Dragonfly Library Lamp ca. 1905. Leaded glass with bronze base. Designed by Clara Driscoll. (Courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.)
Tiffany is a name that’s synonymous with the enchanting and sublimely beautiful glassware of the Art Nouveau movement in the United States.
With a career spanning from the 1870s through the 1920s, Louis Comfort Tiffany embraced virtually every artistic medium: leaded-glass windows, mosaics, lamps, glass, pottery, jewelry, and furniture. Of all Tiffany’s artistic accomplishments, it was his innovation in leaded glass that brought him the most recognition. Tiffany was among the first U.S. designers to be acclaimed abroad. His techniques in glass and the union of his craft with American arts set him apart as the most innovative designer at the turn of the century.
“I have always striven to fix beauty in wood or stone or glass or pottery, in oil or watercolor, by using whatever seemed fittest for the expression of beauty.”
—Louis C. Tiffany
Louis C. Tiffany was the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the successful and influential silver and jewelry firm Tiffany & Co. In lieu of working for his father’s business, Louis C. Tiffany chose to pursue his own artistic interests. The young Tiffany began his career as a painter, working and studying under the tutelage of American landscape artist George Inness. Inness is reputed to have remarked of Tiffany: “The more I teach him the less he knows, and the older he grows the farther he is from what he ought to be.”
Electrolier, c. 1904. Black-eyed Susan design. Leaded glass. Photo by Raymond Martinot. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)
Tiffany’s fervor for the arts led him to France, where he studied with Léon Belly in Paris. It was Belly’s exhibition of Islamic genre scenes and landscapes that initially opened Tiffany’s eyes to a bright world of patterns and colors—which became Tiffany’s signature trademark for his leaded glass. In spring 1869, he met artist Samuel Colman, cofounder and first president of the American Watercolor Society. Colman taught Tiffany the value of watercolors for sketching, and together they traveled to Spain and North Africa in search of exotic subjects. Tiffany spent his time in North Africa collecting photographs, glassware, and objects that helped further formulate new ideas and theories about color.
“When first I had a chance to travel in the Near East and to paint where the people and the buildings are also clad in beautiful hues, the pre-eminence of color in the world was brought forcibly to my attention. I returned to New York wondering why we made so little use of our eyes, why we refrained so obstinately from taking advantage of color in our architecture and our clothing when Nature indicates its mastership.”
—Louis C. Tiffany
The Gilded Age
The term “Gilded Age” was coined by writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to represent the era of American opulence. The reconstruction of the United States following the Civil War was a time of unprecedented economic development. Manufacturing production boomed and railways grew across the United States, attracting millions of migrants to the nation. The economic wealth financed the growth of the luxury goods market, and wealthy art patrons sought extravagance as a way of displaying status. The Gilded Age set the stage for the rise of the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States.
Large Memorial window, Education commissioned by Simeon B. Chittenden was made for the window of new library at Yale University. The window, 30 feet long and 5 feet high, was installed in time for commencement week 1890.
The Arts and Crafts movement had already gained popularity in Victorian England during the second half of the 19th century. The return to traditional styles of artisan design was a direct revolt against the Industrial Revolution and what was felt to be the “soulless industrialization of craft.” British artist, designer, and philosopher William Morris led the movement and believed production by machinery to be “altogether evil.” He also advocated for the union of all arts within the field of interior design, emphasizing nature and simplicity of form. The theme of nature remained a powerful iconography throughout the Arts and Crafts movement—especially in the works of Tiffany and in the aesthetics of Art Nouveau.
A Wooded Landscape in Three Panels c. 1905. Leaded Glass. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.Transom, c. 1910–20. Wisteria Leaded glass. Tiffany Studios, New York City. (Photo by Raymond Martinot. Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)
In 1876, Tiffany was first exposed to the lure of the movement when he exhibited his paintings at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. It was then that he became attracted to the decorative arts and began to think about moving his artistry into the field of design, remarking to a fellow exhibitor: “I believe there is more in it than painting pictures.”
Tiffany embarked on a design career in 1879, opening the interior design firm Louis Comfort Tiffany and Associated American Artists, together with Candace Wheeler, Lockwood de Forest, and Colman. In the company’s four short years of existence, it fulfilled numerous interior design commissions, including contracts to design home interiors for wealthy clients such as writer Mark Twain, actor and inventor James Steele MacKaye, and President Chester Alan Arthur.
The Rise of Tiffany Glass
In the early 1870s, Tiffany’s passion for glass blossomed and he began experimenting with different techniques and materials. Between 1880 and 1881, Tiffany filed three patents for his glass-making process. One patent was for the creation of iridescent glass tesserae (small square tiles used in mosaics). Traditional mosaics were made with squares of uniform color. Tiffany’s innovations in glass-making technique, however, allowed for the creation of mosaics with shimmering tiles that were both iridescent and luminous.
Another patented technique utilized metallic oxides to create iridescent window glass. While Tiffany wasn’t the first to invent iridescent glass, he’s the most recognized for popularizing it on the market. Prior to 1880, iridescence in modern glassmaking was used in Venice, Italy, and earlier by Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster, who experimented with iridescent patina.
The third patent involved inducing opalescence by layering stained-glass panels. Tiffany and his early rival John La Farge, another prominent glassmaker, had both been granted similar opalescent glass patents by 1881. Opalescence revolutionized the look of stained glass, which had remained essentially unchanged since Medieval times. Early stained glasswork used flat panes of white and colored glasses, and details were painted atop with glass paints before firing. However, the paint reduced light transmission.
Tiffany sought to find natural ways to allow for gradations of depth, lines, and color—particularly in order to depict the tone and texture of human flesh without losing luminosity. The opalescent effect was so highly sought after because it enabled form to be defined by the glass itself, without paint.
Woman in a Pergola with Wisteria, ca. 1915. Leaded glass. (Courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.)
“By the aid of studies in chemistry and through years of experiments, I have found means to avoid the use of paints, etching, or burning, or otherwise treating the surface of the glass, so that now it is possible to produce figures in glass of which even the flesh tones are not superficially treated, but built up of what I call ‘genuine glass’ because there are no tricks of the glass-maker needed to express flesh.”
—Louis C. Tiffany
Tiffany’s newfound obsession with glass developed and proliferated after the Associated Artists disbanded in 1883. Tiffany continued as an interior designer for many years, but with a new focus on purely decorating, using glass and light. One of his most ambitious interiors was the Tiffany Chapel, exhibited in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition (the Chicago World’s Fair), which was notable for being the first world’s fair to feature electrical exhibitions. A total of 27 million visitors from all around the world came to enjoy the event.
View of the chapel interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)
Light filtered in through 12 leaded windows and a 1,000-pound cruciform-shaped chandelier covered in sparkling jewels and pieces of glass. Created in the Byzantine-Romanesque style, Tiffany Chapel also included 16 mosaic columns and a mosaic altar of marble and white glass. The chapel’s visual impact was undeniable, bringing Tiffany international recognition. It was reported from Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Gemäldegalerie (Painting Gallery) in Berlin, Germany, that the opalescent windows received more attention from visitors than any other industrial art project in the United States. Tiffany Chapel became a symbol of American ingenuity, which could rival and even surpass anything created abroad at the time.
Baptistery and Field of Lilies leaded-glass window from the Tiffany chapel interior at the Morse Museum. Photo by Raymond Martinot. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)Closeup of glass mosaic with Peacocks in Tiffany Chapel c. 1893. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)
Art for Beauty’s Sake
Tiffany’s aesthetics were based on the belief that the most beautiful and perfect design was present in the natural world and that world should therefore be the primary inspiration for art. He had an extensive horticultural library and a collection of plant photography that he commonly used for source material. His youngest daughter, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, recalled of her father: “He knew every plant and flower. … To watch the flowers grow from bud to full bloom was his greatest pleasure.”
