The Exposition had its sculpture laid out as one program. Visitors who entered at the main gate and walked north toward the bay passed a sequence of groups meant to be read in order. It started with a triumphant horseman on a globe at the south gate and ended with an archer on a column at the water's edge. About 78 compositions, repeated and multiplied, came to roughly 820 figures. They were modeled in plaster tinted to look like old stone. Thirty-five mural canvases added color to the courts. Nearly all of it was destroyed in 1916.
Bitter and Calder
On July 24, 1912, the Exposition put two sculptors in charge. Karl Bitter of New York was named Chief of Sculpture. He had held the same job at the St. Louis fair in 1904 and had directed the sculpture at Buffalo in 1901. A. Stirling Calder was named Acting Chief. The work was divided by distance. Bitter directed the sculptors in New York, where they made small models, and Calder ran the job in San Francisco. The official sculpture handbook says plainly that "the actual conduct of the work was in the hands of Mr. Calder." Bitter supplied some of the central ideas, among them the great opposing groups on the arches of the Court of the Universe. On January 16, 1913, he met the sculptors at his studio at 44 West 77th Street in New York and handed out the subjects.
Bitter never saw the result. After the early planning conferences he did not come back to San Francisco. In April 1915, a few weeks after the fair opened, he was struck and killed by an automobile outside the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Todd gives the date as April 9 in one volume and April 10 in another. The budget was tight as well. According to Barry, Bitter asked for $600,000 for sculpture in December 1912 and got $375,000. Todd puts the final cost, including Bitter's fee, Calder's salary, the models and their enlargement, at $384,246.96.
The sculpture factory
At St. Louis and Buffalo, Bitter had had the sculpture made in central shops in the East and shipped west. For San Francisco, freight and breakage made that impractical. Calder set up a workshop on the grounds, in two warehouses and part of a third east of the Palace of Machinery. Todd says the Division of Works ran it "very like a factory." The core staff were young men from New York studios, with Leo Lentelli and Frederick G. R. Roth among the sculptors Calder brought in. Barry says most of the laborers were hired locally.
The method was industrial. A sculptor's small plaster model was enlarged with a pointing machine, a "tri-dimensional pantagraph" in Todd's phrase. The machines were supervised by Robert Treat Paine, who had devised the machine for the Chicago fair of 1893. The full-size figure was built over an armature of rough lumber, old pipe and bent steel rails. That was covered in wire netting and plaster, with nails driven in to mark where the finished surface should be. Figures that appeared many times were cast from molds. Todd says that with such a mold, "making statuary was a good deal like running bullets." Everything was then tinted to match the imitation travertine of the buildings (see Architecture).
"A visit to the airy vastness of the sculpture shop was like a translation into a world of stony giants growing by inches on these iron and timber skeletons, from these little toy models, under the ministrations of a lot of pigmies in nurses' aprons, who climbed on ladders about the knees of monstrous camels."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1 (1921)
The finished giants had to be stored until their courts were ready, and some were kept in the Palace of Machinery. When the Exposition held its costumed Ball of All Nations there in May 1914, the figures of the Nations of the East were on hand for it.
Reading the fair from south to north
Stella G. S. Perry's official handbook of 1915 called the PPIE "the first World's Exposition in which all the sculpture has been planned around a central idea." The idea was a journey. Visitors came in at the Scott Street gate on the south, crossed the South Gardens, passed under the Tower of Jewels, went through the Court of the Universe, and arrived at the Column of Progress on the bay shore. Along the way they met the energy that built the canal, the conquerors and adventurers who opened the Americas, the meeting of East and West, and finally the idea of progress that gave the column its name.
The Fountain of Energy
Calder's own Fountain of Energy faced the main gate. A horseman, 30 feet tall, rode on top of a great globe, arms flung wide as if pushing obstacles aside. Todd calls him "the Lord of the Isthmian Way." Small winged figures blew trumpets from his shoulders. Todd and Barry call them "Fame and Valor," and Perry calls them "Fame and Glory." Below the globe were the Eastern and Western hemispheres, which Todd describes as a "human tiger-cat" and a "man-bull." Groups representing the Atlantic, Pacific, North Sea and South Sea rode in the pool. The whole fountain stood 65 feet high. The poet Edwin Markham called it "The Coming of the Superman." Arthur Putnam's mermaid fountains stood at the ends of the long garden pools nearby.
