Sculpting Abroad: Nationality and Mobility of Sculptors in the Nineteenth Century edited by Marjan Sterckx and Tom Verschaffel

When Stone of Hope—the thirty-foot Chinese granite sculpture depicting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) sculpted by Lei Yixin (b. 1954)—was unveiled in August 2011 on the National Mall, it suffered from a profound lack of admiration. The scarcity of positive reactions was attributed in part to the artwork’s Social Realist style: Dr. King’s Egyptian-like stiffness, his arms folded across his abdomen like a dictator, and his cold, flat, and stern gaze did not win the sculpture any accolades. Stone of Hope and its style seemed imported from a country with tastes wildly different than those of the United States. In his review of the artwork, Edward Rothstein wrote in the New York Times that the sculpture’s development “inspired a number of controversies,” including that “following the appointment of Mr. Lei as sculptor, the foundation [that was established to create the memorial] was attacked for not having chosen a black American, let alone an American.”‍[1] Last year, when The Embrace, a twenty-foot bronze sculpture depicting the clasping arms of Dr. King and his wife Coretta Scott King (1927–2006) arrived in Boston Common, it fared no better with critics, even though the artist, Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) is Black and was born in New Jersey. Much of the public criticism of The Embrace is too bawdy to bear repeating here; let us just say that descriptions of the work online and in social media posts conjured sexual fantasies and feral misinterpretations. Choosing an African American to create the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, an apparent corrective to the “error” made by the foundation who stewarded Stone of Hope to Washington, DC, was itself a failure. Both sculptures have their merits, of course: when I showed these two works recently in my history of sculpture course at the Pratt Institute, students commended the seriousness of the stance and expression of Dr. King’s representation in Stone of Hope, equating it with the seriousness of his mission; and they lauded the romantic gestures in The Embrace, something that stands apart from what is generally mentioned when discussing Dr. King and his wife. It stands to reason that the people or issues presented in sculptures should not be predicated on the nationality or race of the artists who make them but on whether the underlying meaning or message of the work translates well to the public that the works are intended to serve.

I have given this somewhat long preamble here to make the point that not much has changed in the way governments, critics, or the public view nationality and nationhood in relation to an artwork that has been created to represent a person, issue, or country. Over the past two centuries in the United States, both German and Italian sculptors were continually criticized on the grounds of their ethnicity, starting in the 1820s with the arrival of German immigrants to New York and persisting throughout the twentieth century. There remain people today who still staunchly believe that only an African American artist has the right to tell African American stories through art; or that only someone born in the United States should obtain a government commission for a public artwork for the United States. There are those who further believe that neither should someone born in the United States to parents who immigrated to the United States be given such commissions (see, e.g., the case of Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial).‍[2] Thus, the bias against “foreign” artists is universal, longstanding, and continues throughout the modern history of public sculpture.

To present the proof that the specific bias against international sculptors working in a nation other than their own is neither new nor exclusive to the United States, we have under review here Sculpting Abroad: Nationality and Mobility of Sculptors in the Nineteenth Century, a volume edited by Marjan Sterckx and Tom Berschaffel and published as part of Brepols’s XIX: Studies in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture series. The book is divided into three chapters covering ten case studies delving into both the importance of intercultural exchange and the hostility expressed toward foreign artists in a variety of European countries, including Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Prussia, and the Netherlands. The essays in each chapter are focused entirely on male artists, though the introduction does briefly mention Anne Seymour Damer (1748–1828), a British sculptor in Belgium; Mary Francis Thornycroft (1814–95), a British sculptor in Rome; and Marie-Louise Lefèvre-Deumier (1812–77), a French sculptor in the Hague. The discussion of these women does not exceed a few sentences (5, 12–13), which is unfortunate because there are many examples of women sculptors in the nineteenth century who left their birth country to make a life elsewhere, including the now infamous “white marmorean flock” of American women sculptors in Rome, as well as European women, such as the Swiss-born, Parisian-established Marcello (1836–79). These artists were not spared from disapproval because they were women; in fact, quite the contrary was true. The criticism was redoubled because they were both foreigners and women. And yet, all the authors represented in this book are women. Even for someone who adheres to the “death-of-the-author” approach to interpretation, the odd one-sidedness of the text—all the authors are women; all the artists discussed are men—was striking. The question, though, is of course not who wrote the essays or who they wrote about, but whether the underlying meaning or message of the anthology as a whole translates well to the readership that it is intended to serve.

