“One pair of bronze trousers is not very much more interesting than another pair,” Lorado Taft wrote in 1921. One of Chicago’s most famous sculptors, Taft had surveyed the city’s collection of public statuary in that year and did not like what he saw. Too many generals on pedestals in the parks and too few wood nymphs. Too many figures posed in modern dress (“clothing dummies,” Taft called them) commemorating the fashionable instead of the timeless. Too many members of what Taft called “the petrified congress of nations” memorializing Chicago’s “mighty melting pot,” and too few icons of universal meaning.
Creator of two of the city’s best-known works of public art–Fountain of Time and Fountain of the Great Lakes (now on the west wall of the Art Institute’s Morton wing)–Taft also was an influential scholar, teacher, and critic. In 1903 he wrote the authoritative History of American Sculpture. In the years before World War I he undertook, through lectures and newspaper columns, to mold the public taste in Chicago. And as an instructor (at the Art Institute, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, as well as in the artistic community that he housed at his Midway studio in Hyde Park), he taught a generation of sculptors how to cater to that taste.
Whatever it meant for the city, for sculptors like Taft the Columbian Exposition meant commissions and careers. Taft attracted attention with two allegorical groups he did for the entrance to the exhibition’s Horticultural Building; he also was chosen to superintend other sculptors’ works. Not exactly overnight stardom, but welcome nonetheless to a young sculptor in a hurry. Shortly after his arrival, he had been describing himself in letters to his family as a rising artist with “accumulating” prospects. But Garvey argues that Taft’s hopes before the exposition for a career in Chicago were naive. True, he did a certain trade in portrait busts, mainly for clients who confirmed Hawthorne’s opinion that no man who needs to have a monument to himself ought to have one. He also taught, modeled fireplace grates, even did butter sculptures for restaurants; the major commissions in those years went to out-of-towners with artistic pedigrees.
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Garvey’s rambling exposition may frustrate those wanting either a careful biographical account or a more developed critique of Taft’s artistic theories. What Garvey does well is to re-create the artist’s life in Chicago before the Great War, relying on the novels–thinly disguised accounts of real life–by members of Taft’s circle. At home, in the midst of their artistic friends, Chicago’s artists forswore the hypocrisies of the wider world and celebrated Art devotedly. Taft’s colleagues gathered in informal clubs like the Little Room, which met weekly in the tenth-floor penthouse studios in the Fine Arts Building. The menu at such feasts was mostly talk, although the group also staged amateur theatricals and told stories. In the summer, they moved the congregation out-of-doors, most famously to Eagles Nest Camp near the Rock River, west of the city.
Taft left many of his sculpted figures unclothed, partly because he regarded the human body as central to the sculptor’s art and partly because his ambitions were allegorical rather than documentary. Not that artistic rationale mattered much to local bluenoses. The three boys who cavort in the Bates Fountain in Lincoln Park were equipped for a time with copper fig leaves by a blushing parks board. The exposed breast of Hebe, who stands atop a drinking fountain at Michigan near Roosevelt (done by Franz Machtl in 1893), was a compromise; the sculptor had originally revealed both. When in 1927 Montgomery Ward commissioned a copy of Spirit of Progress (a Diana-like nymph that once graced its Michigan Avenue headquarters) for its new administration building on West Chicago, it ordered the breasts of the new one covered.
But while Riedy may be considered the last word on Chicago sculpture, he is not the only word. A Guide to Chicago’s Public Sculpture, by Ira Bach and Mary Lackritz Gray, remains essential. Riedy offers more works and the photographs are rather better, but the pocket-size Bach-Gray guide is much more convenient for the strolling statuehound. It is also occasionally more informative. It is from Bach and Gray that we learn that the committee that commissioned the Haymarket monument complained to the sculptor that his patrolman looked too Irish.
