When Art Goes to War

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2025

When Art Goes to War

Sabin Howard has been at the center of a battle over sculpture for over three decades. I first wrote about him in this space nearly twenty years ago, when I paid a visit to his studio in the South Bronx and found him surrounded by a pantheon in plaster and bronze (see “Gallery chronicle,” May 2007). At the time, Howard was completing a statue of Apollo. As with all of his work, this multiyear labor, built up through tens of thousands of hand-applied dots of plasteline, was destined to be cast in an alloy, one might say, of his own autobiography. Howard sculpts in epic and myth, including his war against our cultural status quo. He has long approached the plastic arts as if he were a Prometheus, a fallen god out to redeliver that creative fire from Mount Olympus.

I doubt I was the only observer who felt a mixture of elation and apprehension when, in 2016, the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission selected Howard out of some 350 submissions to design the centerpiece for its new war memorial on the Washington Mall. Here was a creative battle to end all art wars. I feared one unelected agency after another would wear down this aesthetic belligerent to a stalemate, if not gassing him into unconditional surrender.

It did not help matters that the designated site of Pershing Park, just around the corner from the White House, already contained a design from 1981 that had been the result of an earlier competition involving no less than Robert Venturi, Richard Serra, and M. Paul Friedberg—establishment grandees all. True, their site had been in decline for decades. First it was shoehorned into a sunken ice rink, then a swamp designed by the firm of Oehme, van Sweden, and finally a brownfield site of broken water features, abandoned postmodern pavilions, and a derelict garage for the Zamboni. Despite the sorry state, preservationists were quick to panic in this needle park as they dug up Kodachromes from opening day, 1981. Any commission would need to accommodate Pershing Park’s bones—including its existing monumental plaza dedicated to General John J. Pershing, which had been designed by Wallace K. Harrison with a statue by Robert White from 1983—even as it looked to create something revivified and new.

The location of the memorial site was just one of Howard’s many troubles. Our nation’s art-and-architecture insiders were sure to see the selection of Howard and his competition partner, Joseph Weishaar—a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the University of Arkansas, an architect who did not yet have his license at the time of the announcement—as interlopers in what was supposed to be an exclusive lawn party for pedigreed insiders. After all, the last starchitect to dip his beak in the National Mall was none other than Frank Gehry. In 2020, he left it with an anti-monument made of chicken wire, purportedly dedicated to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Of course, the war over the National Mall goes back much further. In 1982, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, submitted when she was an undergraduate at Yale (whew!), was a minimalist broadside against the capital’s classical aspirations. The assault was only somewhat countered two years later by the addition to the site of Three Soldiers, Frederick Hart’s realistic bronze sculpture of multiracial brothers-in-arms.

Sure enough, as I tuned in to view the endless agency meetings in the years following the commission announcement, it seemed as though Howard and Weishaar’s concept, called “The Weight of Sacrifice,” would be bled through a thousand bureaucrats. What initially called for three walls of engravings, all designed to surround a freestanding battle sculpture and an elevated lawn, was eventually reduced through eighteen different iterations to a single wall of sculptural relief less than sixty feet in length. Weishaar’s elevated lawn, meanwhile, returned back to Friedberg’s sunken plaza, now merely modified and tidied up, with Howard’s sculptural frieze essentially replacing the old Zamboni dock. (gwwo Architects, meanwhile, stepped in as managing architects, with David Rubin Land Collective serving as the landscape designer.)

The pressures might have been enough to shell-shock any creative soul. For Howard, it appears to have fired up some essential distillation, encouraged by his commissioners, including Edwin Fountain, as well as by Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society. Relief sculpture going back to antiquity has a special ability to convey the cycles of war. Unlike freestanding statuary, its program can be episodic. Rather than a single moment, relief can contain many moments across a single frame progressing from left to right, as for example up the spiral of Trajan’s Column in Rome.

Howard appears to have drawn from numerous sources as he recast his sculpture into what he titled A Soldier’s Journey—a long frame of a single figure in multiple scenes as he turns from his daughter and wife, marches off to war, faces the ferocity and terrors of the trenches, and returns home to his family. Howard’s wife, the novelist Traci L. Slatton, as project manager recorded the evolution online in preparation for a documentary about the commission called Heroic, to be released this summer. She also served as a model for a nurse in the composition; their teenage daughter provided the model for the girl at the start and end of the frieze.

For inspiration Howard looked to Ghiberti’s baptistry doors in Florence and John Singer Sargent’s Gassed, that epic processional painting of blinded soldiers from 1919 based on Sargent’s own frontline observations, now in London’s Imperial War Museum. The minimalism of Lin and the realism of Hart both seemed to become reflected in the synthesis of the evolving relief. So too the turmoil of Henry Merwin Shrady’s sculptural battle groups for his tripartite Ulysses S. Grant Memorial, which leads up to the United States Capitol from the west. That work took Shrady twenty years to complete and accelerated his untimely death in 1922 at just age fifty, a fact that did not bode well for Howard. The Grant Memorial was only completed by Shrady’s studio assistants Edmond Amateis and Sherry Fry. (Shrady’s pendant equestrian statue in Charlottesville of Robert E. Lee, completed by Leo Lentelli in 1924 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, was removed and melted down in 2023 as a consequence of the moral panics of 2017. This is just one of the many recent crimes against our sculptural patrimony that has yet to be redressed.)

