Released in September 2002 on Peak Records, the Latin jazz ballad “Beautiful Walk” is from Argentine-born saxophonist Leandro “Gato” (the “Cat”)Barbieri’s 50th album, Shadow of the Cat.
Shadow of the Cat was Grammy-nominated for Best Latin Jazz. Gato Barbieri looked to two major sources for the album’s inspiration. The first was the 30th anniversary of his Last Tango in Paris (1972) for which Barbieri won a Grammy Award for the film score. The second was his huge-toned, raucous yet smooth jazz-pop sound Barbieri created in five albums he made at A&M Records in the mid-to-late-1970’s.
Following a six decade career as a music original, Gato Barbieri died on April 2, 2016 at 83 years old.
Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement in 2015. “What do you play?”
By 2006 Gato Barbieri was content that in a long musical career he had pursued playing different musical styles—jazz, Latin, film orchestration, etc.—and did not limit himself to a single genre.
In November 2015 Gato Barbieri received the Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for music that has been described as “mystical yet fiery, passionately romantic yet supremely cool.” Around the same time, Barbieri gave his final concert at the Blue Note club in Greenwich Village. That was the club where the “Cat” first performed in 1985 and—still sporting his trademark black fedora hat—started performing again there in 2013 on a monthly basis until his last concert on November 23, 2015.
“The jazz people they don’t consider me a jazz musician. If I am Latin, they don’t consider me Latin. So I am here in the middle,” Gato said. “It’s a good thing. You know why? Because they say, ‘What do you play?’ I say, ‘I play my music — Gato Barbieri.’”
Gato Barbieri and Italian-born wife Michelle married in 1960 and moved to Rome in 1962, where Gato began collaborating with American jazz trumpeter Don Cherry (1936-1995). The year is 1966. Tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri is joined by trumpeter Don Cherry, jazz vibraphonist Karl Berger (German, b. 1935) and bassist Bo Stief (Danish, b. 1946). In 1966 Barbieri and Cherry recorded two albums for Blue Note—Complete Communion and Symphony For Improvisors. Also in that early era Gato recorded with jazz saxophonist and composer Steve Lacy (1934-2004) and South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (b. 1934).
Recordings for Flying Dutchman and Impulse!.
In the early 1970’s Barbieri recorded a handful of albums on the Flying Dutchman label and later signed with Impulse! where he recorded his classic “Chapter Series” which included Latin America and Hasta Siempre (both 1973), Viva Emiliano Zapata (1974) and Alive in New York (1975).
Gato Barbieri, “Encuentros” from Chapter One: Latin America, the 1973 album on the Impulse! label.
Barbieri’s free jazz meant he was playing with American jazz double bass player Charlie Haden (1937-2014) and American jazz pianist Carla Bley (b. 1936), among many others. The Cat could also be found jamming with jazz bassist Stanley Clarke (b. 1951), Brazilian jazz drummer and percussionist Airto Moreira (b. 1941), Cuban composer Chico O’Farrill (1921-2001) and American jazz musician Lonnie Liston Smith (b.1940).
Gato Barbieri’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) was an international sensation. The “Cat” won the Grammy Award that year for his musical score in the Bernardo Bertolucci film starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.
Gato Barbieri’s free-jazz playing and improvised style that mined Latin jazz in multi-artist projects in the late 1960s and early 1970s attracted Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018) for his next film project. In 1972 Bertolucci recruited Gato Barbieri to compose the score for Bertolucci’s brutal sex-fantasy film Last Tango in Paris (1973) starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider.
Bertolucci hired Barbieri to incorporate the Italian director’s ideas for an original blend of jazz, strings, and tangos to embody his highly controversial X-rated film’s chaos of spirit and ferocious sexuality that gave nod to American and European avant-gardists with a splash of Hollywood popularity. The musical score for Last Tango in Paris was a professional triumph for the 41-year-old Gato Barbieri.
The film, censored and disliked across a range of groups as well as whole nations, received two Academy Award nominations – for Best Actor for Marlon Brando’s performance and Best Director for Bertolucci. At the April 1974 ceremony, Oscar in both categories, went to others – respectively, Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger and George Roy Hill for The Sting. The film was neither nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, nor was its musical score recognized in any way.
After Last Tango in Paris opened in New York City on February 1, 1973, Gato Barbieri’s musical score was an instant international sensation. In March 1974, at the 16th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, Gato Barbieri won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition (“Album of Best Original Score Written For A Motion Picture Or A Television Special”) for his work on Last Tango in Paris.
