but had come through her pale of grief with a strange serenity. On the eve of her husband’s inauguration in March 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt returned to the gravesite with newspaper reporter Lorena Hitchcock, telling Hitchcock that she wanted to show her “something that used to mean a very great deal to me.” The reporter later described how the two women entered the monument in silence.
Finally Mrs. Roosevelt spoke, in a hushed tone, as though she were in church. “It’s by Saint Gaudens,” she said. “He called it ‘Grief,’ but it’s better known as the Adams Memorial. Henry Adams had it erected here, in memory of his wife.… In the old days, when we lived here, I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage it, I’d come out here, alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away somehow feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.”20
Sculptor Penelope Jencks tapped these insights into Eleanor Roosevelt’s feelings in the 1990s when she created a statue of the former first lady to be placed at the southern tip of Riverside Park in Manhattan. The model she created shows Mrs. Roosevelt leaning against a large rock with one arm across her waist and the fingers of her other hand touching her chin in a gesture reminiscent of the Adams Memorial (Figure 85).
Figure 85.
Penelope Jencks, Monument to Eleanor Roosevelt, 1996. Riverside Park, Manhattan. Photo by James Lancel McElhinney.
Writer Alexander Woollcott urged an end to the reticence about Clover Adams’s life and suicide, saying she had “merely exercised her inalienable privilege of taking her own life.” Yet because of this, he said, she was effaced from her husband’s writings and her death was not even confronted later by biographer James Truslow Adams. “The most beautiful thing ever fashioned by the hand of man on this continent marks the nameless grave of a woman who is not mentioned in her husband’s autobiography,” Woollcott declared in his book When Rome Burns:
It is the ineffably tranquil bronze—the hypnotically tranquil bronze—which you will find in an evergreen thicket of cypress, holly and pine on a slope in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington. I have often encountered a popular disposition to call it “Grief,” but if there be one thing indisputably certain about the utter composure of that passionless figure, it is that it is beyond grief, as it is beyond pain and all the hurt the world can do. In the more than forty years of its standing there, it has become a recognized node in the increasing vibration of American life. Scurrying little pilgrims … go to it, stay a while, and come away again. The oblivious figure challenges each and every one. Motionless, it reaches out and draws a holy circle around its bit of fragrant earth, saying with such an imperious force as no mere prelate ever commanded, “Here, here is sanctuary.”21
By the 1950s even an aging Bernard Berenson, the famous connoisseur who had been among Henry Adams’s acquaintances, could look back a little mournfully on the turn-of-the-century craze for Saint-Gaudens’s work and the celebrity of his friend’s memorial. In a 1955 letter, Berenson recalled Saint-Gaudens’s “wonderful” portrait reliefs, equestrian statues, and memorial art, concluding: “His Sherman delighted, & his famous allegorical figure over the tomb of Mrs. Henry Adams, impressed me. All this so long ago! I wonder what I should think now.”22