Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love

Copyright, permissions, credits

Copyright

Text copyright © 2020 Dianne L. Durante. All rights reserved. Except where noted, all photos are copyright © 2020 Dianne L. Durante.

Chapters 2 and 3 appeared in an earlier form in The Objective Standard in 2006, under the title Getting More Enjoyment from Art You Love.

The original version of Chapter 4, on Nathan Hale, was published in AOB News (the newsletter of the Association of Objectivist Businessmen), VIII:6 (Nov./Dec. 1998), pp. 10-11.

The original versions of Chapters 5, 6, and 7 appeared on DianneDuranteWriter.com.

The original versions of Chapters 8-17 appeared in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide, published by New York University Press in 2007.

Permissions

For permission to publish lengthy excerpts or reproduce photos not in the public domain, contact [email protected].

Cover

Cover photos copyright © 2020 Dianne L. Durante. Cover based on a design by Allegra Durante https://www.AllegraDurante.com/contact/ 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Eric Kalin, Brian R. Lessing, Michael Wilkinson, HealingForHeroes.org, John Cerasuolo, Betsy Speicher, Vikki Cohen, Carrie Lee-Rickard, Rebecca Wrenn Jones, Lulu Lamberti, David Sanderson, and Catherine Dickerson for their support of the publication of this book.

Special thanks to those who have supported my work at the highest level on Patreon, and now via the Tip Jar on DianneDuranteWriter.com: Adam Reed, E.M. Allison, Duncan Curry, and Jeri Eagan.  If you’d like to support my work, visit https://diannedurantewriter.com/sunday-recommendations/ .

As always, thanks to my sister Jan Robinson for her meticulous proofreading. Any errors that remain are my own responsibility.

Finally, thanks to Sal and Allegra. If you got paid for all the work you put into being my husband and daughter, you’d be, like, crazillionaires.

This collection was first published on 2/29/2020.

This version: 7/19/2023.

Table of Contents

Copyright, permissions, credits

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

CHAPTER 2: George Washington

CHAPTER 3: The Cid

CHAPTER 4: Nathan Hale

CHAPTER 5: The Puritan

CHAPTER 6: Loeb Fountain

CHAPTER 7: Alice in Wonderland

CHAPTER 8: Joan of Arc

CHAPTER 9: Peter Cooper

CHAPTER 10: Bryant Memorial

CHAPTER 11: Giovanni da Verrazzano

CHAPTER 12: Glory of Commerce

CHAPTER 13: Washington Arch

CHAPTER 14: Firemen’s Memorial

CHAPTER 15: Columbus Monument

CHAPTER 16: Maine Monument

CHAPTER 17: Continents

APPENDIX 1: Christo’s Gates: Art in Individual Minds and Public Places

APPENDIX 2: Politics and Portrait Sculptures

APPENDIX 3: Suggested Readings

APPENDIX 4: Questions for Looking at Sculpture

About the Author

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

In Manhattan’s Union Square, a 164-year-old equestrian sculpture of George Washington presides over throngs of students, commuters, shoppers, and protesters. Few glance at it, much less scrutinize it. Yet although I’ve passed through Union Square thousands of times, I always pause to view it and it always makes me smile.

Brown, Washington, 1856. See Chapter 2.

Why? Because Washington reminds me of ideas and values that are critical to the way I choose to live my life. Time after time, the sight of this sculpture provides me with emotional fuel and great pleasure.

Why learn to look closely at art you love?

Favorite artworks play a very special role in our lives. They provide us with enjoyment and inspiration. They help us recall important events of the past and project a course of action in the future. They help us relax when the time is right and exert ourselves when appropriate. Art, in short, helps us to live and makes life more enjoyable. That’s why we value favorite works so highly.

Given the vital role these works play in our lives, it’s worth asking: Are we extracting all the pleasure we can from them? Or are we missing something—perhaps something crucial—that would make them even more meaningful, more powerful, more life-serving?

My method of looking at art

The summer after I graduated from high school, I discovered that art wasn’t merely a way to fill a blank wall. I think you’ll enjoy this, said my high-school art teacher, Mrs. Hartman, as she handed me what looked like the largest, thickest book in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. To eyes accustomed to garden gnomes and rock-star posters, the illustrations in H.W. Janson’s History of Art shone outrageously, extrava­gantly beautiful.

And there was more than beauty. When studying the art of the Renaissance, for instance, I realized I could see what people of that place and time considered important. I began to think not just about colors and shapes, but about the ideas each artist was expressing. I began to look, too, for connections of those ideas with the fundamental ideas of history, science, technology, politics, and philosophy.

Some years later, I heard Mary Ann Sures give a brilliant talk about the ideas and meaning of several paintings and sculptures. I left the talk eager to go out and analyze art as she did. But I quickly realized that I had no reliable way to get from the visual to verbal—from looking at a work to thinking and talking about it. So in the 1990s, I set out to develop a systematic method for doing that. Among the elements that helped it evolve were a college course on explication de texte and Leonard Peikoff’s course Eight Great Plays As Literature and As Philosophy.