Fireflies is the lead track from Gato’s bestselling Caliente! album for A&M in 1976. It was produced by Herb Alpert.
Gato Barbieri performed benefit concerts, one for the Friends of Chile benefit concert in Madison Square Garden on May 6, 1974. Gato Barbieri’s five albums on A&M Records in the mid-to-late 1970s featured a more soothing jazz-pop sound.
Caliente! (1976) on A&M Records was released at the beginning of the peak of the jazz-fusion and disco eras. Produced by Herb Alpert, Gato Barbieri plays with sizzling heat relying on tango-infused Argentine fluency as well as the influence of Sonny Rollins (b.1930), John Coltrane (1926-1967) and Pharoah Sanders (b. 1940).
Caliente! is beautifully arranged and executed which makes for enjoyable listening. The concept of strings combined with rhythmic danceable funk anted up Barbieri’s raucous sound and made Caliente! a successful primogeniture to Herb Alpert’s instrumental Rise in 1979 which became a huge international hit.
“Always in the tango is tragedy,” said Barbieri in 1997. “She leaves him, she kills him. It’s like an opera—but it’s called tango.”
In the 1980s the “Cat” kicked it up a notch for Para Los Amigos (1984), an album which spotlighted the rock-influenced South American sound.
Mystica is from Gato Barbieri’s Qué Pasa. After working nonstop for nearly 30 years the 1997 album was the Argentine jazz tenor saxophonist’s first of the 1990’s. Gato would produce over 50 albums in his career. (5.20 minutes).Gato: “Music is a mystery.” “Gato Barbieri” by ognid is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
By the early 1990’s Gato had taken time off from creating in order to evaluate his musical style and identity going forward. Suddenly, in 1995, Michelle Barbieri, his wife of 36 years, as well as manager and confidant, died. In deep bereavment, Gato took up his saxophone and began to record again. This effort soon produced the 1997 album, Qué Pasa, Gato Barbieri’s first album of the decade.
In 1996 Gato Barbieri married his wife Laura and they soon had Christian, their son. After Gato’s death on April 2, 2016 at 83 years old, Laura Barbieri told The Associated Press: “Music was a mystery to Gato, and each time he played was a new experience for him, and he wanted it to be that way for his audience.”
FEATURE Image: June 2017. Pewaukee, WI. Wedding party.
July 2017. LaSalle Co., IL. 1964 Ford Galaxie 500XL Convertible.May 2024. DeKalb Co., IL. 5.22 mb _6595 (1)
Introduction.
Here are some of my photographs featuring the people, places, and things I have seen on today’s U.S. Midwest roads.
I have a personal affinity and affection for the American Midwest. I grew up in Chicago and its suburbs, and went to school here and live here today. My family has been in Illinois since at least the 1830s.
Growing up in the Midwest, my experiences included family, friends, diverse outings, engaging jobs, and being married here. I love to explore this vast region that’s rightly called “The Heart of America.”
Memories of the Middle West — its sights, sounds, smells, and tastes — and mostly in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan — are the mother’s milk of my life. In steamy summers, multi-colored autumns, ice-bitten winters, and flowering, reawakening springs to get outside to walk and ride on Midwest roads are pure adventure, then and now.
The American Midwest is filled with human stories and diverse and awesome natural beauty. There is timeless nostalgia, and, if such things don’t entice for the moment, unexpected curiosities.
For those who love it, the Midwest terrain carries all Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) spoke on in his last major book, The Sangamon. There is “magic in that soil, in the plains, the borders of forest, the oak trees on the hills,” the poet wrote. Masters was sure that “if you should drive through (this region)…strange dreams would come to you, and moreover those dreams would tally with mine.”
The region continues to offer the sightseer magical things. This includes its primordial aspects, such as animals, birds, natural outcroppings and waterways, as well as impressive remnants of Native American mound-building culture from the Midwest’s southern to northern reaches.
Edgar Lee Masters understood that it is the Midwest’s people – often defined as individualistic, hospitable, diverse, industrious, good-willed, courageous and independent – who imbue the region its greatest distinction. It is a populace and setting that, despite various economic setbacks and pockets of unfortunate decline, build and display what is often photographed on Midwest roads: historic canals, roads, barns and farms, houses. In the 21st century new things of interest can be seen on Midwest roads such as cellphone towers and wind turbines as older things, like barns and even some towns, decay or disappear.