The Tower of Jewels
Two equestrian statues guarded the Tower's great arch: Charles Niehaus's Cortez on the east and C. C. Rumsey's Pizarro on the west. Higher up stood John Flanagan's figures of the Adventurer, the Priest, the Philosopher and the Soldier, each about twice life size and repeated on all four sides. F. M. L. Tonetti's Armored Horseman appeared sixteen times around a terrace of the Tower. Not everyone admired him.
"His being repeated so often up there made an effect almost comic."
John D. Barry, The City of Domes (1915), on Tonetti's Armored Horseman
In the colonnades on either side of the Tower were two fountains by women sculptors. Edith Woodman Burroughs's Fountain of Youth stood on the east. On the west was Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's Fountain of El Dorado.
The Court of the Universe
The largest groups on the grounds stood on top of the two triumphal arches that closed the east and west ends of the Court of the Universe. On the Arch of the Rising Sun were the Nations of the East: an elephant, camels, an Arab sheik on his camel, a Mongolian horseman, a falconer, a lama and an Indian prince. On the Arch of the Setting Sun were the Nations of the West, built around a prairie schooner drawn by oxen, with Calder's Mother of Tomorrow, Enterprise and Hopes of the Future and Lentelli's four horsemen. The groups were suggested by Bitter and worked out by Calder, Roth and Lentelli, who divided the figures among them. Roth, for instance, modeled the elephant and the oxen. Each group stood about 42 feet high on a base about 54 by 38 feet. The standing figure of an African in the eastern group alone was 13½ feet tall. See Nations of the East and Nations of the West.
Below the groups the court was full of smaller, repeated figures. Calder's Star, a woman with a starburst headdress and arms raised, stood ninety times on the colonnades. Hermon A. MacNeil's signs of the zodiac ran in a frieze around the corner pavilions. At the ends of the sunken garden were Adolph A. Weinman's two fountain columns, topped by Rising Sun and a companion figure that Perry calls Setting Sun and Todd calls Descending Night. Robert Aitken's Earth, Air, Fire and Water and Paul Manship's Music and Dance flanked the garden stairs. Fifty-two lamp-bearers by Ulysses Ricci lined the balustrade.
"It was the object on which the last beam was turned when the lights went out forever at midnight of December 4, so that the watching thousands should carry home with them a final, an unforgettable, spell."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921), on Weinman's Descending Night
The Column of Progress
At the north end, on the Marina, stood the 185-foot Column of Progress. Calder had the idea. William Symmes Richardson of McKim, Mead & White designed the column, although Juliet James's 1915 guide credits Calder with the whole thing. Isidore Konti made the four relief panels on its base. Hermon MacNeil did the frieze of straining figures (the "Burden Bearers") that spiraled up the shaft, and the group on top, the Adventurous Bowman.
"The great Column of Progress is the first column in the world, so far as I know, whose design was inspired by a purely imaginative motive, and the first sculpture column at any exposition."
Eugen Neuhaus, The Art of the Exposition (1915)
The side courts
Each of the smaller courts had its own sculptural theme. In the Court of Abundance (first called the Court of the Ages), Chester Beach's groups of the Early, Middle and Modern Ages climbed the 219-foot Tower of Ages. In the middle stood Robert Aitken's Fountain of the Earth, a sunken basin surrounded by about thirty-four figures. It won the Architectural League's gold medal in 1915. Lentelli modeled the water-sprite columns, and Albert Weinert's primitive figures ran around the arcade, sixty of them from three models.
In the Court of the Four Seasons, Furio Piccirilli modeled the four Seasons groups. Albert Jaegers did Harvest, Rain and Sunshine and the bulls of the Feast of Sacrifice, and August Jaegers did the attic figures. Evelyn Beatrice Longman's Fountain of Ceres stood in the adjoining Court of Ceres. The critics could not agree on the best of the Seasons: Perry and Todd preferred Autumn, and Neuhaus thought Winter "by far the most effective."
At the south entrances of the side courts stood the two most famous single figures of the fair. James Earle Fraser's <em>The End of the Trail</em>, a mounted Indian at the end of his strength, marked the entrance to the Court of Palms. Solon Borglum's <em>The Pioneer</em>, also a mounted figure, marked the entrance to the Court of Flowers. Inside that court were Calder's Flower Girls (forty of them), Albert Laessle's lions and Edgar Walter's Beauty and the Beast.