Howard’s most significant invention in A Soldier’s Journey was surely mothered by the necessities of his impending deadline and what he could fully do with the sculptural space that remained for him. For an artist who could spend years building up a single statue, a multipart relief of more than three dozen figures, all over life size, could quickly add up to a terminal Shrady sum. A manual artist, Howard turned to digital solutions. At first he took some twelve thousand pictures of his models, posed in authentic period uniforms, with his cell phone. The many models—a mix of actors and military veterans along with his family members—recited period poetry during the long posing sessions. “Dulce et Decorum Est,” written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920, proved to be particularly relevant to the emerging sculptural story:

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

To advance his production schedule further, Howard relocated for nine months to New Zealand, where he worked with Wētā Workshop, the concept-design company behind the Lord of the Rings franchise. Through Wētā’s digital modeling software, he developed and tweaked his sculptural maquettes to secure commission approval. With his models and their wardrobes in tow, Howard then traveled to the Cotswolds in England to work with Steve Russell Studios and the Pangolin Editions foundry. Here he positioned his models one by one in a 360-degree photogrammetry rig—a cage of 156 inward facing cameras feeding three-dimensional scanners—for a final round of imaging. After digital editing, Pangolin milled foam mannequins of these figural forms, which were left coated with a thin layer of clay.

Beyond merely accelerating his development time, this digital process significantly altered Howard’s final results. His use of digital modeling not only helped him to arrange his figures but also allowed him to build his relief more fully in the round, with increasingly true-to-life complexity. With the foam figures back in his studio, now a garage in Englewood, New Jersey, he sliced and diced slivers off of them while slapping on additional layers of plasteline. The action added an expressionistic finish and an urgent manual dash to the underlying digital printouts. The entire assembly was then cast by Pangolin in large bronze sections. In a final step, Howard patinated his bronze in dark gray with a brush and blowtorch.

Technological advancements have always upended creative practice in both destructive and generative ways that can be long debated. A century ago, the sculptor Paul Manship lamented the imposition of the Janvier Reducing Machine even as the mechanical lathe allowed sculptors to rescale their reliefs as never before (see my “Tokens of culture” in The New Criterion of December 2024).

A Soldier’s Journey, by Sabin Howard, The National WWI Memorial, Washington, D.C. Photo: James Panero

For an artist long dedicated to the importance of manual craft, Howard’s digital intervention has created a hybrid sculpture. A Soldier’s Journey is not classical in its own right. It is rather a modern work that speaks to the classical tradition, quite literally, through a contemporary lens. Viewing the completed assembly soon after its unveiling last September—most revealingly in the stark spotlights that illuminate the monumental site at night and shimmer in its reflecting pools—I sensed I was experiencing not traditional sculpture at all but rather actors frozen on a stage. The uncanny-valley hyperrealism of Howard’s digital scans has left us with a cinematic diorama caked in plasteline mud. In memorializing a war that defied all convention and accelerated our modern era, this end result may ultimately be more successful than any purely classical relief. Staring at his figures, which seem to stare right back as they march and spin and cry through the muck, I regarded the work as an unalloyed triumph.

It should come as little surprise that movie-making, an art form coming into its own at the time of the First World War, should have proven so successful at depicting the flashing terrors of that modern slaughter—and in turn influencing more traditional creative forms. King Vidor’s 1925 film The Big Parade remains one of the finest reflections of that conflict and deeply informed the cinematic painting style of Andrew Wyeth. The films All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Paths of Glory (1957), and, more recently, 1917 (2019) have all arguably done more to keep World War I in the popular consciousness than any other form of art.

Howard has taken up this cinematic idiom to give us a sculptural statement on the First World War that manages to make its century-old realities newly real. At the same time, his composition speaks to the history of relief in bold new ways. I was particularly struck by his use of traditional relief framing at the start of the composition that then appears to crumble away in the mire of battle. Further along, an American flag rises above the relief’s upper frame to signal the new standard on the horizon and the turning point in the war. Throughout the deep relief, the helmets and weapons and gas masks that are scattered about appear as though they could almost be kicked off the stone plinth and into the cascading fountain and reflecting pool beneath them.

At the unveiling ceremony, Howard aptly reflected on the message of his figures and what he hoped to achieve with a monument that gives new life to an old conflict:

There are no victims here. They are all heroes. They are all moving forward, calling upon their better selves, and giving unstintingly to their country, to protect what we so often take for granted, our freedom to choose what we will do with the gift of life.

Schiele’s Living Dead

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2025

Schiele’s Living Dead

On “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” at the Neue Galerie, New York.