The fascination with nature and extending the capabilities of glass to replicate the subtle shading and lush palettes found in flowers and plants led Tiffany to explore another technique—Favrile. The term is derived from the Old English word fabrile, meaning handmade. Favrile glass is different from other iridescent glasses because the color doesn’t sit solely on the surface; it’s actually embedded within the glass.
In 1893, Tiffany hired expert glassblowers, some of whom came from the not-long-defunct Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, and established his own glass furnaces in the neighborhood of Corona, in New York’s Queens borough. From there, large quantities of his Favrile blown-glass vases and bowls could be sent to museums worldwide. In 1896, Tiffany took his new products to market, holding the first public Favrile glass exhibition at his Fourth Avenue studio in New York.
Flower-Form Vase, ca. 1899–1900. Blown glass. (Courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.)
After 1900, the name Tiffany became associated with art glass, lamps, and decorative objects, more so than the formerly acclaimed stained-glass windows and mosaics. Among the items made at the time were desk sets, ash trays, enamel boxes, and jewelry. It was Tiffany’s passion that beautiful art and objects be made available to the widest audience of American homeowners. He set out to provide everyday items that he felt would enrich people’s lives with beauty and justified shifting the focus of art from public displays to household objects with the reasoning that items such as lamps, flower vases, and toilet accessories reach wider audiences than a painting might. Tiffany looked to artisans as “educators of people in the truest sense” and as masters of art appealing to emotion and the senses, thus “rousing enthusiasm for beauty in one’s environment.”
Necklace, c. 1903–6. Exhibited at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français, Paris, 1905 or 1906. Peacock and flamingo. Enamel, opal, amethyst, ruby, sapphire, demantoid garnet, emerald, chrysoberyl, pearl, gold. (Photo by Raymond)
He consistently held to a traditional criterion of beauty similar to that of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke in his treatise “On the Sublime and Beautiful,” positing that man’s concepts of beauty arise from the passion of love, the senses, the calming of nerves, and the divine providence of God. An article written by Tiffany for Country Life in America titled, “The Gospel of Good Taste” publicly shares his aesthetic views, hoping to educate and inspire a surge of beautiful art in America: “It is all a matter of education, and we shall never have good art in our homes until the people learn to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly. … We should study classic art, and learn that the simplest things are the best.”
A Dream Realized
The unification of the arts and the culmination of Tiffany’s artistic and aesthetic endeavors were embodied by the final house he designed in its entirety—his own estate. Laurelton Hall was erected in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1905. The 84-room property sat on 580 acres of land, 60 acres of which were devoted to the design of picturesque gardens and woodlands containing ponds, tennis courts, and a bathing beach.
View of Laurelton Hall. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)Living Room at Laurelton Hall. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)
The estate housed his collection of unique art gathered from around the world, as well as numerous relics designed by Tiffany Studios: furniture, lamps, windows, vases, and more. The architecture, both interior and exterior, was ornamented with glass mosaics and carved wood, inspired by art and designs from Asia and the Middle East.
Dining room from Laurelton Hall, c. 1925. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)
The décor included wisteria-bordered long glass panels that lit up the dining room. In a sheltered alcove of the living room, Tiffany displayed several of his stained-glass windows, including “The Four Seasons,” which he cut into separate panels—the window had previously been awarded a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition and inspired the French government to appoint Tiffany a Chevalier (Knight) of the Legion of Honour.
“God has given us our talents, not to copy the talents of others, but rather to use our brains and our imagination in order to obtain the revelation of True Beauty.”
—Louis C. Tiffany
Spring panel from Four Seasons window, c. 1899–1900. Exhibited: Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900. Leaded glass. Photo by Raymond Martinot. (Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park, Florida)
Tiffany wanted to create a school of rational art (as he referred to it), where students would be shown specimens of good artwork collected from various periods and countries, fostering education in the simple, true, and beautiful. His plan for a special “museum school” was denied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but reimagined through the transformation of his own estate, Laurelton Hall, into an artists’ retreat. In 1918, a gift of 62 acres (with several structures included) was granted to the newly established Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. The stables were converted into dormitories and the gatehouse into an art gallery to accommodate students eager to learn the aesthetics of Tiffany’s doctrine of beauty.
Capital, c. 1915 Daffodil Terrace, Laurelton Hall, Long Island, New York. Cast and cut glass, concrete Tiffany Studios, New York City. (Photography by Joseph Coscia Jr. Courtesy of The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, Winter Park)
Tiffany’s Legacy
Tiffany’s work and ethics resolved the conflicting ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, making an assorted range of products available to consumers of every economic level. While Arts and Crafts influencer Morris once said, “What business have we with art at all unless all can share it,” in reality, most companies couldn’t produce high-quality art at affordable prices. Tiffany, however, successfully created an art industry for all classes of people, in part because his personal wealth allowed him to sacrifice profits in the interest of advancing his artistic philosophy.
With the modernization of the United States, Tiffany’s art had fallen out of favor by the 1920s. However, after several decades of neglect the Art Nouveau movement was revived through interior design, publications, and museum exhibitions—a common aphorism is that we often scoff the arts of our parents and revive those of our grandparents. Since the turn of the century, the United States has seen the design of public buildings enhanced by ornamentation and mosaics, and many artists have begun to work in glass—glassblowing, as an art form, is more appreciated now than ever before.
Tiffany’s legacy lives on through the careful preservation of relics obtained and collected after his death in 1933. Following a fire that ravaged the abandoned Laurelton Hall in 1957, Hugh F. McKean, former artist in residence at Laurelton Hall, and wife Jeannette Genius McKean, founder of the Morse Museum, purchased what they could of the intact remains. Today, the Morse Museum’s collection of Laurelton Hall relics is the largest single collection of surviving materials from Tiffany’s turn-of-the-century estate and will likely remain a visual masterpiece of influence and inspiration for generations of artists to come.
U.S. troops and Filipino guerrillas pinned down by enemy in Bamban during World War II, Luzon Island, Philippines, circa 1943. (U.S. Army Signal Corps/Getty Images)
The United States suffered its biggest defeat of World War II in the Philippines. More American soldiers were captured there than in any other campaign in U.S. military history. The number of Filipino soldiers who surrendered dwarfed the U.S. totals. Despite that, after the surrender of U.S. forces, the war in the Philippines continued in a guerilla struggle.
“War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942–1944,” by James Kelly Morningstar, documents that struggle. It is the first generally accessible attempt to compile the guerilla struggle in the Philippines into a single, coherent story.
Morningstar starts by describing the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and the conventional struggle that followed. He shows the difficulties faced by Allied forces in the Philippines, both U.S. and Filipino. He captures the tensions between the U.S. and Philippine governments. The Philippines were a reluctant colony of the United States but on a path to independence when Japan invaded. The nascent Philippine Army was still forming and unprepared. U.S. forces were underequipped, despite major commitments of aircraft.
Surprisingly, no preparations for guerrilla warfare were made before Allied conventional military forces collapsed. Morningstar shows how Washington exacerbated the collapse of conventional resistance. The resistance springing up after U.S. forces surrendered was spontaneous, a reaction to thuggish Japanese behavior and cruelty. In other cases, Morningstar shows that it was the result of soldiers, American and Filipino, refusing to surrender while still capable of fighting, or exploiting Japan’s inability to occupy all of the Philippines.
Morningstar traces how these disconnected movements began communicating with each other, fought each other, and eventually began merging into a coherent movement. Simply establishing communications with General Douglas MacArthur (then the supreme commander, Southwest Pacific Area) in Australia took months, and over a year passed before any supplies began flowing to the Philippine resistance.
Morningstar shows how the resistance denied Japan many of the resources the Philippines could have supplied. Its most important contribution was giving MacArthur the leverage needed to force Allied landings in the Philippines rather than Formosa.
The story was difficult to capture. The opening of the guerrilla war was chaotic and disorganized. Some guerrilla bands may have been snuffed out before having their actions recorded. Documentation was secondary to survival. Regardless, Morningstar does a good job. He manages to place the chaos into a larger picture, accurately capturing the outline of the struggle and its consequences. “War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942–1944” offers fascinating reading about a difficult and dirty battle.
