Sometimes being caught by an artwork, and by the story behind it, is like walking into a complex room, perhaps an overgrown conservatory, with underbrush and overstory, half-hidden doors, and many corridors.
And sometimes while you’re peering about, absorbed, you discover something.
There is a discreet barrier on the gallery floor near the Paul Manship zodiac sculptures at the Minnesota Museum of American Art. It prevents gallery visitors from stepping close and touching, which one wants to do, pulled by the curving sensual forms, the slight roughness of the terra cotta, the rhythmic shapes. The wall is gray, a bit like a night sky. The pieces are lit from above; their short shadows accent their shapes.
The twelve zodiac forms were made toward the end of Manship’s long career and life, and his renowned mastery of form and technique seems here to yield to a kind of relaxation; they look somehow inevitable on the wall, a quality that Harry Rand, a curator at the Smithsonian, called “sedate eloquence.”
The stars, the constellations, the progression of the zodiac forms across the sky are, of course, an ancient predilection – a very great and possibly impenetrable mystery. The same might be said about the source of an artist’s inspiration – for one piece, for a series of pieces, or in this case, a lifetime.
A stack of Manship books and catalogs and print-outs has been adorning my desk of late. The earliest zodiac reference I found there was in reference to a memorial plaque commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, honoring John Pierpont Morgan, its former president. The stone tablet with its portrait is still visible at the museum’s Fifth Avenue entrance; its sides feature the signs of the zodiac in low relief symbolizing, Manship said, the “Cycle of the Year or the Compass of Life.” It was made in 1914; the artist was twenty-nine.
Two years later, a New York exhibition included a piece called Day and the Hours – Sundial, in which a female figure is shown on a circular base with signs of the zodiac. (The sundial told time, as did others Manship made during his career, including one for the New York World’s Fair of 1939, with a gnomon of 27 feet.)
Manship used the zodiac signs repeatedly in his work. Could it be that it has been his own fascination that reached out from his work, then and now, to catch gallery-goers?
His best-known piece may be the Prometheus that anchors Rockefeller Center; non-New Yorkers might associate it with the winter skating rink, or the Christmas Tree. The graceful golden shape, all curves and upward movement, seems to hover above a large bronze ring “inscribed with the signs and symbols of the twelve astrological constellations, which represent the heavens.” Prometheus was installed in 1934. Manship was forty-nine years old.
I’ve written elsewhere about the ongoing pleasure of living across the street, here in Saint Paul, from a fine arts museum. Manship, born in 1885, had powerful Minnesota roots, including a boyhood summer cottage on Bald Eagle Lake where he might have watched the stars. He attended Mechanic Arts High School, which was near the state capitol, and took evening classes at the St. Paul School of Art. His career began early, and he was quickly very successful, with many awards and commissions. Susan Rather says that “between the world wars, Manship ranked as the most visible and sought-after sculptor in America.”
Apparently, the artist was intrigued by the zodiac for all of that time. A 1956 interview says the artist became interested in what he referred to as “astro-mythology” after visiting his first planetarium in Germany in 1931. “The more I got into it, the less I knew, naturally. It was just a superficial and fragmentary sort of thing that fascinated me – that is, the treatment of the relationships of the constellations by the ancients. So I began to draw the constellations as they had been handed down to us through the ages.” And elsewhere, “I have adhered as closely as possible to the ancient forms.” The constellations appear frequently in Manship’s series of armillary spheres, defined as “historical astronomical instruments” originally invented in ancient Greece and China. He returned to them repeatedly. There is a record of his armillary spheres in 1914, 1916, and two in 1918. In 1939, he made the 14-foot Celestial Sphere, a memorial for Woodrow Wilson at the Palace of the League of Nations in Geneva.
John Manship, the artist’s son, wrote “The idea of a celestial sphere continued to haunt Manship. As was his way, he sought out authorities in the field…he studied astronomy, made frequent visits to New York’s Hayden Planetarium, and went stargazing…but his interest was an artist’s, not a scientist’s; what fascinated him was the mythology of the heavens – Perseus and Andromeda, Orion and Pegasus eternally delineated by their stars.”