For an artist now best known for his desiccated portraits, “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes,” on view at New York’s Neue Galerie through mid-January, adds some necessary water to the flower pot.1 With their exposed, contorted flesh, Schiele’s figures even today appear shriveled and deathlike—and unnecessarily brutalized. Those uncompromising bodies seemed to come out of nowhere when Schiele first conjured them up like an act of necromancy in 1910—a mad, mannered departure from whatever figuration had preceded them, even for the artist himself. Writing in 1912, the art critic Adalbert F. Seligmann took note of Schiele’s

gruesome-fantastical caricatures . . . ghostly lemurs with bloody spider fingers, mutilated, half-decomposed corpses, as if caught in a distorting mirror . . . . [T]he painting seems to have been taken from thousand-year-old graves.

Depending on how you take your art, such an assessment could be considered damning or the highest praise.

That same year, far from helping the case, Schiele was arrested for the kidnapping and defilement of an underage girl. The Neue show glosses over this incident, as those interested in this artist’s reputation have long swept questions of Schiele’s character under the Secessionist rug. Although he was acquitted of these particular charges, Schiele was found guilty of public immorality for displaying his nude figures in his studio with minors present and sentenced to twenty-four days in jail. Such early indictments against Schiele might still find a sympathetic jury today—and did, in fact, in 2018. The hundredth anniversary of his death at age twenty-eight came just in time for #MeToo and saw the artist’s posthumous appraisal unfairly brought before the court of social-media opinion.

Egon Schiele, Krumau Townscape, 1912, Oil on panel, Private Collection.

The Neue Galerie’s current exhibition—curated by Christian Bauer, the founding director of the State Gallery of Lower Austria in Krems—introduces some exculpatory evidence to the shock and awe of Schiele’s stark figures while also revealing the “life” and “landscape” that in fact occupied a majority of his output. Compared to the one-hundred-thirty-odd nudes and portraits he created in his lifetime, Schiele composed nearly one hundred seventy landscapes, townscapes, and natural scenes during his intense but brief period of creative work.

Rather than the prurient cosmopolitan that his ill-formed nudes might suggest, at least according to this exhibition and its rather impenetrable catalogue of essays in translation, Schiele was a spiritually driven provincial who sought the divine in nature. Born in the hinterlands outside Vienna in a stationmaster’s apartment on the line to the imperial city, Schiele as a boy filled his sketchbooks with drawings of the local countryside. One of his early interests was the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. His first exhibition took place at the Augustinian monastery in Klosterneuburg, where for a time he studied and lived. In 1906, at the age of sixteen, he arrived at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as its youngest student, where he burned to reveal a pastoral religiosity through his work.

This is not all to suggest that Schiele was a prime candidate to join his local Rotary Club. In his 1979 book Symbolism, Robert Goldwater identified the late nineteenth-century fervor to “make emotion meaningful, by connecting it with humanity at large and by seeing nature as its reflection.” For Vincent van Gogh, for example, that meant making “each object such a microcosm of an animized universe vibrating with his own feelings, that it is, in this new sense, a symbol—of himself and of a pantheistic spirit.” For Schiele (who was most likely exposed to Van Gogh through exhibitions in Vienna in 1906 and 1909), a Romantic sense of place combined with an ardent Symbolist faith in the power of depicting the cycles of life and death—which in turn flowed through the godlike self-conception of this headstrong, wunderkind artist. “A divine human being always leads the crowd!” Schiele proclaimed. “So let it be said: that the artist is the only one who is the ruler, the dominator, of 100, 1,000, and 10,000, that he creates only for himself, because it is the same as breathing.” Never one for understatement, he continued, “An artist above all is the one of great spiritual gifts.”

Egon Schiele, Town Among the Greenery (The Old City III), 1917, Oil on canvas, Neue Galerie, New York.

Schiele’s gift, at least as he understood it, was for revealing the spirits of life and making them manifest in oil. “I can speak with all living creatures, even with plants and stones; speak, speak directly into their face, into their essence,” he said.

Every tree has its face; I recognize its kind of eyes, its kind of arms, its components, its organism. I want to be addressed by everything!—My act is the answer.

For Schiele, God “breathes much more clearly in a field.” As the Viennese art collector Rudolf Leopold said of Schiele, he approached “landscape envisioned as a cathedral.”

In his interests in animism and pantheism, Schiele found ready affinity with the lingering pre-Christian sentiments that took quick root in Austria through such social scientists as Erwin Hanslik, a now largely forgotten figure who was the founder of the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute of Cultural Research) in Vienna, one who gathered the artistic elite around his belief in a Weltkulturgesellschaft (world-cultural society). Working directly with Schiele on the supposed connections between landscape and skull shape, Hanslik saw in Austria, in particular, a “humanity as it truly is, as an earth person, as a powerful, earth-bound spiritual being.”

When not dabbling in phrenology (Schiele even provided the phenotypic head illustrations for Hanslik’s book Wesen der Menschheit—“the essence of humanity”—which is now about as démodé as it gets), the artist worked through several fine but indistinct watercolors and gouaches in Klosterneuburg. Silhouette of Klosterneuburg (ca. 1906, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten) and The Blacksmith’s Courtyard in Klosterneuburg (1906, Stiftsmuseum, Kosterneururg) speak to Schiele’s interest in local topographies but give little hint of the compositional innovations he developed over the next few years.

Egon Schiele, City on the Blue River I (Dead City I), 1910, Gouache with glue & black crayon on paper, Private Collection.