“War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942–1944,” by James Kelly Morningstar, Naval Institute Press, 2021.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, Texas. His website is MarkLardas.com
Guests look at a Magna Carta replica inside the the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 29, 2015 (Molly Riley/Getty Images)
The crypt of the U.S. Capitol isn’t the dark, dank dwelling conjured up by its evocative moniker. On the contrary, the crypt is a well-lit circular chamber on the ground floor, under the rotunda, traversed by countless people every day, hurrying on their way—blinders on—to a hearing or meeting of reputed import. George Washington was supposed to be interred here—hence the name of the burial place—but his body never made it. Construction of the crypt was interrupted by the War of 1812. His family decided to honor his wish to be buried at his Mt. Vernon, Virginia, home, just a few miles away from the Capitol.
Magna Carta
Tucked away in the crypt—hidden in plain sight—is a replica of the Magna Carta, the 800-year-old document reining in the monarch. On tours, I make a point of directing my visitors’ attention to this transformational declaration; otherwise, they might miss it, given all the magnificent distractions surrounding it—forty neoclassical columns, and thirteen statues of prominent Americans of the original thirteen colonies.
In all the times I’ve entered the crypt—and it’s been plenty—I’ve never seen people clustered around the gold and glass case containing this most essential document, the greatest relic in the room.
The history of the Magna Carta predates our nation’s founding by more than five hundred fifty years, which might explain how it sometimes escapes people’s attention today. King John of England signed the Magna Carta on June 15 of 1215, after a severe clash with his barons, who had become frustrated with the monarch’s arbitrary rule and abuses of power. The noblemen set out to craft a document to rein in the king’s powers. The document they formulated prohibited arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and established individuals’ right to a fair trial and the protection of private property. Those rights are foundational to the rule of law, and essential for limiting the powers of government.
The Magna Carta—Latin for “the Great Charter”—provided the key principles of the supremacy of the rule of law that formed the foundation of our Constitution. In this respect, it is symbolic that the Magna Carta replica lies in the crypt—the literal foundation—of the Capitol, erected to support the rotunda above it. The document’s most important principle— that no man is above the law, not even the king—is the foundation for American rule of law, and the base upon which we have built our system of government.
If those basic rights recognized in the Magna Carta sound familiar, it’s for good reason. America’s founders drew heavily from the ideas in the Magna Carta to write the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The Compass Star
Only a few feet away from the Magna Carta is a worn white marble stone compass star embedded in the center of the floor of the crypt. While it may seem, at first glance, the two features of the Capitol are unrelated, they each reinforce the primacy of the rule of law and the importance of the legislative body.
That compass star is the point in Washington, D.C. where all four quadrants of the district—northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest—converge. If you place your foot on the compass, as I have from time to time to demonstrate for my visitors, you are standing in all four quadrants of the city simultaneously. When I take tourists to this spot, the following ritual tends to take place: They stand on the star, which droops below floor level, smoothed down with the passage of time. Then they hop off the star, pull out their smartphones, and take photos of what is, admittedly, a cool symbol. But it holds even greater significance. The compass star is the key to understanding the vital role the legislature plays in our republic.
L’Enfant
We must first revisit Pierre-Charles L’Enfant. After he wrote to President George Washington, offering to create a capital “magnificent enough to grace a great nation,” he got the gig in 1791. Influenced by the France of his youth, L’Enfant borrowed ideas from the grand sweep of the Versailles palace, conjuring up what are now distinct D.C. features, such as its broad avenues, designed on a slashing angle. The cheerful L’Enfant sought another epic brush stroke, designing a considerable park in front of the White House, for the benefit of the president, whoever happened to be in residence. But Thomas Jefferson put the kibosh on those plans out of a worry such an exclusive domain didn’t mesh with the nascent nation of the people. Hence, the space became a public gathering spot you might have heard of—Lafayette Park.
L’Enfant, though, got his way on a more vital part of his plan, to make the Capitol the central point of the new capital district. The Capitol was created to be the central focus of the new government, a building perched on a slight hill, elevated above the rest of the city. That hill was known in our nation’s earlier years as “Jenkins Hill,” because a man named Thomas Jenkins apparently once grazed livestock at the site. L’Enfant saw it in a more enchanted way, as “a pedestal waiting for a monument.” That pedestal has come to be known as Capitol Hill, today.
The location of the Capitol building speaks volumes about the role our founders intended the legislative branch to play—and the paramount role of the rule of law. Because the Capitol is located on a hill, on one of the highest points in Washington, D.C., it reminds all of us that the legislative branch—the part of the federal government most accountable to the people—is the most important branch of government.
Excerpted from the 2020 book “Capital of Freedom, Restoring American Greatness” by Colorado Rep. Ken Buck
Walking six blocks to work each morning gives Charles Marohn a unique insight into the vitality of his town, and into his own well-being. Aware of the benefits of exercise in his life, he quickly draws an analogy between personal discipline and the discipline that makes for a strong town. Wisdom literature often draws a comparison when it calls the human body one’s temple or place of habitation, cautioning us to make good choices in the care thereof. Marohn sees the same discipline necessary for personal health as being necessary for our communities—the shared places of our habitation. In a recent conversation, we talked a bit about his faith. He’s a practicing Catholic who values the discipline of self-denial. “Fasting is an intentional deprivation that actually makes your body work better—a lot like exercise,” he said.
As the founder of Strong Towns, Marohn is on a mission to help communities of all sizes gain the discipline that will give them the strength and resiliency to not only survive challenges but also to use them as catalysts to grow and prosper. Surveying his town as he walks, Marohn sees the human struggle as well as the opportunities. Little things—the trees planted, the fresh paint, a hand-painted crosswalk, the cleaned-up empty lot; these are the signs of a healthy community. Thousands of individuals, each of them adding a small piece to the fabric of the whole, together cause a community to grow and prosper.
And Marohn has been forced to search for these components that make communities strong. He grew up on a small farm in Baxter, Minnesota, studied civil engineering at the University of Minnesota, and received a master’s degree in planning. “An engineer sees everything in equations,” he says. Working for the small town of Remer, Minnesota, Marohn set out to obtain funding for a small sewer system repair. Government agencies couldn’t be bothered with his small grant request, so Marohn got creative, turning a $300,000 repair into a $2.5-million sewer expansion project. He was a hero—or was he? Even with grants and sweet loan deals, the project actually failed to generate enough revenue to cover repaying the loans. So Marohn began to see the bigger picture.
His latest book, “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer,” is scheduled for release in the fall of 2021. In it, he questions the planning and procurement mentality that favors building bigger instead of using a more organic and locally empowered process. His critics love to call him “anti-growth” or “anti-suburbs,” but in really dialoguing with him, one finds a man with a truly positive vision for the places of our habitation—and he’s a visionary with a keen sense of history.
History and Planning
Marohn’s hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, began as a collection of hastily constructed wooden buildings along a simple main street. Following a pattern they had seen before, they used local lumber, milled and planed, to develop a street—Front Street. “This is how every city in human history up to this point had begun: a series of pop-up shacks, some hopes, and some dreams. The great cities of North America—San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, and Manhattan—all began in this way. London, Paris, Milan, and the cities of Europe, likewise. Even ancient cities, where urban DNA was in a more infantile phase—places like Alexandria, Thebes, Beirut, and Damascus—were founded in this same manner.” Was it a smooth process? Not exactly, as there was chaos and failure along the way, too. But as the town grew, the mistakes could give way to other uses.
A town would grow incrementally and organically, evolving slowly as its inhabitants continually sought to meet their needs and express their dreams. Its fine school, its Beaux-Arts courthouse, and the presence they both conveyed—none of these came first; rather, they emerged gradually as the process unfolded. They were more often than not a second or third version of the same edifice—often on the very same spot. This process of gradual renewal served us well, and we tend to forget that it came to us, sometimes quite literally, through the fire. Some of our great cities burned to the ground, and lessons learned in disaster informed the rebuilding.