Many famous American and international figures have lived and traveled on Midwest roads such as U.S. presidents, writers, actors, artists, business people, etc. This includes James Monroe (in 1785), Charles Dickens (1842), John Muir (1849), Henry David Thoreau (1861), Antonín Dvořák (1893), Winston Churchill (1946). Midwest natives include Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Edison, Edgar Lee Masters, Walt Disney, Mark Twain, Jane Addams, Harry S Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Barack and Michelle Obama, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Wayne, Wyatt Earp, “Wild Bill” Hickok, Jesse James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Dinah Washington (“Queen of the Blues”), and many, many more.
But It is Abraham Lincoln whose memory is most famously linked to Midwest Roads. Riding on his horse, “Old Bob,” Lincoln loved to travel the Eighth Judicial Circuit in central Illinois as a defense lawyer. It is to the 16th U.S. president and a Midwestern spirit he manifested to whom this photographic essay is dedicated.
SOURCES: E.L. Masters quotes from The Sangamon by Edgar Lee Masters with Introduction by Charles E. Burgess, University of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago, 1988 (first published 1942), p.6.
“(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” is a popular rhythm & blues standard composed in 1946 by American songwriter Bobby Troup (1918-1999). It was a hit that same year for Nat King Cole who, with the King Cole Trio, first recorded the song. Troup got the idea for the song when taking a ten-day cross country trip with his wife in a Buick from Pennsylvania to California on U.S. Routes 40 and 66. The lyrics include some of the popular cities and towns on the route. Troup, who later became a film and television actor, certainly drove by what is today Dell Rhea’s Chicken Basket on that historic road trip.
Dell Rhea’s Chicken Basket at 645 Joliet Road in Willowbrook, Illinois, is 22 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.
April 2016. Willowbrook, IL. Chicken Basket. 6.53 mb
The Chicken Basket is a mandatory dine-in or carry-out stop on a “Midwest Roads” visit. Vintage roadhouse decor and family-oriented service is joined to the menu which features fresh, succulent fried chicken cooked-to-order.
Opened in 1926
The business first opened in 1926 as a gas station and lunch counter on the brand-new Route 66. U.S. Route 66 traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles, California —a distance of more than 2,000 miles.
In 1939, fried chicken was served for the first time by its original owner, Irv Kolarik.
In 1946 the present one-story brick commercial building was designed and built by architect Eugene F. Stoyke (1912-1993) next to the original building. It was during the post-World-War-II travel (and baby) boom that it became a full-service restaurant.
Original windows and signage
Dell Rhea’s bay of 9 single-light-glass-and-wood-canted windows is original where an immense fireplace anchored the dining area’s north wall. The neon-and-metal sign in the photograph was original when this photograph was taken. It was replaced in 2017 with an exact replica. In 1956, a cocktail lounge was added to the south.
Bluebird Bus stop to St. Louis
In 1962 Interstate 55 opened—the major expressway connecting Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans—and effectively retired U.S. Route 66 in this part of Illinois.
In front of the restaurant there was a Bluebird Bus stop (founded in 1927) which people could take to St. Louis or use to send packages across country.
New Owners
In 1963 the Chicken Basket was bought by Chicago businessman Delbert Francis “Dell” Rhea (1907-1992) who knew how to invigorate the eatery while maintaining its tradition for a new era.
The popular Chicken Basket was owned and managed by the Rhea family until 2019. The Lombardi family took over with the promise to keep intact the original recipe which is unchanged since 1946 and continue the same Chicken Basket tradition.
White Fence Farm Main Restaurant 1376 Joliet Rd, Romeoville, IL is 30 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.
White Fence Farm is 30 miles southwest of downtown Chicago at 1376 Joliet Road in Romeoville, Illinois. In the 1920s Stuyvesant “Jack” Peabody (1888-1926), son of a wealthy coal baron, opened White Fence Farm to feed his personal guests who visited his 500-acre horse farm on the opposite side of the newly-opened U.S. Route 66.
In the mid1930s Peabody started to promote the domestic wine industry by featuring California wines at the Romeoville restaurant.
May Henderson Peabody Osborne (1891-1936) and Stuyvesant “Jack” Peabody (1888-1946)
(Above) Children of coal magnate F.S. Peabody (1859-1922) in a photograph from around 1910. When May died at 44 years in 1936 her estate was valued at around $500,000 – about $10 million in 2021. F.S. Peabody was the largest coal producer in the U.S. He died in 1922 in Oakbrook, Illinois, at 63 years old after he suffered a heart attack at a house- warming party he was giving to celebrate the completion of his new mansion.