In 1907, as a student in Vienna, Schiele met Gustav Klimt, his elder by nearly thirty years, who became a mentor and influence—and who happened to be the subject of a revelatory landscape show at the Neue Galerie less than a year ago (see “Summer lights” in The New Criterion of June 2024). For the next few years, Schiele worked though Klimt-like modes of composition that interwove figure and ground into a dappled whole. Summer Night (1907, private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute, New York) and Drying Laundry (1908, Kallir Family Foundation) are two of these small highlights of oil on cardboard—or rather “lowlights,” as their indistinct forms and fading illumination convey a haunting presence. Current of Youth (Danaë) (1909, the Lewis Collection), an astonishing concatenation of figure and ground in which a nude melts into the sinuous vines of a dark stream, reveals Schiele’s full debt to Klimt and announced the young artist’s arrival when shown in his first group exhibition in Vienna that year. (If only this nuanced work had been hung lower down at the Neue and not in the glare of gallery lights above a mantelpiece.)

Schiele’s true compositional breakthrough occurred the following year, when he stripped away this integration of figure and ground and placed his subjects—animal, vegetable, and mineral—in free-floating white relief. Sunflower I (1908, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), of falling petals and wilted leaves, set off by a scumbled white ground, hints at how this process began in his natural still lifes before influencing the progression of his portraiture.

A central gallery in this exhibition is titled “My Transformations” (with Schiele, it’s always me, me, me). Here we are presented with a suite of gnarled figures alongside his depictions of peasant jugs and chestnut trees. A gouache and pencil on paper titled Wilted Sunflower from 1912 (private collection, courtesy Kallir Research Institute) speaks most directly to the portraits here assembled in both composition and tonality. In Schiele’s monistic imagination, figures such as those in his Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff (1910, private collection) and Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovšek) (1910, private collection) are merely the dry leaves and branches of plants in another form. By floating them in fields of dingy white, Schiele further conveys the provisional sketchiness of life—man as little more than stick figure, here revealed by a numinous artist–god as depicted in Self-Portrait in Peacock Waistcoat, Standing (1911, Ernst Ploil, Vienna).

Through such mortifications of the flesh, Schiele connected his art with the melancholy light of a particular central-European sensibility. “My essence—my putrescence,” is how this artist once summed things up. In his stick-bug portraits, squashed as though stepped on by society’s shoe, Schiele presents a vision of human metamorphosis that is Kafkaesque—or perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that Franz Kafka was Schielesque. For the painter, the Fall of Man and the season of fall came together in an imagination that fixated on the cycles of decay and rebirth in the Crucifixion. In his native Austria, Schiele saw his own Calvary Hill (with the tortured artist, of course, on that cross).

Egon Schiele, Sunflower I, 1908, Oil on cardboard, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten.

Rather than some Futurism, Schiele most strongly identified with the Gothic. In his punk appearance, he was himself the original goth. In the Neue’s largest gallery, titled “My Places,” we can see how his treatment of geometric forms and mottled color, set off by thick black lines, calls to mind nothing less than ecclesiastical stained glass. Houses by the River II (The Old City II) (1914, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) is a tour de force of translucent rectangles. Several of the works here are little more than sketches, a continuation of the artist’s interest in the local typologies of house, river, and street—Group of Houses on a Mountain (1912, Albertina, Vienna), Old Houses in Krumau (1914, Landessammlungen Niederösterreich, St. Pölten), and Supply Depot, Trento Branch: Exterior View with Notice Board (1917, private collection). The highlight in the mix is the Neue Galerie’s own Town among Greenery (The Old City III) (1917). Here the triangular rooflines of a gemütlich village, surrounded by greenery, grow up through Schiele’s picture plane like the bark of an ancient tree.

It was Schiele’s fate never to take such root himself but rather to wither on the vine of youth. Itinerant as a boy even before his father’s attempted suicide and death, which sent him into the guardianship of his Bohemian uncle, Schiele was further uprooted by the First World War. In 1918, just days after his wife Edith Harms, six months pregnant, died of influenza, Schiele himself succumbed to the ravages of the Spanish Flu. A final, funereal gallery titled “My Self-Portraits” ends with the plaster Death Mask of Egon Schiele (1918), a gift to the Neue Galerie from the scholar Alessandra Comini, who curated the museum’s blockbuster exhibition of Schiele portraits in 2014. Obsessed with depicting the cycle of life, Schiele was far from wrong in his early premonitions of death.

1. “Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes” opened at Neue Galerie, New York, on October 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 13, 2025. ↩

Tokens of Culture

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2024

Tokens of culture

On American medallic art

How did America’s Gilded Age leave its most enduring mark? Through its architecture? Its institutions? By the numbers, the age’s most lasting currency has been its coins and medals. Consider the penny. The sculptor Victor David Brenner designed the Lincoln cent in 1909. Since then, the U.S. Mint has produced nearly five hundred billion pennies featuring Brenner’s obverse design. On August 6, 2012, one such coin minted in 1909, a rare variety featuring Brenner’s initials, touched down on the planet Mars as a passenger on the Curiosity mission. Since the lander used the penny as a calibration target, what is surely mankind’s most remote work of bas-relief sculpture became covered in Martian dust. Closer to home, but equally remote and dust-covered, there is probably a Lincoln cent in the pocket or couch cushion of every American. The New York Times Magazine recently saw fit to publish a cover story slamming the penny’s obsolescence, but no consideration was given to the astonishing success of its design. In the history of the world, no other work of sculpture has been as ubiquitous.

