The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (38 page)

Meanwhile, a controversy arose among colored leaders, decrying the use of white material. They called for use of the more natural shades of bronze – as originally conceived.
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Edmonia worried most about the treacherous Committee. Charged with acceptance and placement of art, the Committee could suddenly refuse her
Cleopatra
based on some technicality. It could accept the work but relegate it to a location so inappropriate that art lovers would never find it. It banished Thomas Eakins’s grisly
Gross Clinic
(1875), to the section on medicine. It broke Margaret Foley’s heart by exiling her first large work – an elaborate fountain – to decorate flower gardens far away where art critics might not notice it. Critics did notice, but when Foley died the following year, her friends said the bitter disappointment hastened her death.
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Even Vinnie Ream worried about the Committee and took unusual steps, as described below, to assure placement of her work.

Learning when the Committee would see her work, Edmonia hurried to Fairmount Park. She needed to see her statues safely installed. Visualize her as she waited patiently, standing within earshot of the Committee as it passed on submissions.

Vigilant and flushed with anxiety, she saw the Committee reject work after work. Each elimination tore at her heart. She stood as quietly as she could, smaller than small, trying not to stare, not to make eye contact. Her strong fingers trembled as they gripped her purse, touched her hair, straightened her garments... Her mind surely raced. Were they aware of her standing there? Did they know who she was? What would she do if they rejected her work? Would she be able to speak, to argue some appeal? Would anyone be her advocate, come to her aid? Where was that commissioner? She covered her mouth as she nervously cleared her throat. At last, they brought in the “Dying Cleopatra” and uncrated it.

Like one of her own clay
bozzetti,
she stood soft, vulnerable, and damp, away from the sparkle of the spring day. “I scarcely breathed,” she recalled to the
New York Times.
“I felt as though I was nothing.

“They opened the box, looked at the work, talked together a moment, and then I heard the order given to place it in such and such a position.”
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She was in! She “swallowed her sobs for a moment and then went home and had a good cry all by herself.” Tears of joy. Sighs of relief. Prayers of thanks. Surely she penned a note to her brother to share the good news. He cared so much for her success.

Now she could worry just a little more. What else could go wrong? What would the people say? What would the critics write? She would spend every minute with visitors judging her work – blacks and whites, tourists and locals, critics and correspondents – especially those who respectfully wondered who she was and how a colored person could create original sculpture. These people were so important. She was tense with anticipation, apprehension, and hope.

A week after her arrival, the Exposition erupted into months of excitement. For the first time, the United States invited the countries of the world to share technology and culture in the New World. With speeches and band-playing, President U. S. Grant opened the flag-bedecked show. Frederick Douglass had a ticket to sit with the senators and other dignitaries. The police barred his entry. Finally, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York came to his aid, and he was able to take his seat.

Over the following months, more than eight million Americans, many riding on reduced railroad fares, poured into the Exposition’s glass and cast-iron halls. Once there, they scrutinized craftsmanship, horticulture, the revolution of steam- and electric-powered machinery, and more fine art from all over the world than ever assembled before.

Figure 42.
The Death of Cleopatra,
1876

Kept secret for years leading up to the Centennial, Edmonia’s main entry caused a sensation after its unveiling. Later, it was lost and found, as described in the Epilogue. Now, even after restoration, its original polish remains eroded, having suffered the harsh Chicago weather and innocent attempts to pretty it with paint. Photo courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the Historical Society of Forest Park, Illinois.

Fine art filled Memorial Hall, the first American art museum built in the Beaux-Arts style.
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Together with an equally large Annex, built at the last minute to accommodate the surprising number of entries, the world’s greatest art show required more than three acres.

Edmonia must have walked eagerly through the assembly of masterworks from around the world – portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, John Gibson’s tinted
Venus
(ca. 1851-1856) from England, Rosa Bonheur’s painting of
Oxen Plowing
(1849), and many other works. It was an astonishing array. There were famous works and beautiful examples from Europe and the Americas – with more outside and in outlying buildings. The exhibitors numbered more than ten times the hundreds entered in Paris nine years earlier.

Europe was still the center of culture for the Western World. Classical and continental themes were everywhere in the mass array. At a time when Victorian modesty required covering all flesh but face and hands, acres of artful nudity lured crowds the way Monte Carlo drew gamblers.

Meanwhile, another revolution was in progress. For the first time, Americans realized they inspired artists. They were better subjects, some thought, than literary themes so rare that only scholars knew their meaning. One of the statues collecting crowds was Daniel Chester French’s iconic plaster
Minute Man 1775
(1875). It honored the Battle of Concord, which opened hostilities more than a year before the Declaration of Independence.

In spite of efforts by the Centennial managers to block unwelcome politics, the exhibition catalog reveals a number of artists who referred to slavery. Andrea Malfatti and Vincenzo Ragusa of Milan both offered sculptures called
Emancipation
in the Italian section. A chromo-lithograph by Levi F. Smith of Philadelphia, presented
The Proclamation of Emancipation.
An oil by a French painter and a furniture design from the University of Cincinnati depicted fugitive slaves.