Since 1954, the Hastert family has owned and operated White Fence Farm. Advertising itself as the “World’s Greatest Chicken,” the restaurant building has been expanded many times under the Hasterts. Within a country farm manor ambience, the popular restaurant boasts several dining rooms that can seat over 1,000 diners. White Fence Farm continues to offer some of freshest and best-tasting fried chicken in and around historic U.S. Route 66. The restaurant is a perennially popular destination, especially on weekends and during the warm weather months, where tourists and locals arrive in droves.
Since 2023 the old-fashioned walk-up ice cream window shop is under new ownership by Rockford natives and called Willyums Dari Fair.
Rich & Creamy is on the old Route 66 highway at 920 N. Broadway Street in Joliet, Illinois.
May 2017. Joliet, IL. 7.15 mb 99%
Rich & Creamy with its figures of “Joliet” Jake and Elwood Blues (“The Blues Brothers”) atop its flat roof is a classic ice cream stand on the old Route 66 highway.
U.S. Route 20 is the longest road in the country.
May 2017. McHenry Co. Near Coral, IL.
U.S. Route 20 stretches from Boston, Massachusetts, to Newport, Oregon. That’s about 3,100 miles. Route 20 began its development on the East Coast in the early-mid1920’s. The road reached Illinois in 1938 and is mostly unchanged since that time. In 1955 the Illinois General Assembly designated the road’s length in Illinois the U.S. Grant Memorial Highway. The sign was produced in late 2006.
July 2021. DuPage Co. July 2018. Downers Grove, IL. 246kb July 2018. Downers Grove, IL. June 2017. June 2017. Pewaukee, WI. Wedding party. 531 kb 50%September 2016. Tazewell Co., IL. September 2016. LaSalle/Grundy Cos. Seneca, IL. October 2016. DeKalb Co., IL. 1992 Case IH 7150 3.53mbJuly 2017. Kirkland, IL (DeKalb Co.) 3.21mb (10)August 2016. Oglesby, IL LaSalle Co. 5.84mbAugust 2016. Ottawa IL 2.24mb 35% September 2016. Ottawa, IL. Bi-centennial mural (detail). August 2017. Watseka, IL. September 2016. DeKalb Co., IL. 3.48 mbMay 2017. Lake Geneva, WI. July 2017. Rockford, IL. July 2017. Rockford, IL August 2017. Watseka, IL.
Corn for sale.
August 2014. Fox River, Kane Co., IL 8/2014June 2017. Pewaukee Lake, Waukesha Co., WI. 7.37 mb (30)May 2017. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. 5.27mb DSC_0420October 2017. Downers Grove, IL. November 2023. 3.68mbAugust 2015. Herrick Lake, Wheaton, IL. September 2021. Farmer’s Market. Downers Grove, IL. September 2017. Farmer’s Market (cheese seller), Downers Grove, IL. August 2014. West Dundee, IL.
May 2016. Kline Creek Farm, Wheaton, IL. June 2018. Cedarburg, WI (Ozaukee Co.) 6/2018 August 2016. Ottawa, IL. 2.46 mbSeptember 2016. Metamora, IL (Woodford Co.) 6.46 mb (40)August 2023. DuPage Co. 5.89mbMay 2021. Joliet, IL.
In the early 1950’s, Alfred, Jr. (Mitch) and Norma Mitchell opened a small grocery store on the corner of Raynor and Curtis Avenues. In 1957, it was expanded to the present location adjacent to the original building. A short time later, Harley Mitchell joined his brother.
July 2023. DuPage Co. 7.93mb 79%August 2016. La Salle Country Courthouse, Ottawa, IL. 4.13 mb
“In honor of ABRAHAM LINCOLN Who practiced law from 1851 to 1859 Before the Supreme Court of Illinois At its sessions then held in the old La Salle County Court House on this site Erected by the Illini Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution 1922.”