The Lincoln cent is one of the last circulating examples of President Theodore Roosevelt’s direct efforts to extend his era’s aesthetic aspirations to the art of American coinage. Brenner’s penny, with its crisply articulated profile of the sixteenth president, based on an 1864 photograph by Mathew Brady, was the first American coin to depict a historical figure. It replaced James Barton Longacre’s comparatively primitive Indian Head design of 1859—of which the numismatist Cornelius Vermeule (the father of the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule) said, “Great art the coin was not.”

The penny became the most widespread example of the transformation of American numismatics in the early twentieth century. “I think the state of our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness,” Roosevelt wrote in 1904 to his treasury secretary, Leslie Mortier Shaw. “Would it be possible, without asking permission of Congress, to employ a man like Saint-Gaudens to give us a coinage that would have some beauty?” A year later, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Dublin-born pioneer of the American Beaux-Arts, working with Adolph A. Weinman, designed the medal for Roosevelt’s second inauguration and established a unique working relationship with the president. “I am very, very proud at having Saint-Gaudens connected in any way with my administration,” the president wrote to the cosmopolitan artist Francis D. Millet, who had suggested the commission and was pushing for an overhaul of American coinage. Roosevelt called the medal “the most satisfactory thing imaginable.” Now in his first full term, the president set his sights on the one-cent piece and gold coinage, to which changes could be made with less legislative oversight compared to other denominations. “I suppose I shall be impeached for it in Congress,” he wrote to Saint-Gaudens, who had been running up against the mint’s uninspiring designs for decades, “but I shall regard that as a very cheap payment.”

The U.S. penny aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover in Gale Crater on Mars. Photo: Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), courtesy of NASA.

Roosevelt pitted Saint-Gaudens against Charles E. Barber, the U.S. Mint’s chief engraver, who had designed much of the “atrocious hideousness” then in circulation. Dying of cancer at his studio in Cornish, New Hampshire, Saint-Gaudens completed his Indian Head gold eagle (pulled together from other designs) and his double eagle in 1907, in the last year of his life. With a walking Liberty based on both the Nike of Samothrace and his own William Tecumseh Sherman monument in New York’s Grand Army Plaza on the obverse, and an eagle flying above a radiating sun on the reverse, Saint-Gaudens’s luminous double eagle in particular reflected the luster of its material and became one of the country’s most revered coins. Roosevelt’s beautification of America’s gold coinage not only set a new standard for numismatics. It also reinvigorated the gold standard. The novel design, striding forward, stood in direct opposition to the bimetallism advocated by William Jennings Bryan bearing his populist “cross of gold.”

Sculptors close to Saint-Gaudens, along with others who like him studied and exhibited in Paris, such as Brenner, soon set upon redesigning America’s other coinage: in addition to the Lincoln cent, there was Bela Lyon Pratt with his Indian Head quarter eagle and half eagle in 1908; James Earle Fraser with his Buffalo nickel in 1913; Adolph A. Weinman with his Mercury dime (which in fact depicted a winged Liberty) and walking Liberty half dollar in 1916; Hermon Atkins MacNeil with his standing Liberty quarter dollar that same year; and Anthony de Francisci with his Peace dollar in 1921. The historian Roger W. Burdette covers these developments in Renaissance of American Coinage, his three-volume series on early twentieth-century numismatics. Thayer Tolles writes about the Barber–Saint-Gaudens rivalry in Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Michael F. Moran focuses on the Roosevelt–Saint‐Gaudens collaboration in his book Striking Change.

All of these sculptors applied the lessons of the Beaux-Arts to American coinage, with stylized forms and deep reliefs modeled through classical training. At the same time, but in efforts far less appreciated today, these sculptors also turned their attention to the design of American medals. As larger, non-circulating, non-stackable objects that can be treated more like sculpture, medals can often display even more artistic innovation than coins due to their wider expressive range.

Medallic art, now regarded by some as a division of “exonumia” (for “outside of coins”), has a lineage that goes back to the portrait medals of the Italian Renaissance. Working in Ferrara for the Este court, Antonio di Puccio Pisano, better known as Pisanello, inaugurated the tradition of European medals in the fifteenth century by casting over two dozen of his designs, drawing influence from Roman and Etruscan bas-relief portraiture. Known as medallions in their largest sizes, through their association with currency—as coin-like objects that could be held or worn—such medals were created to reflect the value of those depicted. Through its exhibition and acquisition of the Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Collection of portrait medals, New York’s Frick Collection has recently done much to reveal the breadth of European medallic art history while giving these at-times-overlooked objects a renewed evaluation on the level of painting and sculpture.