The
Christian Recorder
critic waxed ecstatic over a carving from Milan, Italy, titled simply,
The Slave,
by Michele Buoninsegna. The critic raved that it surpassed Hiram Powers’s
Greek Slave:

It represents a young girl beautiful as the day and she discloses her … story effectually, without the accessories of whips and chains. You can almost discern the blush upon the expressive countenance and the action of the figure, is so marvelously graceful, that our pity and admiration are irresistibly excited.
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More notably, for our narrative, an Austrian
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entered a life-size bronze of a colored man celebrating his broken chains. Its realism attracted considerable abuse from people like
Atlantic Monthly
editor William Dean Howells. A Midwesterner who had backed Lincoln, Howells nonetheless wrote, “one longs to clap him back into hopeless bondage.”
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The
New York Times
contended the model was a seaman later hanged in New York for murder, and “not at all like a Negro from the Southern States.”
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The
Christian Recorder
critic also scolded, reproaching its realism and the choice of an unheroic-looking model for this “noble subject.” He summarized, “[it] causes one to regret that it is formed of such enduring material.”
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With comments that match Mrs. Child’s objections to Edmonia’s
Freed Woman,
the critic seemingly wished he could have defeated it while in clay. How can art inspire noble thoughts with imperfect faces and bodies?

A more upbeat coverage featured the work in
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
where an artist depicted it surrounded by well-dressed colored visitors.
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Augustus Saint-Gaudens’
Hiawatha
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also crossed a color line, but with restraint. Here was a nearly nude, perfectly “Greek” young man with only a quiver of arrows and longish hair to indicate he was a Native American. He sat deep in thought, absorbed in contemplation of something unseen. Many visitors could recall Longfellow’s lines depicting Hiawatha, “Pondering, musing in the forest / On the welfare of his people.”

It is possible Edmonia had seen his work before, although she avoided the studios of male artists. More likely, Saint-Gaudens had heard about and seen hers. He started his “pondering” hero in 1871, right across the street from Edmonia’s best-selling
Hiawathas
in Rome.
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Years earlier, William Story had shepherded his
Cleopatra
and
Libyan Sibyl
at their London debut. He now stayed in Rome, hosting aristocrats and celebrating his daughter’s wedding. He did not visit America until the following year, after the expo was done. His entries rested under the magnificent dome in the main building’s Grand Central Hall.
Medea,
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larger-than-life, thoughtfully held the dagger that would slay her children.
Cleopatra, Libyan Sibyl,
and
Semiramis
(1874)
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did not appear.
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Nearby,
Cleopatra
busts by Foley and Haseltine debated modesty vs. nudity, respectively. The central object under the dome was a terra-cotta reproduction of the colossal group
America
(1865-71), bison included, by John Bell, imported from London’s Albert Memorial. Nearby, visitors found Gilbert Stuart’s
George Washington
(1796), the only portrait painted from life, and more than forty sculptures by American artists. Like Edmonia’s literary Indians, Randolph Rogers’ best-known work,
Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii
(
1853-54),
was based on a best-selling book, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Vinnie Ream’s
Miriam, The West, The Spirit of the Carnival,
and her bust of congressman
Daniel J. Morrell
sat in the Grand Central Hall. In order to assure positions equal to male sculptors, she had written “obscene” letters, marked “personal” and sent to Morrell’s hotel.
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The lusty politician was chairman of the Centennial Committee on Selection.

Edmonia’s life-size
Death of Cleopatra
dominated the well-lit southwest gallery.
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It sat amidst dozens of other works of art, mostly small sculptures and a few pieces of stained glass. There medallions by Foley; there a bust of a child by Ream. Crowding made it impossible to fully view the queen’s face, yet the work drew intense interest as she proudly stood nearby.

One lesson Edmonia had learned well at the Paris Exposition was how best to display important statuary. Their monochrome makes them bland in contrast to colorful paintings. A large hall full of marbles, bronzes, and terra cottas creates a confusing clutter. In Paris, each major sculpture was set apart by high colored drapes that created an alcove, defining its space and focusing its visual impact. Edmonia’s
magnum opus
sat under a brilliant canopy of gold. Supported at four corners by ebony spears, it professed to screen the queen from the hot African sun. The huge swatch of color caught every eye at a distance. It dramatically distinguished her work, making it brighter, taller and larger. No one could miss it.

American racism knew few bounds in 1876. Common decorum was a far cry from today’s protocols of civility and respect. Groups of boys and men heckled visitors even from Turkey, Egypt, Spain, Japan, and China.
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Nothing in the day’s rhetoric of freedom and equality had real meaning to them.

Vigilant, Edmonia entered the fray. She stood and sat for hours, knowing her presence shocked and mortified anyone who counted on the invisibility of colored Americans. Those who realized she was the creator of an important work saw her as an intruder. Some glared, reddened, and turned away. Others let her know, goading her, spitting, even striking her, as they had done and would do again.
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They would never accept her talent or her claim to rights. False ideas, born of generations of greed and rivalry, were too emotional, too deeply rooted to change.

Ignoring them, she greeted friendly visitors warmly. By all accounts, she was as proud as modesty allowed, sometimes referring to herself in the third person as ‘the artist’ and helping visitors with quiet charm. She handed out an updated version of
How Edmonia Lewis Became an Artist
.
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