May 2018. Santuario de Guadalupe, Des Plaines, IL. Grundy Co., IL. 2016 June 2017. Bureau Co., IL.May 2017. Walworth Co., WI. July 2017. June 2017. Walworth Co., WI. September 2016. Grundy Co., IL. August 2016. Wauconda, IL. September 2016. Kendall Co., ILSeptember 2016. Grundy Co., IL.September 2016. LaSalle Co., IL. August 2016. LaSalle Co., IL. August 2016. Grundy Co., IL. June 2017. Bureau Co., IL.April 2016. Oswego, IL.April 2018. Downers Grove, IL. April 2018. Wheaton, IL. Wheaton, IL. 2016June 2020. DuPage Co., IL. May 2006. Macomb, IL (McDonough Co.)June 2017. Lee Co., IL. August 2017. Downers Grove, IL. Converted barn house.August 2017. Goodland, IN (Newton Co.)January 2021. Downers Grove, IL June 2017. Dane Co., WI 5.69 mbMay 2017. McHenry Co., IL. June 2017 Dane Co., WI. 4.48 mbMay 2017. Marengo IL 4.60 mbAugust 2017. Iroquois Co., IL 3.16 mbMay 2023. Downers Grove IL 5/2023 7.95mb 97%June 2023. Downers Grove, IL 7.84 mb 73%June 2021. Wheaton, IL 7.93mb 94%August 2023. Downers Grove, IL 7.74mb 80%August 2017. Iroquois Co., IL 6.43 mbOctober 2023. 6.83mb 99%May 2024. Sycamore IL 99% 7.45mb (80)August 2016. 99% 7.24mb DSCN3773 (1)October 2022. Downers Grove, Illinois. 93% 7.92mb_8818May 2024. 78% 7.87mb _6726 (1)
Air Classics Museum of Aviation, Sugar Grove, IL. NORTH AMERICAN AVIATION P-51D MUSTANG was an American long-range, single-seat fighter/bomber used during World War II. At the start of the Korean War, the Mustang was the main fighter of the United Nations until jet fighters (such as the F-86) took over. In the background is the CURTISS-WRIGHT CORP P-40 WARHAWK made famous by the Flying Tigers that were flown in China in 1941.
May 2024. 90% 7.61 mb _6613
The State Theater in Sycamore, Illinois, opened as the 900-seat Fargo Theater on December 12, 1925. It was equipped with a Geneva pipe organ. It closed on November 2, 1938, and reopened later that month with 491 seats. On August 6, 1940, it was renamed the State Theater. Today it is triplex theater showing first run films. In summer 1996 we saw “Independence Day” here. https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/1658 – retrieved January 19, 2025.
May 2024. Batavia, IL 90% 7.85_6324.
Founded in 1833, Batavia (originally, “Head of the Big Woods”) is the oldest city in Kane County.
July 2016. Barge, Chicago. 4.05mb DSC_0872August 2016. Schaumburg, IL. 4.06mb DSCN3873February 2025. Downers Grove, IL. 78% 7.82mb DSC_7408June 2017. Main Street Amboy, IL 5.23mb DSC_0948June 2017. American restaurant, since 1996. 216 W River Street, Dixon, IL. 4.01 mb DSC_0788 see – https://www.manta.com/c/mm03d4w/b-b-y-chicken-and-carry-out – retrieved June 7, 2025. May 2016. 5.27mb DSCN2891 (1) June 2017. Southern Wisconsin. 3.82mb DSC_0362 (1)July 2017. Old bank. Ogle County IL 5.38mb DSC_0935 (1)August 2017. Iroquois Co, Illinois 3.70mb DSC_0993 May 2016. Kline Creek Farm, West Chicago, Illinois. 6.09mb DSCN2904 (1)August 2017. First Baptist Church, Kankakee County, IL. 6.63 mb July 2021. Field of Honor Colonial Flag Foundation (June 30 – July 4) Seven Gables Park, Wheaton, IL 7.82 mb
The event’s website claims: “This stirring display of 2,000 flags will bring the community together in a patriotic tribute to honor our heroes.”
April 2016. 1.52mb DSC_0319 (1)June 2016. 3.05mb DSC_0719 (1)June 2016. 3.26 mb DSC_0830 (1)June 2016. Warrenville, IL. 2.90mb DSC_0926 (1)July 2016. DuPage County. 2.58mb DSC_0521 (1)July 2016. DuPage County. 2.75 mb DSC_0507 (1)July 2016. DuPage Co. 4.53mb DSC_0670 (2)July 2016. 215 Lincoln Highway, Rochelle IL. 6.30mb DSCN3448 (1)July 2016. DeKalb, IL. 8.83mb DSC_0968 (1)July 2016. Franklin Grove, IL 2.56 mb DSC_0085 copy (1)August 2016. Chicago. 1.72mb DSCN3771 (2)August 2016. Hanover Park, IL. 6.30mb DSC_0712 (1)August 2016. Prairie Preserve. 2.72mb DSC_0798 (1)August 2016. 5.34mb DSC_0771 (1) “I went to the woods….to see if I could not learn what it had to teach (Thoreau).”August 2016. Crete Township, IL. 6.39mb DSC_0002 (1)August 2016. Lake Zurich, IL. 6.64mb DSC_0022 (1) August 2016. 2.22mb DSC_0105 (1)August 2016. Richmond, IL. 4.96mb DSC_0193 (1)
The oldest surviving building in Richmond, Illinois, was built 1844 by Charles Cotting, a pioneer who platted the town and built its first mill. The house sits on a river stone foundation.