Section 1, entitled “Dubious Nationalities,” includes Jana Wijnsouw’s “In Search of a National (S)cul(p)ture: The Local, National, and International Identity of Sculptors in Belgium (1830–1916),” Désirée de Chair’s “Henry de Triqueti between Britain and Prussia: A Frenchman Sculpting for Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia and Princess Royal of Great Britain (c. 1864–1874),” Frédérique Brinkerink’s “‘The Right Man in the Right Place’: Foreign Sculptors Active in the Netherlands (c. 1820–1890),” and Linda Van Santvoort’s “A Clear Case of Favouritism? The French Ornamentist Georges Houtstont at Work in Brussels (c. 1862–1912).” Wijnsouw leads the study with a strong essay on the development of a national sculpture in Belgium. In 1835, a commission was held for a national pantheon of sculptures by Belgian sculptors of Belgian heroes (19). The problem here was not the nationality of the sculptors, but that of the chosen subjects: the first sculpture was to commemorate a French man, General Augustin Daniel Belliard (1769–1832), who helped Belgium establish itself as an independent kingdom. Belgians feared “a foreign prevalence” in their art, and, from this concern, controversies ensued (20–21). When the French sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824–87) took charge of the sculptural program at the Brussels Stock Exchange in 1870 (with Auguste Rodin providing assistance), he was accused of making the building look too French, even though he hired mostly Belgian sculptors. Training was another problem: since many places in Europe did not have a national school or any significant training for artists in their cities, artists had to train elsewhere. This resulted in freshly trained artists importing a foreign style when they returned to their birth country to find work or complete commissions.‍[3] Most of the Belgian sculptors that Carrier-Belleuse hired were trained in France. While Wijnsouw’s essay is never clear about what exactly constituted a Belgian national style, it does establish that there was a significant attempt to commission sculpture to create and perpetuate a national character, whatever that was.

De Chair’s essay discusses an unrealized tomb commission originally offered to Henry de Triqueti (1803–74), a French-born artist who used his own luxurious technique of tarsia sculpture (large marble tablets using a jigsaw motif without the use of tesserae) for his stone works in the Albert Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle. Queen Victoria’s daughter Victoria (known as “Vicky”) promoted his work there and later called upon Triqueti to create designs for the Church of Peace in Potsdam, where Vicky’s toddler Sigismund was buried. But while in Britain foreign artists were tolerated, in Prussia it would have been difficult for Vicky to publicly hire a French artist as the Franco-Prussian War had made the two countries enemies. Vicky decided to have the work produced in Prussia according to Triqueti’s designs to avoid insulting anyone in Prussia by hiring a French artist. This, however, slowed the process, and when Triqueti died suddenly in 1874, the project never came to fruition.

Belgian artists had to take their lumps in turn when they worked in the Netherlands. Brinkerlink’s essay focuses on the Belgian-born artist Louis Royer (1793–1868); German-born Johann Stracké (1817–91); and Belgian-born Eugène Lacomblé (1828–1905). Between 1864 and 1865, Stracké moved to Amsterdam to assist Royer on the Vondel Monument in Vondelpark (49); Royer’s appointment was debated in the local newspapers. There was also an open contest among Stracké, Lacomblé, and Royer for the Henrik Tollens Monument; Royer backed out of that competition and Stracké was selected on Royer’s advice. An Antwerp sculptor, Johan Leonard de Cuyper (1813–70), offered to create the sculpture of Vondel for free, assuming that being from Antwerp would make him the logical choice, but the critic Alberdingk Thijm (1820–89) argued that Royer was from “southern Dutch origin,” and while Cuyper’s sculptures might be free, they were “ugly” (52). All this hemming and hawing over sculptors who were all born in places less than 300 miles from Amsterdam seems ridiculous; but, then again, Maya Lin was also accused of being foreign, despite having been born and raised in Athens, Ohio, just 350 miles from Washington, DC.

The French-born artist Georges Houtstont (1831–1912) is the subject of Van Santvoort’s essay. The French ornamentalist had a veritable monopoly on commissions in Brussels, to the point where one critic lamented: “are there no Belgian artists who are competent?” (57). Returning to the issue of training, Van Santvoort argues that Belgium’s education system was deficient in the training of artists in ornamental sculpture, and thus artists who could complete the work were brought to Brussels from Paris.

Section 2, entitled “Daily Practices,” is comprised of three essays including Barbara Musetti’s “Prejudice and Protectionism: Italian Sculptors in France in the Nineteenth Century,” Clarisse Fava-Piz’s “From Commodore John Barry to Le Débarquement: Embodying Mobility in Andrew O’Connor’s Oeuvre (c. 1900–1940),” and Anne-Lise Desmas’s “An Artwork’s Journey: The International Peregrinations of a 1889 Bronze Vase Created by French Sculptor Ringel d’Illzach and Cast in Brussels.” Musetti’s essay makes the greatest understatement in the book, noting that Italian marble carvers “provoked violent social reactions” (73). At the end of the century, Italian immigration was at a historic high, and xenophobia raged in France. According to Musetti, by 1930, Paris was the leading “Italian” city outside of Italy, with 50,169 registered Italians.‍[4] Many Italian men worked as praticiens (carvers) for French sculptors in France. Because of the reaction against Italian praticiens and the predominance of Italian marble and marble suppliers active in Paris, there was a concerted effort to use local French stone.‍[5] Here we see that even the material used for sculpture had a nationality of its own.