A few important works stood outside the program. Daniel Chester French's <em>Genius of Creation</em> was placed before the Palace of Machinery. Charles Grafly's <em>Pioneer Mother</em> stood before the Palace of Fine Arts. It was a permanent bronze paid for by $25,000 in public subscriptions and intended for the Civic Center, and Perry notes that it was not part of the Exposition sculpture as such. At the Palace of Fine Arts, Ulric Ellerhusen made the women who stand, faces turned away, at the corners of the tall boxes on top of the colonnade, and the "Classic Art" figures in the rotunda. Bruno Zimm carved the rotunda's frieze panels, and Ralph Stackpole's kneeling figure tended the altar. See Palace of Fine Arts.
"The Exposition sculpture, at least the characteristic part of it, was not pretty. It was not meant to be. It was beautiful, but not in the finished and finite way. It was alive with realism."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921)
The murals
Jules Guérin, the Exposition's chief of color, chose the mural painters and set their palette. Most of them worked side by side in a studio in the Palace of Machinery, from five or six base colors that Guérin fixed so that every canvas would sit in the color scheme of the walls. Frank Brangwyn painted his panels in London, and Arthur Mathews in his own San Francisco studio. The Exposition paid $152,209 for some thirty-five canvases. The Court of Palms murals went up in the fall of 1914, and Brangwyn's arrived from London in October.
| Painter | Work | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Frank Brangwyn | Eight panels on the elements: Earth (Dancing the Grapes; The Fruit Pickers), Air (The Hunters; The Windmill), Fire (Primitive Fire; Industrial Fire), Water (The Net; The Fountain), each about 27 × 12 ft | Corners of the Court of Abundance |
| William de Leftwich Dodge | Two long triptychs: Atlantic and Pacific between Discovery and The Purchase; Gateway of All Nations between Achievement and Labor Crowned | Inside the arch of the Tower of Jewels |
| Edward Simmons | The Lure of the Atlantic; The Visions of Exploration | Arch of the Rising Sun, Court of the Universe |
| Frank Vincent Du Mond | Leaving the East; The Arrival in the West, with portraits of figures such as Bret Harte and the painter William Keith | Arch of the Setting Sun, Court of the Universe |
| H. Milton Bancroft | Ten panels, Pleasures and Work of the Seasons | Court of the Four Seasons |
| Charles Holloway | The Pursuit of Pleasure | Lunette, Court of Palms |
| Childe Hassam | Fruit and Flowers | Lunette, Court of Palms |
| Arthur F. Mathews | The Victorious Spirit | Lunette, Court of Palms |
| Robert Reid | Eight panels: the Four Golds of California alternating with the Golden Arts | Dome of the Palace of Fine Arts rotunda |
The sizes varied. Dodge's panels ran about 200 feet in all, with 96-foot centers, and Simmons's and Du Mond's arch panels each measured about 47 by 12 feet. Brangwyn's big, crowded canvases got the most attention. Neuhaus called them "a veritable riot of color, full of animation and life. They are almost dynamic."
The Official Guide's list appears to pair Hassam with The Pursuit of Pleasure, but the official handbook, Todd and Neuhaus all give that title to Holloway and call Hassam's lunette Fruit and Flowers.
What became of it
When the fair closed, the plaster sculpture had almost no value. Todd writes that the travertine statuary "had no sales value" and was so bound up with its setting that "most of it literally could not be given away." It was offered to any city that would take it, and only four accepted any part. In May 1916 the Nations of the East came down with the Arch of the Rising Sun, blown over by dynamite. The murals fared better. Brangwyn's, Mathews's and Hassam's went to the Palace of Fine Arts, and two by Du Mond went to the San Francisco Public Library. What Survived follows the bronzes and casts that outlasted the fair, including The End of the Trail and the Pioneer Mother.
Sources
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (1921): vol. 1, ch. LXXII ("A Sculpture Factory"), ch. LXXI (the murals and Guérin); vol. 2, chs. LII–LVIII (the courts, the Tower, the Fountain of Energy), ch. LXI ("A Wealth of Sculpture and Painting," with the full list of works and artists); vol. 3 (Bitter's death); vol. 5, ch. XXXVII (fate of the statuary and murals).
- Stella G. S. Perry, The Sculpture and Murals of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition: The Official Handbook (San Francisco: Wahlgreen, 1915).
- Stella G. S. Perry, The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition, introduction by A. Stirling Calder (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1915).
- Eugen Neuhaus, The Art of the Exposition (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1915).
- Juliet James, Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1915).
- John D. Barry, The City of Domes (1915).
- Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), sculpture section.