121 Park Avenue, Pewaukee, WI 53072. Opened in 1948 as the Lake Theatre, the venue closed in 1977. By 1983 the building reopened as Park Avenue Pizza Company restaurant. The ticket booth from the building’s days as a movie theater can still be seen under the canopy at left.
FEATURE image: At Chicago’s City Hall, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Chicago Freedom Movement leaders, July 10, 1966. Following a speech in front of thousands at Soldier Field and a march downtown, Dr. King presented Mayor Daley with fourteen demands for a racially open city.
August 5, 2016 – by John P. Walsh.
Released on July 4, 1966 The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100in August 1966 and stayed there for three consecutive weeks.1 “Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty, been down, isn’t it a pity, doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city. All around, people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…”
In Chicago in 1966 Dr. King promised a summer of nonviolence but that didn’t stop a white Chicago policeman from shooting and killing a 21-year-old Puerto Rican on June 10, 1966 and sparking a riot of the victim’s neighbors who looted stores, torched squad cars and assaulted firefighters called out to quell the blazes. A month earlier Stokely Carmichael, elected by a razor-thin margin over John Lewis to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, pronounced a new Black Power movement that ended that organization’s interracial efforts.
While the Chicago Freedom Movement remained staunchly interracial King warned Daley on July 9, 1966 that the mayor’s aloofness towards fundamental improvements for African-Americans in Chicago could lead to more radical black groups making their own demands. Since black Chicagoans were, despite a fair housing ordinance, mostly restricted to the ghetto where landlords charged higher rents to a captive market, King’s allies believed open access to Chicago’s real estate market was necessary to tackle larger problems of slums, unemployment, and underprivileged schools.
Chicago, Illinois, summer 1966 (AP Photo). In the foreground is the Shangri-La with its parking garage and deck at 222 N. State Street. Billed on its matchbooks as “the world’s most romantic restaurant” the Far Eastern/Polynesian themed establishment opened in 1944 and closed in 1968. The 65-story Marina Towers (background) opened in 1963. When completed in 1968 the twin towers were both the tallest residential buildings and the tallest reinforced concrete structures in the world.
Released on July 4, 1966, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 1966 and stayed there for three consecutive weeks.
January 2016. Chicago. 2.42mb DSC_0075 (1)Author’s photograph.
The 45‑foot fiberglass “Geronimo” statue at 63rd and Pulaski in Chicago was installed in 1966, and present during the Civil Rights marches led by Dr. King for fair housing and integration. The figure faces east toward predominantly Black neighborhoods such as Englewood, while the area west of it was then largely white and resistant to integration. Originally purchased from an Arizona reservation by the building’s owner, the statue first advertised a tobacco shop before becoming the landmark for an eye care clinic in the West Lawn neighborhood.
Mayor Richard J. Daley views the Chicago skyline in 1966 from atop the new Daley Center. Daley was focused on downtown development in the mid-1960’s and viewed King largely as an outsider with his own political agenda who simplified complex urban social problems for which Chicago was not completely at fault.
Martin Luther King Jr., with Stokely Carmichael in Mississippi in 1966. Although King saw Carmichael as a most promising young leader, in May 1966 Carmichael declared a new Black Power movement that ended the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s interracial efforts. The Chicago Freedom Movement to which King was attached stayed staunchly interracial.
Dr. King exits the tenement apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin on Chicago’s West Side where his family stayed during the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. American Friends Service Committee found that white and black families paid about the same in monthly rent but whites earned half as much more as what blacks earned. They found that for the same money blacks on average lived in about 15% less space (3.35 to 3.95 rooms). King looked to solve these and other socioeconomic discrepancies in his 1966 Chicago sojourn.