For many observers, medals have fallen somewhere between fine art and coinage, with the obverse not knowing what to make of the reverse. But medals should please both concerns. Their size, forms, and patinations all contribute to their artistry, while their shape, marks, and serialization still speak to the technical world of coins (usually with much greater rarity than currency). Examples of medallic art can be found in major museum collections alongside the other art and sculpture of their designers. Nevertheless, their exchange still tends to be facilitated by coin dealers (many now working through eBay) and numismatic auction houses such as Stack’s Bowers, which hosts regular sales of medallic exonumia labeled under “numismatic Americana.” The study and conservation of medals has centered around the American Numismatic Society, founded in New York in 1858, while medallic artists have historically been associated with the National Sculpture Society, the National Academy of Design, the National Arts Club, the Grolier Club, and the Century Association.

Society of Medalists issues. Photo courtesy of medallicartcollector.com.

Through its use in commemoration—in impressing tangible monuments into fine metal—a rich medallic tradition speaks to the health of a culture. Medals leave a lasting record of a civilization’s military, athletic, artistic, scholastic, and agricultural achievements. They reflect the values placed on events and figures. They speak to the weight of their depictions through their tangible mass. They also reveal a particular artistry in their deployment of letters, numbers, and symbols as they tell a concise story, usually in two acts, through the flip of their front and back faces—their heads-and-tails designs.

Unlike many other works of art, medals are also intended for personal contemplation. They are meant to be given, held, collected, and privately revered. At the same time, minted in multiples, medals are enduring and accessible to a wider audience. Through their reduction of works of sculpture to portable size, they provide unique access to artistry, with sculptors exploring the objects’ diminutive possibilities. As I sought out a handful of American art medals while laid up with a broken ankle, in their tactile presence, I discovered nothing less than a museum in miniature.

The modern medal presents its miniature world by way of a key French invention: the Janvier Reducing Machine. Patented by the French engraver Victor Janvier in 1899, this pantograph lathe can scan a much larger sculptural prototype and reduce its forms with astonishing accuracy onto a steel die, which is then used to strike a coin or medal. The Janvier machine was not the first pantograph lathe in existence, but its great efficiency and accuracy meant that coin designers and medallic artists could for the first time impose their sculptural vision without the imposition of engravers and diesinkers.

The first Janvier came to America not through the U.S. Mint but rather through a private New York firm that went on to play a central role in twentieth century medal production: the Medallic Art Company, popularly known as MACO. In 1902, an engraver named Henri Weil became familiar with the Janvier machine’s operations while in Paris and imported one for his work with Deitsch Brothers, a ladies’ handbag company, at first to create medallic ornaments for its leather designs. When such ornaments soon fell out of fashion, Weil began promoting his reduction services to sculptors and, along with his brother Felix, spun off operations into a stand-alone company. So crucial was the arrival of this Janvier—and so resistant was Barber as the government’s chief engraver—that Saint-Gaudens’s Benjamin Franklin bicentennial medal, his double-eagle design, and Brenner’s Lincoln cent were all only able to be finalized once they had passed through initial reduction stages with Weil in New York.

The obverse of the James H. Hyde Medallion on the Janvier reduction machine at the Medallic Art Company. Photo courtesy of the American Numismatic Society.

In the nineteenth century, private firms such as Gorham in Providence, Davison’s in Philadelphia, Green Duck in Chicago, Whitehead & Hoag in Newark, and Tiffany in New York were producing a wide selection of commissioned medals. With the Janvier, however, the Weils could appeal directly to sculptors and a growing interest in medallic art for art’s sake. Numismatic societies in Europe were already promoting their own art medals—works created for aesthetic appreciation instead of any particular commemoration, and usually produced through subscription rather than commission. Such organizations included the Art Union of London, the Société hollandaise-belge des Amis de la médaille d’art in Brussels, the Österreichische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Medaillenkunst und Kleinplastik in Vienna, and the Société des Amis de la médaille française in Paris. By the turn of the century, as these medals were collected and exhibited in the United States, artists and patrons looked to create an American counterpart.

Through his work on the Lincoln cent, Henri Weil befriended the Lincoln collector Robert Hewitt Jr. Together with Charles de Kay, the poet and newspaper editor who helped found several New York cultural institutions, in 1909 Hewitt and Weil launched the short-lived Circle of Friends of the Medallion. With two medals a year, each inserted in the binding of a booklet issued to some five hundred subscribers through 1915, the series alternated between historical and philosophical subjects and involved the work of prominent sculptors including John Flanagan (Hudson–Fulton Celebration, cof 1, 1909), Brenner (Motherhood, cof 4, 1911), and Louis Potter (Abdul Baha, cof 7, 1912). The Ocean (cof 8, 1913), by Sigurd Neandross, is arguably the most striking and strange of the series for its contrast between obverse and reverse: on one side, a top-down image of two figures caught in a maelstrom; on the other, a sea-god with his mouth on the water’s horizon line. In its swirling energy and centripetal force, the design makes the most of the medal’s circular shape.

Due to a financial dispute between Deitsch and the Weils, the edge marks of the Medallic Art Company only appear at the beginning and end of this series, as much of the production for the Friends of the Medallion went to Joseph K. Davison’s Sons in Philadelphia. In 1919, an investor named Clyde Curle Trees entered the MACO partnership and expanded the New York company into a fully fledged private mint that could attract sculptural talent while also producing much of the last century’s run of American medals.

