The Spirit of American Sculpture

Other gifts besides those commonly acknowledged as the artist's peculiar possession are needful if the advancement of art and the status of the artist are to be fitly assured. These other gifts belonged to the painter Morse when in defending the interests of art-study he played his important part in founding our National Academy of Design in 1825. They belonged to the artists who, in espousing the cause of the young Saint-Gaudens half a century later, broke away from the Academy to form the Society of American Artists. They belonged also to those later spirits who, perceiving the weakness of that disunion, managed somehow to gather the Society back into the bosom of the Academy, to the chastening of both factions. And they belong in good measure to Mr. F. W. Ruckstull, an American sculptor of widely recognized ability, who in 1893, with the help of Mr. Charles de Kay and others, was foremost in assembling the body since known as the National Sculpture Society. Mr. Ruckstull and the other charter members had no personal tocsin of revolt to sound; they simply saw, as intelligent artists and citizens, that their art and their country needed such an organization, "to spread the knowledge of good sculpture."

To begin with, sculpture is not easy to exhibit. Far more than any living painter has ever acknowledged, it suffers acutely from unfriendly lighting. The old proverb that good sculpture looks well anywhere ought to be amended to add, it looks its best only in its chosen light and space. Sculpture's appetite for space, at times modest, is at times illimitable. The Academy, always hard-pressed for space in its annual exhibitions, cannot afford to give up large well-lit areas for sculptures of heroic size. The Architectural League is hospitable toward sculpture, but, the aims of this body being many and diverse, it certainly cannot favor the sculptors above all other comers. Once in a while, if not oftener, our sculpture should be shown under the happiest conditions. Again, sculpture, even more than painting, has active contacts with the worlds of government, whether municipal, state or federal; it should be able to present itself with the authority naturally vested in an honored group of experts. And sculptors, quite as much as painters and architects, must stand together lest personal interest wrong the general good, and lest individuals fall into misunderstandings either among themselves, or with the public, to whose intelligent opinion they, like other citizens, must commonly submit.