And now the discovery. In the midst of my research, I turned up a new book to read, clearly marked “Use In This Room Only”, pulled from the back of the stacks at the Saint Paul Public Library. It did not set off alarms when I checked it out and carried it through the security gate. A heavy volume, Paul Manship, written by the artist’s son John, it has oversized pages for text and photographs. On page 184, I found this paragraph, regarding an armillary sphere that was originally conceived for the Roosevelt Memorial, but was not included in the final installation.
The sphere, it said, “was re-cycled as a permanent sculpture for the New York World’s Fair of 1964-5. It included the last and finest of Manship’s zodiac signs…The sphere remained in Flushing Meadow Park after the Fair was over, but unfortunately it proved to be less than permanent. At some point in the mid-1970s it was destroyed and carted away, presumably to be sold as scrap metal.” From another source: “…presumably sold as junk to an unscrupulous dealer who melted it for scrap metal.”
Sad, I thought…something about permanence and impermanence. Vandalism. Bronze. Scrap metal. Gone.
I turned the page to a large photograph of the sphere at the Fair, clearly showing the zodiac signs in the firmament, Sagittarius and Capricorn and the rest. I looked, and looked again. The signs shown are ours. They are the same. They are in Saint Paul. They live across the street.
The backstory and timing are perfect. The terra cotta forms here were likely used to cast the twelve zodiac signs used in the Fair sphere. If the photo tells the tale, then the signs in the M gallery, the ones that the barrier prevents us from touching, are the only survivors from the “last and finest” of Manship’s zodiac works, the models for the bronze forms in the armillary sphere seen by 51 million visitors at the New York World’s Fair of 1964-5, then carted off, and sold for scrap.
And how did the terra cotta forms come to the M?
The sculptor had a long association with the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, and intended that the bulk of his work be displayed there in a dedicated gallery. Saint Paul interfered with that plan. In 1964, two years before Manship’s death, according to his son, “Laureen Tibbetts, who was then director of education for the Saint Paul Art Center (now called the Minnesota Museum of [American] Art) called Paul in Lanesville [MA] and asked if she could visit him. She came with his childhood friend Ben Storey and convinced Manship of the importance of the museum that Saint Paul was organizing. When he got back to New York he rewrote his will, dividing his art between the national Collection of Fine Arts [Smithsonian] and the Saint Paul Art Center.”
As the story goes, curators from the two museums visited the studio after the sculptor’s death, and literally flipped a coin for first choice. I’ll take this one. All right then, I’ll take that one. We don’t know where the zodiac figures came up in that selection rotation, what preceded or followed that choice. But the curator representing the M chose the zodiac figures for Saint Paul.
Visit the M and view the zodiac signs in their “sedate eloquence” on the wall. They are all that is left of an artwork that was the culmination of Paul Manship’s lifetime interest in the sky. The cast pieces from that last armillary sphere – Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces– are gone. But here are the terra cottas. Here they are.
(Addendum: In late-breaking news, the M’s Tom Arneson turned up a 2014 clipping from a New York borough-based newspaper called Queens Chronicle. It places the cut-up-and-stolen moment in 1980, and has this hopeful note. “Two of the original signs of the zodiac, ‘Aries the Ram’ and ‘Taurus the Bull,’ were recovered in 1990 from private collectors…”
Were they? And where might they be now?)
***
The story about acquisition of the zodiac sculptures was first told to me by Tom Arneson of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the M. Thank you! I have also relied on Paul Manship by John Manship, plus Paul Manship by Harry Rand, plus Archaism, Modernism, and the Art of Paul Manship by Susan Rather, plus the exhibition catalog Paul Manship: Changing Taste in America from the M, plus various online sources. For Minnesota readers, please note another wonderful Manship sculpture, Indian Hunter and His Dog, on Saint Paul’s Summit Avenue, Cochran Park. For New York readers, don’t miss the Bronx Zoo Gates.
Graphics by Wylde Hare. Photos by the author.
This is the third of a Motley series called Caught By The Art.
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