Fava-Piz’s essay focuses on the work of Andrew O’Connor (1874–1941), an Irish American sculptor who studied in France with Rodin. His monument to World War I, referred to by its French title Le débarquement (The Debarkation of the Returned Soldier, also called The Arrival, 1918–31, cast in 1970), is reminiscent of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1884–95), particularly in the separation of the figures on distinct, low-to-the-ground bases and in the figures’ large, gnarled hands and feet. It was difficult for O’Connor—as it was for Camille Claudel (1864–1943)—to escape Rodin’s shadow. Fava-Piz argues here for O’Connor’s unique artistic identity; his focus on issues of displacement, trauma, and victimhood; and his international reputation, especially with regard to his work on the unrealized Commodore John Barry monument.

A vase that absolutely nobody wanted (but is today luckily in safe hands at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu) by the French artist Jean-Désiré-Ringel d’Illzach (1849–1916) is the subject of Anne-Lise Desmas’s essay. The title refers to the long journey this bronze vase took around Europe, beginning at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and then travelling to London, Chicago, and Brussels for additional expositions. Cast by the Compagnie des Bronzes of Belgium and Ringel d’Illzach in the fonte direct (direct casting) technique, the work is an excellent example of applied life casting used in a symbolist artwork (101). While Desmas’s essay is a satisfying study of the public presentations and reception of a single artwork in different countries, the problems with the sale of the vase seem to have more to do with its enormous size and the fact that the artist and foundry could never fully agree on a sales price than the fact that it was made by a French artist. Consequently, this essay seems to deviate the most from the theme of inherent problems of nationality and nationhood that the rest of the book tries to tackle.

The final section, “Career Strategies,” is comprised of three essays, including Sharon Hecker’s “An Italian Émigré Sculptor in Paris: The Case of Medardo Rosso,” Francisca Vandepitte’s “The Last Waltz: Constantin Meunier and the Vienna Secession (1898–1905),” and Antoinette Le Normand-Romain’s “‘Far from Sculpture and Close to Nature?’ Auguste Rodin and the Attraction of Belgium, Italy, and England (c. 1870–1890).” These essays are particularly short—the entire chapter is only twenty-two pages. Hecker considers Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) and his move to Paris from Milan in 1889. While the essay is brief, it makes one salient point: Rosso avoided Italian locales and organizations in Paris, but he also did not express any overt enthusiasm for France. This tactic rendered him more neutral in relation to questions of nationalism and shielded him from open criticism. Vandepitte’s essay is a data-driven analysis of Constantin Meunier’s (1831–1905) participation in six of the Vienna Secession exhibitions; how these exhibitions may have been significant for him and his career; and his promotion in Vienna by the Hungarian critic Ludwig Hevesi (1843–1910). Unfortunately, this essay seems truncated and does not dig deeply enough into the issues presented.

The last essay, by Le Normand-Romain, treads adjacent to a familiar road—that is, the importance of Belgium and Italy to Rodin. The substance of the essay, however, is the expanded understanding of the influence of Rodin’s trips to London between 1881 and 1886. A surmoulage (a cast taken from an existing artwork) of Rodin’s Children Kissing (1884, it is unclear, but this seems to be the work illustrated on page 143 and later entitled Ixelles Idyll) was rejected from the Royal Academy exhibition in 1886, which “drove him away from England, despite his strong attraction to the country at the time” (142). Le Normand-Romain does not explain or venture a guess as to why the sculpture was rejected. Despite this, The Three Shades (1887) were inspired by, and are positioned similarly to, two figures in Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1515), an Italian artwork on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum (then the South Kensington Museum) since 1856. In this concluding essay, Le Normand-Romain brings together how an artist’s travels outside of their own country generate the visual and emotional chemistry necessary for the creation of new ideas and compositions.

There are a few technical problems with the book, which suffers from a lack of a bibliography at the end of the text. Such a listing would have been useful to readers who would like to learn more about the subject of sculpture and nationalism. Each essay has endnotes directly after the text, which is convenient, but these endnotes are not uniform throughout the text. For example, Wijnsouw’s essay contains in-text and in-note foreign language quotations with no translations, but other essays include in-text translations in English with the original language in the endnotes. The illustrations, however, are excellently reproduced, and there are more color images than black and white, making this book quite sumptuous.

Overall, Sculpting Abroad: Nationality and Mobility of Sculptors in the Nineteenth Century gets its message across. While artists working abroad or for governments not their own have frequently faced criticism in the modern period, this intercultural exchange nonetheless reinforced ideas of nationhood and nationality.