A
n allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which symbolic figures and imagery are used to represent abstract ideas. From ancient Greek art onward, artists have employed allegory to convey moral or religious messages through visual signs that require interpretation to uncover deeper meanings.
Sculpture has for long been seen as the perfect medium for its exploration and expression. More than anything else, public sculpture connects New York City with Paris.
Allegorical Sculpture
A defining feature of Renaissance sculpture was its naturalism. Artists sought to capture the human form with meticulous accuracy, drawing inspiration from classical Greek and Roman sculptures. They studied anatomy and musculature, striving to imbue their works with a sense of lifelike presence.
In addition to physical realism, sculptors infused their works with a range of emotions, from triumph to sorrow or anguish. Michelangelo’s “David,” is the ultimate example.
Archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii inspired renewed interest in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. By the 1760s neoclassicism began to dominate art and architecture, lasting deep into the nineteenth century. The Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris stood in the forefront of this development, attracting students from all over Europe and America.
During the nineteenth century, the Academy promoted an eclectic mixture of classical themes and styles. In architecture, columns, round arches, pediments and domes proliferated. The period also witnessed a flourishing of allegorical sculpture. Bronze or marble statues were commissioned for public spaces, palaces and gardens, serving as visual narratives of cultural values.
Allegorical sculptures are the personification of an abstract concept through a system of visual images. Statues of “Vanity” were represented in the form of a semi-nude girl admiring herself in the mirror; “Fame” was depicted as an angel holding a long trumpet to blow the triumphal notes or wearing the crown of success in the form of a laurel wreath.
The figure of “Lady Justice” has persisted into modern times. Originating in ancient Greece, she is blindfolded. Carrying scales and a sword, she is traditionally grouped with the “Cardinal Virtues” of Prudence, Fortitude and Temperance, each of them with accompanying “props” or material attributes that identified them and elucidated their meaning.
City Beautiful Movement
In the 1840s, Richard Morris Hunt was the first American student to attend the Académie des Beaux Arts. By the 1870s, he was the nation’s most prominent architect and a leading designer for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Twenty million visitors came to admire the “White City” and public enthusiasm gave rise to the City Beautiful Movement.
Its prime concern was that the city was not seen merely as a driver of economic development. Urban planning should turn the metropolis into an environment of grandeur, promoting social harmony and quality of life.
The movement spurred the creation of New York City’s Municipal Art Society in March 1893. Attention shifted towards the social role of art and its potential to enhance public well-being. Richard Morris Hunt and fellow civic activists made it their founding mission to beautify the city with public art. Much of New York City’s outdoor sculpture dates from this period.
One of Hunt’s students was Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), a sculptor whose monumental work would become synonymous with the American Beaux-Arts style. He too had spent time in Paris. When architect Cass Gilbert constructed the “classical” US Custom House at 1 Bowling Green, Manhattan, he requested French to supply sculptures at the entrance of the building.
In his design for the project, the latter dedicated a statue to each of the “Four Continents.” Using Tennessee marble, they were executed at the Bronx studio of the Rome-born Piccirilli Brothers and assembled in place in 1907. These massive sculptures were designed to enhance the status of this federal building in the eyes of the world.
Representing Asia, America, Europe and Africa, the main figure in each statue is a seated young woman whose features are typical of a given group or “race.” They are surrounded by symbolic representations that reflect the religion and culture of the continent.
Asia carries a Buddha figure, suggesting religious passivity; Africa is somnolent and slumbering; Europe and America by contrast are capable and intelligent. Symbolism lauded by one generation, can become problematic for the next.
Miss Manhattan
The colossal copper Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor is an allegorical figure of the Roman goddess “Libertas.” She holds a torch above her head and in her left arm carries a tablet with the date of the American Declaration of Independence, symbolizing freedom and democracy. She is not the only sculpted woman to dominate New York City’s skyline.
German immigrant Adolph Alexander Weinman created the second-largest female statue in the city. Standing at twenty-five feet tall, the gilded figure of “Civic Fame” was installed in March 1913 atop Manhattan’s Municipal Building at 1 Centre Street.
Wearing classical drapery, she holds a crown in her left and a shield and laurel branch in her right hand. The laurel signifies fame; the crown’s five parapets symbolize New York City’s five boroughs; dolphins represent the city as a seaport. It was a remarkable lady who had posed for this allegorical figure.
Born in June 1891 in Rochester, NY, Audrey Marie Munson’s (1891-1996) career began in the early 1900s when her physical beauty caught the eye of a local photographer. The encounter launched her into a career as a model for sculptors.
Her first credit was a marble statuary called “Three Graces,” unveiled in the Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Astor at Times Square in September 1909. Created by Isidore Konti (born in Vienna into a Hungarian family), she posed for all three figures. She was soon working for the renowned figures of the Beaux-Arts movement and praised as the epitome of classical beauty.
Audrey figures in the 1913 USS Maine Memorial Monument at Columbus Circle. Representing the figures of “Duty” and “Sacrifice,” she was sculpted Attilio Piccirilli. That same year, she stood for him representing two figures of “Grief” on the Firemen’s Memorial at Riverside Drive.