In the late 1920s, Trees commissioned a film featuring the sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser called The Medal Maker. The film depicted Fraser in her New York studio creating the Special Medal of Honor for the National Sculpture Society (her design is used for the award to this day). At a “sculptors dinner” in 1937, MACO first screened this movie for some seventy-five attendees, whom the company squeezed in among the machinery in what was at the time its Manhattan workshop, a small, two-story building at 210 East Fifty-first Street, just east of Third Avenue, which still stands.

The dinner and movie celebrated American medal-making at the height of its achievements. Medallic Art created a bas-relief plaquette with a profile of Saint-Gaudens by John Flanagan as the night’s parting gift for each guest—although a visit by the New York Police Department, on the trail of a murder suspect allegedly “dressed like a sculptor,” left another impression on the diners as they were detained for questioning.

In the 1990s, by then operating out of South Dakota and Nevada, MACO unearthed this film and brought in Elizabeth Jones, the former chief engraver of the U.S. Mint, to add her narration to the silent documentary and the events surrounding its first screening. The American Numismatic Society hosts a remastered version of this documentary on YouTube as one of the assets the society acquired through its purchase of MACO’s extensive archives and intellectual property—the largest acquisition in the organization’s history—following a series of bankruptcies of the 113-year-old company in 2018.

The Medal Maker imparts a special appreciation for the many steps required to bring a medal from inception to completion—a remarkable combination of art, craft, and machinery all working together at the highest levels. In the film, Fraser begins her medal with pencil sketches. She distills the design down to its essential symbols and letterforms: for the obverse, a male nude, representing the master sculptor, forming the hoof of Pegasus with a mallet and chisel; on the reverse, the lettering of the award along with an image of a flame.

To start the process of transforming her drawing into three dimensions, Fraser smooths out a round, ten-inch cake of oil-based plastiline on a shellacked wooden board. (Other metallic sculptors might similarly begin with a concave plaster disk.) Onto this soft cylinder Fraser enlarges and transfers her sketches with dividers by incising the clay with a wooden stylus. She then adds clay pellets and smoothes them over with her fingers, slowly building up the surface relief. In the meantime, posed in front of her worktable, Fraser’s studio assistant does double duty as her live model, here shown wearing leopard-print briefs as he holds a hammer and chisel in a frozen pose.

Once the obverse relief is finished, looking like a much larger version of the front side of her proposed model, Fraser adds letters to her reverse design. While some medalists use molds to create lettering, or in earlier times would have stamped small letters directly onto a die, Fraser instead rolls out thin ropes of clay and shapes her letterforms on the large disk by hand. By tradition, medallic lettering appears uppercase, although this was one of those rules that the sculptor Paul Manship went on to break.

With the clay patterns for the two sides of the medal complete, Fraser’s studio assistant (now wearing clothes) prepares to cast each in plaster. He fashions a thin strip of metal around the clay to form a fence. He then spatulates, or stirs without introducing bubbles, a mixture of plaster and water, which he brushes and pours over the clay. This plaster creates the first negative impression of the design. Since air bubbles are the enemy of an accurate transfer, the assistant blows on the drying plaster to pop them. A vibrating table can also be used to shake air bubbles to the surface.

The plaster warms from the chemical reaction as it dries. Once it has cooled, the assistant lifts the plaster off the clay. Fraser repairs any infidelities in this cast so her assistant can create a second set of plaster patterns, this time as positive impressions of the negative. To keep the wet plaster of this next positive cast from sticking to the negative mold, like buttering a pan, the assistant brushes a thin layer of vegetable oil on the dry plaster surface (in later years, this became a spray of silicone).

Again, once this new positive plaster is dry and separated from its negative pattern, Fraser makes final fixes and adjustments to these impressions. The next step involves transferring the positive plaster patterns back into negative form, but this time into a much more durable material. In the film, Fraser turns to the traditional technique of casting her plasters into metal at New York’s Roman Bronze Works. By the 1930s, for this step, many other medallic artists and mint designers had switched over to using what are known as galvanos. These copper encrustations are formed on the surface of the plasters—which have been soaked in beeswax and dusted with copper—through electrolysis. The process, done on site at the medal press, creates negative impressions of plaster patterns that are accurate down to the molecule.

The shipping & receiving dock of the Medallic Art Company ca. 1947–51. Photo courtesy of the American Numismatic Society.

Whether cast or electroformed, these metal transfers, called die shells, provide the final patterns for the creation of the small medallic dies—the forms that are used to shape the medals under intense pressure. Earlier medals, including Renaissance portrait medals, were usually cast in a foundry. Later on, once machinery could impose the pressures necessary to strike the blank bronze disks called planchets, die presses similar to coinage mints became the standard for medal production.