Marohn’s bookshelf at his office based in his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. (Jen Kalenberg)
However, sometime during the early to mid-20th century, this natural evolution of towns changed. After the Great Depression and World War II, we felt that we could do a better job by controlling the process from the top down. The United States had emerged from that great conflict relatively unscathed, and we found new prosperity that would allow us to build our environment on a grand scale. Old neighborhoods that had evolved over the years, often home to ethnic communities nurturing their unique cultures, suddenly stood in the way of progress. Flattened to make way for highway interchanges or housing projects, mid-20th-century planners went large when building upon their ruins—and they built their projects all at once.
Whereas entropy and renewal were constant in the old community fabric, a project’s new structures would initially be shiny and pristine, but in no way immune to decay. Also, because they were all constructed at the same time, they would later begin to break down together—and there would be no gradual renewal, only the endless demands of maintenance as they aged. The battle then became an ever-increasing effort to counter the wholesale deterioration of the project. Additionally, novelty and public funding had led cities to underestimate the true cost of maintenance. With abundant sources for project funding, old buildings were left to decay while their occupants simply moved into newer versions across town.
“This idea that there should be some kind of overarching plan that lays it all together gives us a certain degree of comfort—that is really false comfort,” Marohn says. “The postwar development pattern has really forced us into a Sisyphus kind of relationship with the world. Our only struggle now is to resist decline—not to improve, make better, evolve, reach higher states of being and greatness, but to just simply resist the rock falling back down the hill.
“Instead, you need to respect the organic nature of it, the idea that cities do need to evolve and adapt and change and be reborn—cities and neighborhoods need to reinvent themselves regularly. You need to add the capacity to respond to stress and opportunity. If you don’t embrace that, then wherever you are today is the high water mark for everything in the future—and the question is then, ‘How long can you keep from decline?’ Can you put it off for one generation or two generations—10 or 50 years?”
A Change for the Better
“If you look at the way we build places now, the vast majority of them are abandoned, not rejuvenated. Credentialism has led to a lack of experimentation—that stifles innovation,” Marohn says. “The innovator will not necessarily be the smartest person in the room; rather, it will be the result of 1,000 experiments going on simultaneously. Today, we see inventiveness as the realm of people like Elon Musk. And so it goes: The expert will lay out a solution, it will be built, and when it fails to deliver, we’ll do a charrette—we’ll bring in the people and listen to them—and then the expert will pronounce the solution. Jane Jacobs, with no planning experience, saw the value of places like Greenwich Village, and ultimately inspired their renewal. … It is time for a new generation of her ilk to rise up and begin the renewal of their communities from the bottom up. In the end, it really isn’t about new urbanism or suburbs versus city, but a vision for a healthy community—one that lives within its means and allows for its members to contribute to its vitality—much like any healthy family. This is about people more than projects.”
Marohn on his usual route to the Strong Towns office. (Jen Kalenberg)
An example of where this is happening today is the Broad Avenue neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. Broad Avenue was a wasteland of vacant stores and had become a place to simply “drive through.” Then an army of local citizens equipped with brooms, brushes, and cheap hardware-store paint started a revolution. The citizens painted in crosswalks and bicycle lanes, and earnestly worked to make the streets as clean and inviting as their limited resources would allow. They invited merchants into the vacant stores—and the merchants came. When Memphis city officials realized what was happening (with no permits having been requested), did they step in and shut it down? Marohn points out that they did quite the opposite: “In many cases, where it was appropriate, they came in and replaced the hardware store paint with permanent crosswalks and bicycle lanes. They followed the template laid down by the citizens in most cases. Then they looked at the fact that the area had almost 100 percent occupancy of the commercial spaces, and used it as a model for surrounding streets and communities.”
In his work with Strong Towns, Marohn strives to empower many such communities. While the media shows us the decline of Detroit, he can point to neighborhoods where local initiatives are keeping people in their homes—keeping neighborhoods alive. After the difficulties of the pandemic, Marohn sees real lessons to be learned from citizens joining together to revitalize their communities. Psychologists have similarly documented that Americans were actually happier during the Great Depression of the 1930s; as they worked together to overcome all sorts of real obstacles, they experienced real and lasting personal satisfaction. Hopefully, our communities have emerged from the isolation of the past year with renewed respect for our shared places of human habitation. Most importantly, we should move forward as shapers—not merely consumers—of these places, gaining the deep satisfaction that comes from doing so.
Bob Kirchman is an architectural illustrator who lives in Augusta County, Virginia, with his wife, Pam. He teaches studio art (with a good deal of art history thrown in) to students in the Augusta Christian Educators Homeschool Coop. Kirchman is an avid hiker and loves exploring the hidden wonders of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Johanna Schwaiger met Celine Ma, an instructor of classical Chinese dance, who became her model for a sculpture. (Lux Aeterna Photography)
Growing up in Salzburg, Austria, Johanna Schwaiger was constantly surrounded by beautiful art—from the city’s Baroque architecture to majestic fountains and public gardens. “I always thought the masters of these works were of a distant past, … had magical skills, and I thought if I could only learn a little bit of what they knew, I would be so happy,” she said.
Her father, an art teacher, taught her basic drawing and sculpting techniques. Working in clay gave her true joy. “It became my world to retreat to, whenever I felt I needed to escape somewhere, like Alice entering her wonderland,” she said. Today, Schwaiger has not only achieved her childhood dream of becoming a sculptor but also seeks to inspire the next generation of artists to create the kind of art that so moved her.
She came to the United States in 2017 to work with New Masters Academy, a subscription-based online tutorial platform for people to learn fine arts techniques. To begin with, she was invited to teach a sculpture tutorial on video. Today, she is the academy’s program director. Similar to Netflix, people can stream videos of creative artists teaching their crafts from around the world. Even top art schools and entertainment studios, including the Walt Disney Animation Studios, Ringling College of Art and Design, and the National Sculpture Society, have signed up for courses.
A Journey
It would take some time before Schwaiger could fulfill her passion for arts education. At age 15, she enrolled in a local school for sculptors. But while the school taught wood and stone carving, she wanted to learn traditional figurative sculpture, like that of the Renaissance masters, together with training in ink drawing, clay sculpting, and bronze casting. After graduating from high school, Schwaiger searched ateliers and schools in Salzburg, Vienna, and other nearby European cities, but none taught these techniques.
Some in the arts world told Schwaiger that realism had become a thing of the past, so she decided to train herself by studying the works of old masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Schwaiger also majored in art history at the University of Salzburg, and soon picked up commissions to paint portraits and sculpt figures for churches and graveyards, but she still felt a need for more schooling. At age 26, she discovered that the Florence Academy of Art in Italy taught the traditional curriculum. After completing her training there, she returned to her high school alma mater and began teaching a course in traditional figurative art.
Schwaiger was inspired by the grace and strength exhibited by artists of classical Chinese dance. (Lux Aeterna Photography)
Schwaiger has since made it her mission to continue the lineage of the classical art tradition, through New Masters Academy, education initiatives, and her private art studio. “I try to inspire the younger generation to hone their craft and really focus on the craft as much as possible—and make them understand that if you get strong in your craft, that’s how you become free in your expression,” she said in a recent interview held at Fei Tian College in Middletown, New York, where she taught a four-week summer sculpting class.
Now 38, Schwaiger taught her Fei Tian College students human anatomy and how to draw from a live model. To her, it’s about respecting the process pioneered by the great classical artists of the Western tradition. “You need to honor the past, what the ancestors learned and what they brought out. It’s basically taking the torch and bringing the torch further. That’s what I believe in,” said Schwaiger.
Inspired by the East
In her latest project, Schwaiger took inspiration from a different culture. Several years ago, she and her husband attended a performance by Shen Yun Performing Arts, the world’s premier classical Chinese dance company. Based in New York, the company seeks to revive the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization through dance and music. Classical Chinese dance, in particular, has a lineage tracing back to imperial courts and ancient plays. Schwaiger was touched not only by the storytelling but also by the technical prowess of the dancers. “I could see that this is the kind of excellence … that artists in the past were aiming for. And it’s really moving people’s hearts with beauty, and with excellent techniques,” she said.