1550 S. Hamlin on Chicago’s West Side, the redeveloped site where King and his family stayed during the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1966. Screenshot October 29, 2018.
Mathias “Paddy” Bauler who in 1955 famously quipped that “Chicago ain’t ready for a reform mayor”2 was still an active Northside Chicago alderman in 1966. To some Chicagoans, Bauler’s colorful quip should have been Mayor Daley’s prevailing opinion towards open housing. In July and August 1966 King’s street marches into the white-only neighborhoods of Gage Park, Marquette Park and Chicago Lawn3 were intended to showcase the Chicago Freedom Movement’s reform message of open housing.
Following a rally at Soldier Field on Sunday, July 10, 1966 where King spoke to thousands of supporters including these words, “we will no longer sit idly by in agonizing deprivation and wait on others to provide our freedom,”4 he then led thousands on a march to City Hall. Marching peacfully three miles from the lakefront into downtown, King posted the Chicago Freedom Movement’s fourteen demands for a racially open city at City Hall. The next day Daley met with King but the pair, who personally respected one another, floundered at an impasse.
King was impatient for direct action but Daley was passive and noncommittal. Afterwards King made clear to Daley that these were 14 demands, not suggestions. From Daley’s viewpoint, King was a public relations disaster for Chicago because he was an outsider articulating simple solutions to complex and not always only local social problems. King indicated an inclination that it was time to march into the neighborhoods.
Sunday, July 10, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a 12-page speech at a rally for civil rights at Soldier Field in Chicago that drew tens of thousands of supporters of open housing, better education and increased employment opportunities for the city’s black community. Photo: the Sun-Times archives.
The crowd and Dr. King at the Chicago Freedom Movement rally on Sunday, July 10, 1966, at Soldier Field. Photograph by Bernard Kleina.
Following a rally for civil rights at Soldier Field in Chicago where Dr. King addressed the crowd on Sunday, July 10, 1966, thousands marched through downtown Chicago to City Hall.
The march ended when the list of demands was nailed to the door of Chicago’s City Hall.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Chicago’s City Hall on July 10, 1966.
King met with a passive and noncommittal Daley in City Hall on Monday, July 11, 1966 (this photo, March 24, 1966). The antagonists met infrequently in 1966 to address The Chicago Freedom Movement’s issues and each time King left with vague, piecemeal promises for change.
On July 14, 1966, three days after the Daley-King meeting, a drifter named Richard Speck tortured, raped, and murdered eight female student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on the south side of Chicago. Speck, born in an Illinois farm town in 1941, lived in Dallas for the last 15 years and, running from the law there, only arrived into Chicago in April 1966. In the pall of a July heatwave, the serial killer was on the loose in the city for three days – a police sketch plastered everywhere in newspapers and on TV – until he was arrested on July 17, 1966. These gruesome killings were called “The Crime of the Century” and added panic, gloom and a general fear to an already tense city.5
Two weeks later, on August 1, 1966, in Austin, Texas, Charles Whitman, shot 49 victims from the bell tower of the University of Texas, killing 17 – and brought the term “mass shooting” into the American popular discourse.
These violent crimes precipitated ramped-up tension in Chicago and the nation in the hot and muggy summer of 1966. Already gripped by an escalating Vietnam War as well as massive civil rights movements, women’s rights movements, youth counter-cultural movements, and even radical church reform (“Vatican II”) movements, American society was swiftly and increasingly wrapped into a tight fist of revolutionary social change whose resistance to it tended to exacerbate the possibility of what King called “social disaster.”
Violent crimes of mass murderers Richard Speck in Chicago in midJuly 1966 and Charles Whitman in Texas in August 1966 worked to ramp-up tension people felt in Chicago during the long, hot summer of 1966.
Speck’s horrendous crimes came in the same week when Chicago police shot and killed two black Chicagoans, including a pregnant 14-year-old girl, during riots on the predominantly black West Side that Daley blamed on King. King denied any such connection and told Daley that if it wasn’t for the Chicago Freedom Movement’s preaching nonviolence those riots would have mushroomed into another Watts. To King’s way of thinking these disturbances among a swath of the city’s population should serve as the clarion call to Daley to act boldly on behalf of the black community and begin to enact the 14 demands brought to him to make Chicago a racially open city.6
Instead Daley’s response was to mobilize 4,000 members of the National Guard to restore law and order. In the wake of the violence—with police brutality blamed by the police on the rioters—another meeting between Daley and King took place where they agreed on a handful of reforms– (1) to establish a citizen’s advisory committee on police and community relations; (2) that grassroots workers go door to door in riot-affected areas to advise calm; and, (3) a new investment to build more swimming pools in black areas.
