The civilized and genteel tone of art critic Adeline Adams captures a fading historical and cultural moment that she recovers in this memory of American beaux-arts sculpture, fitfully described in a contemporary exhibition brochure as employing “the classical or Renaissance figural type, stripped of idealization and infused with baroque exuberance in composition,” and “combined with a purely nineteenth-century insistence on accuracy in surface detail.” Despite this sculptural syncretism, Adams's assessment evokes the high civic and didactic role that American public sculpture played toward the end of the nineteenth century, and her memory is even more poignant given the fact that Daniel Chester French, born in 1850, would be dead within two years of her commentary. A modest and contemporary survey of his sculpture thus might help us understand the totalizing effect that the City Beautiful Movement held for a short time in terms of aesthetic urban planning. French ranked among Frederick Law Olmstead, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and other architects and artists “to influence the heart, mind, and purse of the citizen,” as William H. Wilson simply puts it. Confronted by industry, urbanization, and immigrants, those harried and long-time residents of Adeline Adams's American urbs were reminded as they rounded street corners and ascended the steps of civic institutions that a kind of classical beauty and simplicity still existed, and that a small corps of artists and urban planners wanted to keep it that way.
A Reconsideration on the Theory of Beauty: Previous Views and a New Approach Following Maslow's Theory (Part II)