Schwaiger thought of capturing through sculpture the grace and strength of the dancers she saw on stage. “What amazed me so much was the variety of dance poses that the dancers can do in sync, and so the whole choreography seems to be a language that is told on stage,” she said.
Through a mutual artist friend, Schwaiger recently met Celine Ma, a 22-year-old instructor of classical Chinese dance at Northern Academy of the Arts, a private middle and high school in Middletown, New York. Together, they thought of possible poses that the figure could take on, with Ma occasionally modeling the movements. At first, Schwaiger found it challenging to translate dance, a moving art form, into the still form of sculpture—especially conveying the light, airy movements of classical Chinese dancers. “It’s a moment in time that you’re capturing, and so the pose I picked is not a resting pose. It’s more like she’s like a flower blossoming into her pose,” said Schwaiger.
The Sculpture
One of the dancer’s legs is grounded, but the rest of her body is twisted toward the viewer. Meanwhile, her extended arm is gesturing toward the sky. “I was trying to think of how plants grow. That helped me to bring that grace into the piece … like how a flower opens its petals. That’s the image I tried to keep in mind as I was sculpting this,” said Schwaiger.
Schwaiger said that she envisioned a flower blossoming while making the sculpture. (Lux Aeterna Photography)
Ma said of the hand gesture: “It’s reaching high, like giving people hope and aiming for something brighter and higher.” She was not only impressed by Schwaiger’s dedication to artistry but also thrilled to see classical Chinese dance represented in another art form. “Dancers in the past—we don’t have a lot of documented footage, and a lot of techniques are lost because there’s no way that someone is passing [them] down through thousands of years,” Ma said, noting that it was thrilling to see “a sculpture that can be everlasting.”
Through working on the sculpture project, Ma also gained a newfound understanding of how Western and Eastern arts can complement each other. And through discussing the posture of the sculpture, she became more aware of the muscles she was using while dancing, and “the beauty of the human form.”
The Role of Art in Society
Ma trained in classical Chinese dance for seven years, learning the inner meanings behind the art form. She said that the training helped her to embody values that were appreciated in ancient Chinese culture, such as self-discipline, being willing to endure hardships, and having an optimistic outlook. To master the art form, “you really have to build these values within you, and it’s something that comes with your heart,” said Ma.
Schwaiger similarly believes that artists must cultivate good values in order to create something beautiful. “The artist very much has to immerse themself with the idea of beauty to communicate it to somebody else. And if the artist is thinking of the audience, wanting the audience to connect with that beauty, the person who is looking at the art is going to feel that. So that’s why I think art has such importance for society,” she said.
She also firmly believes that art has the power to elevate people. “If you’re looking at graceful things, powerful things, it’s naturally helping you to connect with these virtues. … It’s reminding people of these qualities that you should have in yourself,” she said. That’s why she hopes to one day create public art that can inspire through beauty—whether it’s sculpture in schools, hospitals, or public squares.
Schwaiger plans to cast her dancer sculpture in bronze next, using an ancient technique known as lost-wax casting, and she hopes the sculpture can be placed in a public setting one day. With art beautifying its surrounding environment, “you like to spend time there, you’d like to sit down and be there together with others, and you feel the other people that are present—and that’s very essential for our civilization,” she said.
"A Country Home" by Henry Shapleigh, Arlington, Mass., 1866. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Amelia Peabody.
Historic New England is the largest regional heritage organization in America today. Founded in 1910, it was the earliest organization of its type with a focus on the preservation and continued use of properties of historic significance. Historic New England aims to educate the public on their archives and collections and engage in public outreach by establishing house museums—working with homeowners and communities to protect buildings and landscapes.
With a collection of over a million records of photographs, homes, paintings, objects, sculptures, and documents, Historic New England has been able to tell the most complete story of how New Englanders lived from the 17th century to today. There are over 6,500 works of fine art housed across the New England states. Recognizing the importance of their collection, and to engage with the public, “Artful Stories” has brought together works from ten different house museums as well as a number of works from Historic New England’s storage.
The exhibition is held at the historic Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts—a jewel of late-19th-century American architecture built in 1878. The estate was designed by William Ralph Emerson, prominent American architect and cousin of transcendentalist American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Not only was Emerson of the eponymous family, he was a close friend of leading Boston painter William Morris Hunt, and he collaborated with American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. It was a time of cultural renaissance in America, when bronze foundries produced full-scale works on American soil for the first time, and the cities were filling with Neoclassical architecture.
Eustis Estate, Milton, Mass. Public Domain.
Curated by Nancy Carlisle (Historic New England’s Senior Curator of Collections) and Peter Trippi (European art historian and editor-in-chief at Fine Art Connoisseur), “Artful Stories” explores regional stories told through art. Rather than simply showcasing Historic New England’s best paintings and sculptures, the curators selectively chose artists, portraits, and settings to give the artwork and theme a larger sense of context. As Carlisle noted, the experience of curating a show like this reveals new information every time you scratch at the surface of history.
The exhibition was well planned, but just as society had to contend with the pandemic lockdowns, so did “Artful Stories.” They quickly pivoted to online programming and immersive 360-degree videos. Karla Rosenstein, the site manager of the Eustis Estate, shared that “from the beginning, we had planned to utilize the interactive touchscreens to add extra multimedia materials to ‘Artful Stories,’ so we luckily had already been developing some online content for the exhibition.” As it became clear that they would not be able to open up as scheduled, they wanted to provide an online preview that was a full version of the exhibition. “While working from home, we created a far more robust version than we had initially planned” added Rosenstein.
“Homeward Bound” by John George Brown, New York, 1878. Oil on canvas. Gift of Ralph May.
The curators chose to present the works in a variety of themes across four galleries. The first gallery, “Land & Sea,” is a survey of the historical geography of New England. The second gallery, “At Home in New England,” showcases how and why the people of New England came to settle there, while the third gallery, “New England’s People,” reveals the cast of characters involved. The fourth gallery, “Wide World,” is about how the New Englanders interacted with people and places outside their region.
Unlike other exhibitions that would source works from outside their collection, Rosenstein noted, “it was very fortunate that this show was entirely from Historic New England’s collection as we did not need to negotiate date changes with other institutions.” The gallery was open to in-person visits in October 2020 and welcomed small groups of visitors to enjoy the exhibit. “We had a good number of members eager to attend it and get back into our museums,” added Rosenstein. “We also found ways to pivot our planned programming online and hosted a series of conversations between the curators and scholars, artists, and other curators that was attended by far more people than we would have expected in person.”
The show is full of interesting distinctions—a striking, perfect copy of Vigée LeBrun’s self portrait was a surprise for Carlisle. “The copy of Vigée’s portrait was by Elizabeth Adams, an artist about whom we knew nothing. During our research, we discovered who she was and the lengths she went to receive professional training.”
Copy of “Self-Portrait of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun” by Elizabeth Adams, Florence, Italy, 1865–74. Oil on canvas. Gift of the artist’s nephew, Boylston Adams Beal.
As our collective American [MISSING NOUN] shifted so much throughout 2020, this allowed the curators to examine some of the asymmetries of the past, confronting the history of race and social class through the lens of today. Two such landscape paintings are hung in the first gallery, “Land & Sea.” One painting is a tight, Hudson-River-School-influenced panorama by the son of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, while the other is a pure Barbizon, Romantic landscape by an African-American barber who had to strive for his training as a painter. On these two paintings, Peter Trippi noted “the contrast between the landscapes painted by Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow and his neighbor (on the wall), Edward Mitchell Bannister—what different life journeys they had, but they both ended up being talented painters flourishing in New England at the same time!” Truly, one of the most important aspects of representational painting is its ability to transcend setting and social class and rely on truth, skill, and beauty.
