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Found Remnants / Sculptural Decorations
Genius of Creation
Illustrative of the controversies Karl Bitter and A. Sterling Calder — Chief, and Acting Chief of Sculpture respectively — must have encountered attempting to mollify the prickly egos of scores of sculptors and architects, French complained bitterly to the press that he’d been promised, “the place of honor” for his sculpture, and charged that, without first consulting him, it had been shunted off to a locale which didn’t permit viewing it “in the round”.
This slight, whether real or imagined, must have extremely rankled French because mention of his disappointment even found its way into the diary his seventeen year old daughter, Margaret, kept during the family’s April visit to the PPIE. She echoes her father’s complaint by writing, “Bacon’s Court of the Four Seasons is lovely with its round still pool and Beatrice Longman’s fountain. The Central Court of Honor, where Pa’s group of Creation was to have been placed is very imposing , with many statues, two enormous fountains and a perfect forest of rhododendrons in every color”.
Margaret was probably referring to the central Court of the Universe. If this location was ever actually promised to French, which seems highly unlikely given its design, Bitter and Calder are to be congratulated for their final decision. French’s The Genius of Creation, while a magnificent sculptural achievement, would have been lost in this environment. It’s a testament to their diplomacy that French’s complaint appears to have been the only one to have found its way into print.
The creator of the colossal Lincoln seated in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., and the Minute Man at Concord bridge, French purchased a summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in the 1920s. The 122 acre estate he named Chesterwood has been preserved in his memory as The Chesterwood Estate and Museum. On display in his old studio are six small sculptures generated during the process of creating The Genius of Creation including the final “maquette”. The full-scale head of “Adam” (the standing male figure) as well as the complete “Eve” (the standing female figure) which were once part of The Genius of Creation are on display there. It is not known what became of the rest of this exquisite work or how these fragments managed to be retrieved. To learn more about Chesterwood visit the website at http://www.chesterwood.org