In 1915, Audrey acted as model for “Beauty” at the entrance of the New York Public Library (created by Frederick MacMonnies who was also trained at the “École des Beaux-Arts” in Paris).
In 1916 she occupied an imposing position at each side of the Brooklyn entrance to Manhattan Bridge as “Miss Manhattan” and “Miss Brooklyn” (these colossal forms by Daniel Chester French now flank the doorway to the Brooklyn Museum). She also appears on the arch at the end of the Bridge as the “Spirit of Commerce.”
Munson was the Muse of the city, the living face of New York’s sculpture by modeling for more than a dozen public statues. Audrey’s “perfect form” reigned over the urban environment. Elevated to a near-mythical status and an emblem of the Gilded Age, the press nicknamed her the “American Venus.”
The Straus Monument
Allegorical figures serve two purposes. They are both “real” persons in their own right and they represent abstract meanings. Allegory was particularly suited to memorial sculptures as they combined personal loss with a universal message of life and death.
Statues tended to be weeping female figures who were portrayed in classical outfit whilst clutching at a funereal urn – the etherealized embodiments of ritual mourning. Used repetitively, such visual symbols become sterile and stereotypical. There is only so much idealization an active mind can endure.
From a socio-linguistic and psychological point of view, we tend to shroud our ideas of the (dreaded) unknown with notions of the known – and manufacture realities. Death may imply complete finality, but we tend to cling to the Biblical or Shakespearian “sleep” image. Metaphor and euphemism overlap.
By the same token, too much abstraction produces a fatigue that weighs on our mind. When metaphors and allegories become stereotypes, they block human ingenuity as a means of responding to immediate realities and coping with the pressures of being. Predictability stifles emotion and kills creativity.
Allegory, moreover, is a one-way street by which the artist imposes a particular meaning on a work that the viewer is forced to accept. In response, vanguard art circles in Paris of the 1890s demanded more human passion.
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) would pave the way for a vitalized stylistic approach in sculpture. More life, less allegory; more visual delight, less “hidden” meaning; smaller in proportion, but larger in humanity.
That tendency was transported to New York City and made visible with the creation of the Pulitzer Fountain at Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza from which Audrey Munson arises elegantly holding a basket of fruit in an allegorical depiction of “Pomona,” the Roman goddess of abundance. Designed by the Vienna-born sculptor Karl Bitter and finished in 1916 by Isidore Konti, this statue reflects a reorientation of outlook that had been set in motion some years previously.
In 1852 Lazarus Straus (1809-1889) and his family migrated from Bavaria to the United States. He opened a general store rural Talbotton, Georgia. Following the Civil War, he re-located to the city of New York. Negotiating with Rowland Hussey Macy, he secured a basement spot selling crockery in Macy’s department store at Sixth Avenue, turning it into a profitable glass and china department.
His sons Isidor and Nathan acquired a percentage of Macy’s in 1888. Eight years later they had gained full ownership, opening its flagship department store on Herald Square, Manhattan, in 1902.
Isidor had married Ida Blün in 1871. Living in a frame house on Broadway, near 105th Street, the wealthy couple were deeply involved in philanthropic work. Both were aboard the Titanic on April 15, 1912, when it sank on her maiden voyage. She refused to board a lifeboat without her husband; he decided to wait until all women and children had been taken off.
Isidor’s body was recovered and buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx; Ida’s remained lost at sea.
In 1912, the City named a leafy triangle on 106th Street and West End Avenue to their memory. Public subscriptions were raised to commission a memorial fountain for which artists could compete. Held under the auspices of the National Sculpture Society, it was specified that the design should reflect the unostentatious character of the Straus couple and that extravagant features be avoided.
The fountain had to present an object of beauty without necessarily containing an allegorical expression of any particular theme or subject. Out of fifty-nine submissions, the proposal by sculptor Augustus Lukeman and architect Evarts Tracy was selected. Their design was dedicated in 1915.
The work consists of a granite curved exedra and the bronze figure of Audrey Munson gazing over a calm expanse of water. The sculptor avoided all the familiar allegories of “Memory” or “Grief.” The central figure is depicted in a reclining pose, one foot dangling; looking down, her eyelids are lowered, her head rests on one hand and the other holds her chin and cheek.
In this serene location, she is lost in thought and seemingly unaware of the rush of the urban world that surrounds her. A sculpted figure can be full of grace and meaning without additional attributes for “interpretation.” Beauty is timeless, where allegory is not.
Audrey Munson’s private life would eventually deteriorate into a tragic tale of murder and madness. But that is different story altogether.
Illustrations, from above: Portrait of Audrey Munson in “classical pose”; Munson representing “Duty” and “Sacrifice” on the monument commemorating the sinking of USS Maine, Columbus Circle, 1913; Munson as “Miss Brooklyn” by Daniel Chester French, 1916 (now outside the Brooklyn Museum); Munson as “Pomona,” the goddess of abundance, by Karl Bitter, 1916; and the figure of Munson sculpted by Augustus Lukeman, Straus Memorial, 1915.
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