Left: “View of Boston Across the Flats” by Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, Boston, 1876. Oil on canvas. Gift of D. Codman. Right: “Woman Reading Under a Tree” by Edward Mitchell Bannister, probably R.I., 1880–85. Oil on canvas.
Throughout the show, there are a number of thoughtful arrangements and connections made that came to light through their research. In gallery four, “Wide World,” there is a wall which showcases not only the talent and skill of the artists, but the ingenuity and distinction of the American art patrons during the late 19th century. One is a portrait painting of Richard Norton by Italian artist Antonio Mancini. Hanging next to it is Edward Burne-Jones’ portrait of Sara Norton, Richard’s sister. These two paintings couldn’t be more stylistically distinct; Edward Burne-Jones was a Pre-Raphaelite, a classicist in the truest sense of the word, and Mancini an innovator, regarded by American artist John Singer Sargent as the greatest living painter of the time.
Left: “Richard Norton” by Antonio Mancini, Rome, c. 1905. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Susan Norton, the sitter’s daughter. Right: “Sara Norton” by Edward Burne-Jones, London, 1884. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Susan Norton, the sitter’s niece.
The simple fact that these two now hang side-by-side in contrast to each other displays the power of patronage—allowing the artists to fully express their vision of the subject, rather than attempting to impose their own aesthetics onto their likeness. This is further driven home by their accompanying painting on the wall, “St. Servan Harbor” by Edward Darley Boit. Best remembered as the patron who commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint his four daughters (housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), Boit was also an accomplished painter in his own right.
“St. Servan Harbor” by Edward Darley Boit, Dinard, Brittany, France, 1882. Oil on canvas. Gift of Dorothy S. F. M. Codman.
Throughout the exhibition, there are multimedia opportunities to learn more about the various artists and subjects. For those residing outside of New England, the website offers one of the most complete possible viewing experiences online. “Artful Stories” is both a truthful retelling of the Northeast’s history and an important chapter in cultural preservation, which Historic New England continues to champion. The exhibit has been extended until October 17th, 2021.
Chief of Johnson Space Center's flight control division M. P. Frank (1930–2005) and flight controllers (from foreground to background) including S. David Griggs (1939–1989), Robert L. Stewart, Carolyn L. Conley, and Eugene F. Kranz coordinating Space Shuttle mission STS-4 from the mission control center at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, June 27, 1982. (Space Frontiers/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The space shuttle carried 2 to 8 people into space when it flew. Most of us don’t realize that a shuttle mission required a crew as large as that of a modern U.S. Navy cruiser. More than 300 flight controllers at Johnson Space Center in Houston “flew” the mission from 20 stations in the Mission Control Building.
“Shuttle Mission Control: Flight Controller Stories and Photos, 1981–1992,” by Marianne J. Dyson, tells the story of those people and the Flight Control Room (FCR) at the heart of Mission Control.
The FCR was what the public thought of as Mission Control, the room televised during shuttle missions. It can be thought of as the ship’s bridge for shuttle missions. Dyson describes the FCR, its history, its layout, its role within Johnson Space Center, and how it worked.
The book’s real focus is the people running shuttle missions during the shuttle program’s early years. Dyson spends a chapter on each Mission Control station, describing what that station did, telling who the people at each station were and how they supported missions.
She starts with “the Trench,” at the front of the FCR. The bottom row of consoles, the Trench handled critical shuttle engineering activities: propulsion (fuel supply), data processing, guidance and rendezvous, trajectory and flight dynamics, and ground controller.
During Mission 51F (in July 1985), one of the shuttle’s three main engines shut down. A second was reported overheating. Dyson shows Flight Dynamics Officer Brian Perry, assisted by Jenny Howard at the booster console, making a split-second decision to press on, disregarding an errant temperature sensor—and their action saved the mission.
Author Marianne Dyson and her husband Thornton Dyson on the cover of the ebook for “Shuttle Mission Control: Flight Controller Stories and Photos, 1981–1992.” (Courtesy Marianne Dyson)
Dyson continues up the rows showing how the remaining stations played important roles, if not normally as time critical as Trench positions. They ranged from payloads to the flight director. Some are well known, such as the flight director, who “captains” the mission, and CAPCOM (capsule communicator), who talks to the orbiter crew.
Others, such as MMACS (mechanical, maintenance, arm and crew systems), are obscure but critical. MMACS such as Paul Dye were shuttle handymen, dealing with numerous mechanical glitches. Dye scrubbed one mission with five minutes to launch when a system threatened to fail. A tough call, but it proved correct.
Dyson, an award-winning author, was there. She was a flight activities officer; her husband, Thornton E. Dyson, was a guidance officer. Both were in the FCR on the shuttle’s first flight. “Shuttle Mission Control” is an intimate look at a remarkable team.
“Shuttle Mission Control: Flight Controller Stories and Photos, 1981–1992,” by Marianne J. Dyson, self-published by Marianne Dyson, 2021.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, Texas. He is a former Shuttle navigator. His website is marklardas.com.
A vehicle passes through a tollbooth somewhere... (William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)
Norton Juster died in March 2021. He was an architect, as well as an author in his spare time. Despite an impressive career as an architect, he is best known as an author.
“The Phantom Tollbooth” was Juster’s best-known book. It appeared in 1961 and has been in print ever since.
Milo, a child, never knew what to do with himself. Nothing interested him. For Milo, everything seemed a waste of time. One day he comes home to find a surprise package. It contains a tollbooth kit, a map to the Lands Beyond, and coins for the trip.
Milo, with nothing better to do, builds the tollbooth and drives a long-unused electric car among his toys through it. Once through the booth, he discovers he’s no longer in his room. He is traveling on an unfamiliar country highway.
The Lands Beyond prove to be the Realm of Knowledge. The Kingdom of Wisdom has split into competing kingdoms run by the first king’s sons. Azaz the Unabridged is king of Dictiononopolis, the realm of words. The Mathemagician is the Ruler of Digitopolis, the realm of numbers.
Milo soon assumes a quest, rescuing the Princesses of Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason, exiled by their uncles, Azaz and the Mathemagician. Without them, there is neither rhyme nor reason.
Milo encounters, is assisted by, and is opposed by fantastic characters. He is aided by Tock (a watchdog who ticks) and the Humbug. He has to get beyond Expectations and escape the Doldrums. Before freeing the princesses, he meets the Which, Faintly Macabre (in charge of using words wisely), and encounters the symphony of light and battles the demons of ignorance.
Juster never wrote a sequel. Readers, like Milo at the book’s end, realize another visit would have been superfluous.
“The Phantom Tollbooth” is seemingly a children’s book, but viewing it as only a children’s book is dismissive. It’s replete with puns, word plays, and double meanings. The book is an allegory that can be read on many levels. Some are best appreciated as an adult.
You may have read “The Phantom Tollbooth” as a child. You may have missed it. Regardless, it’s worth rereading or reading this year as an adult. Juster presented a world where the realm of knowledge was threatened by the demons of ignorance. As it is today, it was also threatened by the quarrels of those charged with preserving wisdom.
“The Phantom Tollbooth,” by Norton Juster, Random House; 35th ed., 1989.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, Texas. His website is marklardas.com
Portrait of Willa Cather, circa 1900s. (Fotosearch/Getty Images).
Every once in a while, slow and steady wins the race.
One of America’s greatest literary regionalists, Nebraskan Willa Cather (1873–1947), has only slowly and gradually been gaining recognition over the past century as one of our country’s greatest novelists. Indeed, her first novel, “Alexander’s Bridge,” came out 109 years ago in serialized format in McClure’s Magazine. The following year, 1913, she published her first novel in full novel form, the stunning “O, Pioneers!”, which takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem.
