Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon BorglumCasey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
General
Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon Borglum
Casey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
Borglum, Gutzon, 1867-1941
At Gutzon’s suggestion the president sent a telegram to Clarence Mackay
asking him if he would consider having the statue in Reno on the
university campus. Next morning the sculptor received a telegraphic
order to call on President Stubbs. A place for the memorial was located
at the upper end of the campus facing the sun. It was behind a
corrugated-iron shack which bore the label “School of Mines.”
In a short time the statue was dedicated with proper ceremonies and a
tremendous turnout of important people. Clarence Mackay, who brought his
friends from New York in a private car, didn’t like the School of Mines
structure as a background for his father. So he telegraphed architect
Stanford White in New York to come out and lay plans for a new one. The
result was a new building which cost, before Mackay equipped it,
$475,000. After that came a second and a third building which, with
Mackay’s endowments, cost somewhere over $1,500,000.
That, to all intents and purposes, was the beginning of a new life for
the University of Nevada. The statue that led to it cost, complete and
erected, $12,000.
And it led to other things, too. Clarence Mackay was obviously a
satisfied customer. He wrote to Sam Davis that he was so pleased that he
had tried to discharge some of his debt of gratitude by recommending the
sculptor to the sponsors of the Sheridan Memorial to be erected in
Washington. Gutzon was definitely gratified. His study of the Civil War
in preparing the model for the Grant competition had made him familiar
with its leaders. And he loved Sheridan’s saltiness, activity and
audacious courage.
He respected the general’s reputed ability to swear and his genius for
making his men understand tirades that must have sounded like
jabberwocky.
“A great general!” declared Borglum. “And unusual!”
Unfortunately, the United States government had already placed the
commission for this memorial and the field was now open to all because
the original artist had not yet produced a model satisfactory to the
committee. He had been at it thirteen years.
A second misfortune lay in the fact that this sculptor was J. Q. A.
Ward, president of the National Sculpture Society, who had failed to see
eye to eye with Gutzon on many subjects, chief of which was the
controversy over reorganizing the society. In spite of this he and
Gutzon had exchanged letters expressing sorrow that there had been any
bad feeling. The last thing Borglum wanted to do was to give further
offense to the distinguished leader of the New York sculptors ... but he
did make the memorial. Art was art, and he got it done on schedule.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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