By 2000 or so, I had finally developed a method that gave me great pleasure to use, whether I was thinking about art on my own or discussing it with others. It involves looking closely at both subject and style in order to understand a work’s underlying meaning, or theme. The method is easy to grasp and to remember: its steps are set out on pages 10-12.

Why this book?

Over the past twenty years, I’ve applied my method in several hundred essays on sculpture. In 2003 I self-published nineteen of them as Forgotten Delights: The Producers. That book includes chapters on outdoor sculptures in Manhattan representing explorers, inventors, engineers, businessmen, and workers whose thoughts and efforts reshaped New York, the United States, and the world. In 2006, The Objective Standard published Getting More Enjoyment from Art You Love, which included lengthy analyses of two sculptures. In 2007, New York University Press published Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide. It was designed as a guidebook, with fifty-four essays arranged geographically. Sam Roberts in the New York Times praised it as a perfect walking-tour accompaniment to help New Yorkers and visitors find, identify and better appreciate statues famous and obscure.

The sixteen essays in Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love have all appeared either in the works mentioned above or on my website, DianneDuranteWriter.com. I happen to agree with Horace Greeley, who asserted that To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate—nothing to say that has not been better said already—that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. So you might well ask: why am I publishing these essays in book form?

Answer: In this book, the essays have a different goal.  I’m showing you my method for looking at sculptures so that you can learn to apply it to your own favorite works, in detail, in depth, and on your own. Except for Chapters 2 and 3, which include some preliminary material, the essays progress from simple to more complex. They range from the lone figure of Nathan Hale to the allegorical group Continents. Three of the essays (Chapters 2, 3, and 5) look at particular sculptures in great detail. But you need not spend that much time on all sculptures. I’ve also included essays that look at particular aspects of a sculpture’s subject and style more briefly. Abundant color illustrations are included because if you can’t see a sculpture in person, the next best option is to see photos of it from multiple angles.

But why would you take the time to do an analysis of the sort I demonstrate? I can suggest two positive reasons and one negative one.

The negative reason is to be able to defend your favorites. Studying art involves comparison, contrast, and context-setting. For that, the broad knowledge of art historians and critics can be very valuable. Since the late nineteenth century, however, art historians and critics have arrogated to themselves the role of judging whether a piece is art, and whether it’s good or bad art. (For more on why and how that happened, see my Seismic Shifts in Subject and Style, available on Amazon.) But art historians and critics inevitably judge artworks by their own values, which are not always—not even often!—going to be in accord with yours. They may condemn a work you love. They may insist that bizarre objects such as an unmade bed or a cow preserved in formaldehyde are worthy of your attention and admiration. If you can observe a favorite artwork closely and discuss it objectively, you’ll be better able to defend your own reaction to and interpretation of it.

On the positive side: usually there’s much more to a work of art than we can glean in a passive viewing. To enjoy it to the fullest, we need to approach it with an active mind. That might mean diving into the details of the sculpture. It might mean working to understand the sculpture’s theme. It might mean evaluating the sculpture in philosophical, emotional, esthetic, or art-historical terms.

Also on the positive side: using my method will help you find more art that you love. Why? Because if you realize that you love a particular work for its subject, an aspect of its style, or its theme, you can more easily seek out similar works.

I hope this book gives you hours of enjoyment as you read it ... and decades of enjoyment as you look with new eyes at your current and future favorite works of art.

Summary of questions for looking at sculpture

The following are, in brief, the questions I ask when I want to delve deeply into a sculpture. For analysis, the five steps are simple and easy to remember. The first and last are big-picture items: first impression and final overview. The second, third, and fourth are details: the subject of the sculpture, the specific objects shown, and the attributes of the objects. Appendix 4 includes a lengthier list of questions with references to examples from this book and from Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.

If you’re interested in spending even more time with an artwork, you can also delve into its historical context and evaluate it in several different ways. See p. 12 and p. 187.

Analysis

Step 1. Orientation (first impression)

Where does your eye go first, or what strikes you first about the sculpture?

Size: life-size, heroic, under life-size?

Step 2. Subject or story: the person or event shown

Step 3. Objects shown

Note: When working through these questions, always state the detail and its effect. That is, what does that particular detail suggest about the figure represented?

Human figures: proportions, pose, face, hair, overall

Drapery or costume: Does it date the figure, indicate a profession or activity, emphasize certain parts of the body?

Props (objects the figure is holding, or that are near the figure): What are they and what are they for?

Pedestal: What do its shape, decoration and inscription add?

Setting: Where was the sculpture designed to be seen?

Tentative theme: Consider the concretes you’ve seen and the effects you’ve stated. Are some of them repeated or related, and thus emphasized? So far, what theme or message do you think the artist is trying to convey? For a portrait, state the sitter’s character as revealed so far.

Step 4. Attributes of the objects

Medium and color

Texture and play of light

Forms beneath the surface.

Tentative theme (see end of Step 3), revised based on which feature(s) the attributes emphasize.

Step 5. Overview

Composition (arrangement of the figures): Is the outline simple or complex? Are the figures compact or sprawling? Does the composition emphasize any particular parts of the statue? What’s the effect? Can you explain why your eye went to a certain part of the sculpture first, based on composition or an aspect such as color or texture?

Contrasting sculpture: Compare the objects, attributes and composition of