For nearly a century, though, writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald have overshadowed this brilliant writer from the central Great Plains, and it didn’t help her that she was literarily a romantic, politically anti-Progressive and anti-war, and, by the 1930s, skeptical of the New Deal. As strong as her reputation had been in the ’10s and ’20s—with unadulterated praise from such formidable critics as H.L. Mencken—it began to crumble at the hands of the “literary realists” in the 1930s. To them, she insipidly took the worst of life and praised the heroic. Though a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1923, she never recovered her reputation in her lifetime, and her best friend burned her final, uncompleted manuscript, “Hard Punishments.” Since then, her reputation has risen and fallen over the years, but, today, thankfully, it is mostly rising. The state of Nebraska (culturally and politically) has wisely promoted Cather’s reputation as well.
Cather wrote “Alexander’s Bridge” as the kind of novel she thought New York critics would like. She wrote “O, Pioneers!” not only for family, friends, and neighbors, but also, most critically, for herself. “I began to write a book entirely for myself; a story about some Scandinavians and Bohemians who had been neighbors of ours when I lived on a ranch in Nebraska, when I was eight or nine years old.” She found the new novel “absorbing”—far more so than when writing “Alexander’s Bridge”—and she, to her own amazement, realized that with “O, Pioneers!”, “there was no arranging or ‘inventing’; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong.” As the book was written for her own benefit, Cather ignored all the things that she assumed the critics would demand. As such, she feared that no one would think much of the novel, with its “slow-moving story, without ‘action,’ without ‘humor,’ without a ‘hero’; a story concerned entirely with heavy farming people, with cornfields and pasture lands and pig yards—set in Nebraska, of all places!”
Yet, what Cather did, was create an American myth, the difficult—slow but steady—story of a pioneer, a Swedish woman named Alexandra (no relation to Alexander in her first novel, but absolutely connected to that half-god conqueror of the ancient world, known as “The Great”) who yearns to love the land and succeeds in doing so. After all, when the story opens, Cather introduces us to Hanover (Red Cloud), Nebraska, which is doing everything in its power not to be blown across the prairie in a gust of winter fury. The town, it seems, felt the ferocity of the plain’s wind below as well as around it. But when Alexandra looks upon the local area known as the Great Divide, it succumbs to her will. It is worth quoting Cather, here, at length, in all of her myth-making glory:
“When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
It would be difficult, if not downright impossible, to find a passage in American literature that better captures the spirit of American individualism and the frontier, the spirit of romantic longing and of temperate embracing. Cather, to be sure, captures all of the essence of Americanness in this passage. Contrary to critics who see nothing but the erasure of Native Americans, Cather’s point is about human love for the particular harsh Plains landscape, a love that is perhaps unique to farmers who understand every inch of a region’s rises and drops.
“O, Pioneers!”, not surprisingly, follows the story of Alexandra Bergson and her neighbors, Bohemian, French, Norwegian, and Swedish. Though not Roman Catholic herself, Cather writes so lovingly of the Catholic Church and the Catholic immigrants to Nebraska that she—as Notre Dame philosopher Ralph McInerny once said—might as well have been a Catholic in all that she did. It is, after all, in the Catholic Church that Cather finds the will to defy death and sin, nihilism and shame.
In her own understanding of art, which she often made explicit, Cather claimed that the true poet is immune to the drives of the marketplace. “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin,” she wrote, but “economics and art are strangers.” Almost certainly, thinking about the Progressives and the New Dealers, Cather meant that economists are the materialists and utilitarians who view the world as nothing more than a set of choices based on costs and benefits. Regardless, the Nebraskan continued, the poetry of a poet is “his individuality [and] the themes of true poetry, of great poetry, will be the same until all the values of human life have changed and all the strongest emotional responses have become different—which can hardly occur until the physical body itself has fundamentally changed.”
“O, Pioneers!” turned out to be the first of Cather’s several books on the frontier, and her next novels—especially “My Antonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop”—are not only superior, but, arguably, the greatest novels written in the American experience. Yes, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, step aside! Contrary to their wallowing nihilisms, Cather’s work is always humane and gracious.
In her 1913 novel, Cather wrote: “A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” Amen, Willa, amen. The same is as true of a writer as it is of a magazine as it is of a critic. And it’s just as true in 2021 as it was in 1913.
Slow and steady …
Brad Birzer is the Russell Amos Kirk chair in American studies at Hillsdale College. He would like to thank Liberty Fund for sponsoring a conference on Cather and Rose Wilder Lane, March 10–11, 2021, and for Anne Fortier’s comment on Alexandra as a conqueror.
As a teenager, I had little time for classical music. Opera just about made my hair stand on end. Choirs would send me running for the door. Orchestral music, in general, had been written for fuddy-duddies or nerds, I thought. It might not be too much of a generalization to say that most teenagers are drawn more toward hot dogs, fizzy drinks, and loud music than fine wine, nicely aged cheddar, and a prelude, but I have often wondered why. Is it perhaps simply a matter of waiting until we have matured and developed a more sophisticated sense of taste?
However, a dear friend of mine, an older composer, assured me it was otherwise. “One has to have suffered the slings and arrows of life, got some bangs and bruises, suffered unrequited love, lost a loved one or suffered a few failures, to appreciate the beauty of the finer arts,” he assured me. “Fine arts are a salve for the wounds, chicken soup for the soul. Teenagers have little use for salves. They are, after all, immortal, are they not?”
I couldn’t disagree. Indeed, in moments of doubt, I have clung to the arts, keeping my attention on the higher expressions of life and humanity, if only to maintain hope.
This last year has been difficult for us all, no doubt. Few have escaped unscathed, and yet somehow we seem to have made it through the slings and arrows. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, but I wonder how people have managed.
During my most difficult days, I had quite a few good friends I could turn to. Most of them died a hundred years ago or more, but their music is still very much with us. One of them left us just forty years ago, and yet his contribution stands with the greats of all time. His name is Samuel Osmond Barber II.
Barber was born in Pennsylvania in 1910. Music critic Donal Henahan said of him, “Probably no other American composer has ever enjoyed such early, such persistent and such long-lasting acclaim,” and yet, while I can almost guarantee you will at least have heard one of his compositions somewhere, few know his name.
You may have heard this particular piece in several movies, from David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” to Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning “Platoon.” There is even an electronic dance music cover by the famed DJ Tiësto, which, though it veers drastically from the original, is actually pretty great!
The composition I am referring to comes from the second movement of Barber’s String Quartet, Opus 11, the iconic “Adagio for Strings.” It is a composition of such lilting and yet uneasy and suspenseful beauty that most composers would wait an entire lifetime for such a piece to come from their pen, and yet Barber was just 26 years old when he wrote it.
Author Alexander J. Morin said of the piece, “It was so full of passion and pathos that it seldom left a dry eye.” Right from its first gentle refrain, the mournful yet delicate strings begin an ascending melody that is passed like a holy grail from yearning cellos to violas and violins. With the end of each passage, the orchestra seems almost to pause for breath, or even to sigh, before continuing the melody’s upward progress, as if searching desperately for daylight through the clouds. Rising and falling in an arch-shaped progression, the ascent leads to a searing, breathtaking crescendo that could pierce the stoniest of hearts.
At a time when many composers had begun experimenting with curious scales and discordant musical arrangements—“modernism,” they called it—Barber shunned the trends, focusing on a lyrical use of classic tonal harmony that gave his work a singular and remarkable charm and beauty, catapulting it into the spotlight.
In 1938, Barber sent a copy of the orchestration for the “Adagio” to famed conductor Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the 20th century, renowned for his ear for orchestral detail and his notoriously fierce perfectionism. When Toscanini returned the pages without comment, Barber was understandably quite upset. But Toscanini sent word that he had returned the pages simply because he had already memorized the entire opus! It seems the maestro was impressed.
In November of 1938, Toscanini conducted the piece for radio broadcast from Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center in New York. Apparently, Toscanini hadn’t had to look at the music until the day before the performance! The rest, as they say, is history.
Barber went on to win two Pulitzers, with many of his compositions being adopted as part of the canon of orchestral performance. He earned a permanent place in the concert repertory, with all of the renowned orchestras around the world performing his works.
