In the year 1924, Homer Saint-Gaudens, then director of fine arts at the Carnegie Institute, addressed an audience of prominent citizens of Pittsburgh assembled in the institute's vast lecture hall. He was trying to summarize the great classical traditions that had guided his famous sculptor father Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) in the creation of so many memorable American public monuments.
Homer Saint-Gaudens grappled earnestly that November evening with such concepts as Beauty, Truth, and Courage, sensitive to the fact that some in the audience were fidgeting in their seats. By then many of them were already aware of the new cultural influences from Europe, and the lecturer's ideas sounded quaintly old-fashioned.
Seated among the audience was an elderly sculptor, F.W. Ruckstull (1853-1942), a former friend of the deceased sculptor and himself the creator of many illustrious public monuments in Washington and New York. For Ruckstull, the speech afforded one last reaffirmation of the classical principles that had guided his own hand for so many decades.
Few among that audience, indeed in America, comprehended the danger that Ruckstull perceived so clearly in that distant year of 1924. To the great sculptor it appeared that a moral darkness was descending over America, a darkness that threatened to "smother the lamp of Beauty and Truth." To Ruckstull that darkness was Modernism, and in place of Beauty and Truth it offered Nihilism and Ugliness. During the decade following the New York Armory Exhibition of 1913, he had put aside his work in order to alert the public through his writings of the dangers of the coming cultural revolution. He was discouraged because few were listening.
Public art for Ruckstull and his generation represented a tradition of spiritual and moral enlightenment. Their inspiration was derived from the noble public art of nineteenth-century England and France, as exemplified in the great classical sculpture of Alfred Stevens, Jules Dalou, Gustave Dore, Alfred Gilbert, William Thornycraft, F.W. Pomeroy, and Henry Poole. The new Modernism threatened the existence of the aesthetic and moral principles that were the cornerstone of the classical art taught at the Royal Academy and the Ecole des Beaux-arts. The destruction of these principles, Ruckstull warned, would eliminate future need for public memorials or sculptures, and would lead to the ruination of the American spirit.
By the time Ruckstull died in 1942, it appeared as if the issue had been decided by default. There was little demand for public art before and after World War II. The situation changed abruptly during the Kennedy administration of the early 1960s with the establishment of government programs such as Art-in-Architecture, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Art in Public Places.
Proliferating Ugliness
The philosophical implications of Modern art that had so disturbed Ruckstull sixty years earlier, however, had not gone away. By the 1970s the problems had resurfaced on a scale unimaginable even to the perspicacious sculptor. Proliferating across the United States were a spate of ugly public sculptures that offered mute testimony to an absence of any meaningful cultural
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