Word: saints
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...Ignored by all but a few loyalists, American Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens receives his due in a retrospective...
Since the end of the 18th century, America has produced any number of competent sculptors, even a few first-rate ones, but perhaps only two that brought authentic greatness to their own genres: David Smith and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Smith's work was the climax of a tradition of open, sheet-metal sculpture that began in 1912 with Picasso's tin guitar; Saint-Gaudens, at the end of the 19th century, epitomized the academic tradition of public speech through bronze casting, whose roots wound back to Donatello and Verrocchio...
...idea that one was as good as the other would have seemed macaronic 20 years ago, when Saint-Gaudens' name was ignored by everyone except a few elderly loyalists and some young art historians with a revisionist glint in their eyes. He had been dropped from the list, an act comparable to (though, happily, not as final as) the dismantling of that masterpiece of New York public architecture, McKim, Mead and White's Pennsylvania Station. However, work did survive, though unconsulted. Few visits were paid to his Shaw monument on Boston Common, the most intensely felt image of military commemoration...
Between his professional flowering in the 1880s and his death in 1907, Saint-Gaudens was seen as proof that America could produce art--an ability that, his patrons felt, went hand in hand with the triumph of the industrial Northeast after the Civil War. He gave the crude, grabbing Republic its lessons in symbolic deportment and visual elocution, and won its unstinted gratitude. If there was such a thing as the American Renaissance, then Saint-Gaudens embodied it in sculpture, as surely as the Roeblings did in engineering, Louis Comfort Tiffany in décor or McKim, Mead and White...
Without question, Saint-Gaudens was one of the most fluent sculptors that ever lived, and his clients demanded fluency. He could and did turn his hand to anything, from a 10-ft. stone profile on a pyramid in Wyoming to the design of the century's most beautiful coin, the gold 1907 double eagle. He could evoke any mood in a face, from the tremulous profile of an adolescent girl to the stormy jut of Farragut's jaw. But the main impression his works leave, when seen together, is not so much of a rigid technique turning out predictable results...