The “Adagio for Strings” was later adapted for choir and titled “Agnus Dei,” meaning Lamb of God, referring to Christ in the liturgical text. It is beyond sublime and equals, if not surpasses, the heartrending orchestral version. While Barber’s mother was an accomplished pianist, his maternal aunt, Louise Homer, was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera. She is known to have influenced his interest in voice, and some of Barber’s most beloved pieces are written for choir. While it seems natural that the “Adagio” would be adapted, the result is almost too beautiful to bear.
It is often difficult to reconcile the worst expressions of the human race when one witnesses the finest. After all, one need only read the news to fall into despair. However, the great writers, poets, painters and composers not only reflect how incredible we actually are as a species, but they continue to both salve our wounds and point the way to our higher ideals. Perhaps it is right that we pay attention to world events, but that is all the more reason to pay attention to the miraculous beauty that surrounds us, too. And so, dear reader, in this time of healing, after having suffered the slings and arrows of this past year, I heartily recommend you take solace in Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”
Pete McGrain is a professional writer/director/composer best known for the film “Ethos,” which stars Woody Harrelson. Currently living in Los Angeles, Pete hails from Dublin, Ireland, where he studied at Trinity College.
"The Voyage of Life: Youth" by Thomas Cole circa 1842. National Gallery of Art.
America’s first great landscape painter, Thomas Cole, was a pivotal figure in the development of a distinctly American artistic identity in the early 19th century. Cole’s masterful landscapes range from picturesque compositions of America’s pristine wilderness to imaginative historical and allegorical scenes. The revered artist’s devotion to seeking the presence of God in nature inspired him to create depictions of divinity within the world and the human experience.
A prime example of this undertaking, and one of Cole’s most renowned series, “The Voyage of Life,” is a group of four paintings that illustrate the major stages in a man’s life: “Childhood,” “Youth,” “Manhood,” and “Old Age.”
The series was commissioned by wealthy banker Samuel Ward for his private residence. Ward, a religious man, hired Cole to portray the faith-based view of a man’s allegorical path through life ending in salvation. Ward died shortly after the commission commenced, but Cole continued work on the series with the new intention of showing them to the public. In his later years, Cole was an increasingly religious man, to which this series is a testament. Regardless of your faith, “The Voyage of Life” captures a journey through different seasons, challenges, and the varying mental, emotional, and physical states we experience as we ride the river of life.
‘Childhood’
“The Voyage of Life: Childhood” by Thomas Cole circa 1842. National Gallery of Art.Detail of Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life: Childhood.
Cole originally worked on “The Voyage of Life: Childhood” when he was in his late 30s in 1839–40. This first landscape of the series symbolizes man’s birth into the world. A baby whom Cole called “the Voyager” is the passenger on a boat being guided down a river by an angelic figure. The front of the boat has an hourglass that is held by one of many angelic carvings whom Cole called “the Hours.” A shadowy cavern at the base of a massive rocky mountain, whose precipice is lost in clouds, gives the viewer the sense that the child has been delivered into this world of time from a mystery beyond it. The rosy light of sunrise casts an inviting glow on a vast and verdant landscape. Lush foliage and vibrant flowers greet the child on the banks of the calmly flowing river.
The child holds his arms outstretched joyously clenching flowers as he sits on a lush green bed of foliage that fills the boat. His guiding angel looks down lovingly while navigating the child into this colorful and wondrous new world. The painting symbolizes the optimism and mystery of childhood. Everything is fresh and filled with amazement. It is the dawn of existence for Cole’s voyager that is symbolized by the glow of morning light and the abundant natural flourishing of spring.
‘Youth’
“The romantic beauty of youthful imaginings, when the mind elevates the Mean and Common into the Magnificent, before experience teaches what is the Real.” – Thomas Cole
“The Voyage of Life: Youth” by Thomas Cole circa 1842. National Gallery of Art.Detail of Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life: Youth.
Cole completed “The Voyage of Life: Youth” along with the rest of the series in 1840. In this second painting, the landscape has opened up to reveal the course of the river through lofty trees and distant hills that elevate into soaring mountains. The voyager has now confidently taken the helm of the boat and looks longingly forward, pointing toward a glowing palace of clouds in the sky. For Cole, this symbolized “the daydreams of youth, its aspirations after glory and fame.” The young man seems to rush toward his lofty goals unconscious that he seems to have left his angelic guide behind him on the shore.
The landscape of “Youth” is enticingly gorgeous and teeming with life. The many flowers of childhood have been replaced with the ambition of mighty trees. A spirit of adventure and lust for the glories of life are pervasive in the painting. The boy charts a course for the palace in his mind without noticing that the river makes a sharp turn in the distance. It flows toward the right side of the painting where rocky cliffs await the voyager foreshadowing the third painting in the series. The naiveté and optimism of youth are going to be challenged by the realities of manhood. Cole seems to imply that wisdom and humility are the result of tempering the beautiful, yet inexperienced, visions of youth.
‘Manhood’
“The Voyage of Life: Manhood ” by Thomas Cole circa 1842. National Gallery of Art.Detail of Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life: Manhood.
“The Voyage of Life: Manhood” is a very dramatic shift in tone and content from “Youth.” The now middle-aged voyager finds himself in a dark and dreary landscape rushing down a treacherous part of the river. Rocks jut out of rapids that are mere seconds ahead of him. Looking forlorn, the helm of the boat is gone and his hands are clasped together in desperate prayer. The angels on the boat look concerned as time in the hourglass seems to be running out. Cole, who himself had bouts of melancholy, seems to be outlining his sobering and blunt view of middle age. In his words, “Trouble is characteristic of the period of manhood.” Above the voyager in the clouds are ghostly apparitions. The man seems haunted by “demons’ and the place to which he has been delivered by the ignorance of his youth.
The viewer is left with a feeling of uncertainty as to what will happen to the voyager. Out of the bewildered man’s sight, behind him in the clouds, light shines down into the unpleasant scene from where the angel continues to watch over him. This offers the insight that life’s difficulties may not be as serious or lasting as they may seem during the experience. Adulthood is a challenging part of the voyager’s journey that he is navigating with his faith. Even when all seems lost, it is not, and a higher power is watching over him. The flowers and superficial beauty of youth are behind him but what lies ahead is a more meaningful truth.
“The upward and imploring look of the voyager shows his dependence on a Superior Power; and that faith saves him from the destruction that seems inevitable.” – Thomas Cole
‘Old Age’
“The Voyage of Life: Old Age” by Thomas Cole circa 1842. National Gallery of Art.Detail of Thomas Cole’s The Voyage of Life: Old Age.
In “The Voyage of Life: Old Age,” the river has reached the mouth of a calm ocean symbolizing the end of the voyager’s experience in this world. The boat’s hourglass has broken off and there isn’t much left in the landscape. The angel appears before him now, pointing his gaze toward the heavens, which appear to be opening up to him in a gesture of invitation beyond this world.
“The chains of corporeal existence are falling away; and already the mind has glimpses of Immortal Life,” described Cole. It is here that the Christian doctrine of salvation in the afterlife is most prominent allegorically. The voyager had his time on the wildly changing river of life and now looks in hopeful wonder toward the faith-based promise to which Cole and his patron subscribed.
“The Voyage of Life” was well received by the public and critics alike. The poet William Cullen Bryant remarked that “the conception of the series is a perfect poem … set before us are the different stages of human life under images which every beholder admits the beauty and deep significance.” The paintings form a powerful allegory for human life and the hope of salvation in the mystery beyond it. Cole was hugely influential in establishing America’s artistic reputation and his works went on to inspire many other American artists. His attempt to instill the divine into his landscapes played an important part in forming the beauty, soul, and allure of America.
In 1842, after the initial success of the series, Cole made the impressive and somewhat shocking decision to laboriously paint all four paintings a second time in order to be able to further display them publicly. The first series was privately owned by Ward’s family and thus no longer under his control. For this reason, two slightly different yet essentially similar sets of “The Voyage of Life” exist at two different American galleries. The first set (1839–40) is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York, and the second set (1842 and pictured in this article) is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Jeff Perkin is a graphic artist and an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach available at WholySelf.com.