The final step in getting Fraser’s design into these medal presses is to use her large die shells to serve as the models for the smaller steel dies. For this process, The Medal Maker shows the Janvier Reducing Machine in action. As the die shell slowly rotates on one side of the machine, a tracing point reads the shell like a phonograph record. Attached to this point by a beam, and calibrated to reduce the die-shell forms by a factor adjustable from ten-to-one to three-to-one, a lathe cuts into a rotating steel cylinder called the die blank. As oil is played over the turning steel to remove metal shavings and lubricate the cutting bit, the process gets repeated three times with ever finer tools. Once this engraving is complete, the steel dies are heated, or “annealed,” to harden them.

Only now are Fraser’s designs ready to be struck into medals, as the Janvier reduction process has sculpted her forms in minute detail, allowing for the creation of what will become sculptures in miniature. Planchet disks, the medals’ raw material, are cut from strips of bronze by a four-hundred-ton press and annealed with a blowtorch to soften them (such heating has an opposite effect on bronze compared to iron). The planchets are then placed by a machinist one by one in the thousand-ton press—its gears and belts filling the workshop—where they are struck and annealed over a dozen different times. Through repeated striking and annealing, the bronze reliefs finally take their form on each side of the medal.

Unlike with a smaller and flatter coin, which is usually struck only once and then considered complete, bronze medals go through a variety of finishing stages after repeated striking to create their handcrafted patinas. Following the die press, patineurs blast fine sand over the surfaces of the medals to give them a microscopic roughness. They then expose the medals to chemicals such as ammonium sulfide that react with the bronze in various ways. Bronze medalists have dozens of patinations to choose from, with the surface treatment just as artistically determined as the relief itself. Once the bronze is darkened, the patineur often brushes and brightens the higher surfaces of the relief with a pumice solution to create contrast with the darkened areas and emphasize the three-dimensional forms. A spray of lacquer then locks these handmade finishes in place.

Afinal segment of The Medal Maker features Daniel Chester French receiving Laura Gardin Fraser’s Sculpture Society medal as Adolph A. Weinman, James Earle Fraser (Laura’s husband), Hermon Atkins MacNeil, and Herbert Adams look on. With the exception of French, who died in 1931, just after this film was created, all of these sculptors went on to play significant roles in the Society of Medalists, a follow-up to the Friends of the Medallion and America’s longest running series of art medals, which MACO inaugurated under the advisement of the philanthropist George D. Pratt at the same time this film was made.

With 128 regular issues created over sixty-five years—two a year, each roughly three inches in diameter, available at the start for eight dollars annually by subscription, always (for its first decades, at least) by a different sculptor—the Society of Medalists tested the limits of medallic art while presenting a who’s who of twentieth-century American sculpture. Beginning in 1930 at the height of the Depression, continuing through the Second World War, and running through the full length of the Cold War, only ending in 1995, the series reflected the concerns, manners, and mores of American society in miniature. Obliquely at times, more directly at others, its artists found remarkably varied ways to convey meaning in objects meant for the palm of the hand. The definitive book on both the Friends of the Medallion and the Society of Medalists is American Art Medals, 1909–1995, by David Thomason Alexander.

Paul Manship, Hail to Dionysus, 1930, Bronze, Society of Medalists Issue 2.

The issues quickly revealed how the Society of Medalists looked to exceed the accomplishments of the Friends of the Medallion, in particular through a range of patination. Sculpture is an art form in two dimensions as much as three. While almost all composed in bronze, the society’s medals employed a variety of surface treatments, which could range within a single design and across MACO’s reissues struck at its Danbury plant. At their best these surfaces accentuated the subjects of the compositions: the golden mist of Laura Gardin Fraser’s Hunter–Ruffed Grouse (SOM 1, 1930); the wine-dark red of Paul Manship’s Hail to Dionysus (SOM 2, 1930); the green rustication of Hermon MacNeil’s Hopi Prayer for Rain (SOM 3, 1931). In Aesop’s Fables, by Edmond Amateis (SOM 21, 1940), mirrorlike silver plating reflects the relief of a dog who loses his food while contemplating his own image. Frank Eliscu’s Sea Treasures (SOM 70, 1964) features a green patina and bowl-like design that appear to submerge its depiction of marine life and diver. The experimental nature of the series only expanded in its later years, in particular teasing out the relationship of the medals’ obverse and reverse. Just as the two figures of Robert Ingersoll Aitken’s Omnia Vincit Amor (SOM 15, 1937) appear to embrace through the surface of the medal, Cat and Mouse by Robert A. Weinman (SOM 115, 1987), the son of the Gilded Age sculptor and thirty-ninth society medalist, appear to chase each other around a block of Swiss cheese.

In an article of January 8, 1931, titled “God of Wine Stirs Medalists’ Society,” The New York Times noted how this “society was formed more than a year ago for the promotion of art by distributing small pieces of bas-relief sculpture, to make it possible for the man of small means to have works of art in his home.” Manship was then quoted in comment on the controversy he had caused by choosing Dionysus for his theme at the height of Prohibition: “The medal is not conventional. It is subtly humorous, and is symbolic of a present-day attitude toward certain restraints of the times. Thus it is commemorative of an era.”

Today, as I happily discovered, this Manship medal, as with most of the society’s issues, remains remarkably available for the work of one of the last century’s great sculptors. Turning one over in my hands, appreciating its triumphantly sly design, I could not help but feel like a medalist myself.