Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

a heavier, more material medium than paint with a lighter, more transcendentlyluminous effect—perhaps once again expressing that paradoxicalAmerican combination of realism and idealism, matter and spirit.There was little nineteenth-century American sculpture that did notmerely imitate European work in a less effective way—with perhaps twoexceptions. The first was the small quantity of brilliantly eccentric work byWilliam Rimmer (1816–1879), a teacher of La Farge. His figures typicallyexpressed some kind of romantic agony or defeat and showed both a skillfulknowledge of anatomy and a powerful feeling for naturalistically modeledform that looked ahead to the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. The other,later sculptor of note was Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907). Althoughstrongly identified with the retrospective American Renaissance movementstylistically, Saint-Gaudens was able to rise above this context in a few of hisgreatest works, notably in the Admiral David Glasgow Farragut monumentof 1878–1881, the monument for Colonel Robert Shaw and his regiment ofblack soldiers (1884–1898), and the Adams Memorial funerary monument(1886–1891). The latter depicts in bronze a shrouded, brooding figure seatedon a rugged boulder, an image inspired by Buddhist statues and executedfor author Henry Adams with guidance from La Farge.Early Modern ArchitectureIn architecture, some of the first original American developments canbe perceived during the 1880s in the designs of Henry Hobson Richardson(1838–1886). His early work beginning in the 1870s was designed either inthe picturesque American “Shingle Style” (where a house’s walls are coveredwith wooden shingles) or in a particularly solid revival of the roundarchedRomanesque style. He drew freely on a variety of historical styles,reorganizing them between 1877 and 1887 in over sixty buildings that had atremendous influence on American architecture. By the mid-1880s probablyno sizable city in the United States did not have at least a few prominentbuildings imitating Richardson’s style.Richardson focused on the Romanesque style because it was direct,solid, and simple—characteristics that he thought reflected the Americanapproach to building construction. He emphasized the sense of weight andmassiveness in his buildings by the depth of the windows, the broad planesof the roofs, use of heavy, usually rough-surfaced masonry, and a generallargeness and simplicity of form. This rusticity was, in turn, ennobled andformalized by elements added from various design traditions. Eventuallyhis concentration on a clear relationship of solid to void, of wall to window,became a harmonious, abstract composing that hardly referred to any past113