King was unimpressed with what he considered Daley’s lackadaisical approach and local media mocked the mayor’s feeble plan.
“Get Ready” by Smokey Robinson was recorded by The Temptations in December 1965 and released in February 1966. It landed at no.1 on the Billboard R&B singles chart and reached no. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. The up-tempo dance number was led by the falsetto of The Temptations’ Eddie Kendricks. Since The Temptations were formed in Detroit, Michigan, in 1961, the male vocal group has proven to be one of rock history’s most enduring groups who are unparalleled in their artistic and commercial success.
For his part, King started “walking,” that is, organizing marches into the city’s largely white neighborhoods adjacent to black ones so to highlight the need for open housing. KIng also re-started talks with Chicago gang members to convince them to forsake violence and join his nonviolent racially integrated movement.7
Since Daley viewed Chicago as having more accomplishments than problems in the area of race relations and that, further, the Mayor publicly considered the outsider King to be a selfish agitator, many white residents of soon-to-be-marched-upon city neighborhoods assumed Daley would take their side.
But Daley’s politics of law and order and incremental social change succeeded in alienating almost everyone. In the Chicago mayoral election in 1967 black voter turnout and support for Daley disappeared and did not return for him in subsequent mayoral contests in 1971 or 1975. Meanwhile, white residents felt the fatal sting of being “betrayed”8 by the city powers as Daley did not stop the marches from going forward.
The north edge of Marquette Park in early 2016. Photograph by author.
The Rev. Martin Luther King and Chicago building janitor Robert DeBose, left, discuss the eviction of families from the building. DeBose contended the families were evicted for not paying rent. fair use.
The first march was on Saturday, July 16, 1966 when a group of 120 demonstrators marched from Englewood into Marquette Park “for a picnic.” The next day, Sunday, July 17, 1966 about 200 marchers, taunted by neighborhood whites, held a prayer vigil outside a Gage Park church. Almost two weeks later, on Thursday, July 28, 1966, protesters began an all-night vigil at 63rd Street and Kedzie Avenue at a realty company that systematically discriminated against black buyers looking to move into Gage Park. The realtors had been reported to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations but nothing happened. White counter demonstrators appeared and with nightfall Chicago police struck a deal for the lawful open housing (or open occupancy) protesters to file into paddy wagons for safe escort back to the ghetto.
Dr. King attended two marches in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966 and, shown here, South Deering on August 21, 1966.
Movement leaders Al Raby (left), James Bevel (second from right) and Jesse Jackson (center) protest in front of the Chicago Real Estate Board in downtown Chicago.
Chicago Lawn white hecklers during a Chicago Freedom Movement march in summer 1966.
Chicago Police in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. Their presence did not prevent severe rioting by white mobs that day.
On July 30, 1966 about 250 open housing protesters, furious about the recent night’s humiliation, looked to return to the same southwest side intersection. They were met by bottles and rocks thrown by whites so that the protesters retreated again east of Ashland Avenue into Englewood. When demonstrators marched out of Englewood again on July 31, 1966 more than 500 whites met them as the protesters crossed Ashland Avenue on 63rd Street. Armed with cherry bombs, rocks, bricks, and bottles, the surly mob grew to over 4,000 whites where they burned cars and injured around 50 open-occupancy protesters, including a first grade teacher hit by a projectile.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Jesse Jackson in Chicago on August 19, 1966. King holds a Chicago Daily News with a headline that reads “City Seeks To Cut Marches.” (AP Photo/Larry Stoddard) fair use.
On August 2, 1966, Daley met with white homeowner groups from the southwest side. In addition for calling for law and order from blacks and whites, the mayor acknowledged the open housing protesters had a legal right to march. Daley, through an intermediary, sent King modest housing improvement and integration proposals which King rejected and Daley implemented anyway. Daley next sent to an embattled King some local black aldermen who opposed the Chicago Freedom Movement but carried more substantial housing and employment offers from City Hall. The city government hoped that King, who was known to be looking for a way out of Chicago with a tangible victory, might accept a negotiated pact and call an end to the campaign. With these serious talks going on between Daley and King, the late summer marches for open housing continued under an increasingly vicious white backlash.
A white mob attacks a car during the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s August. 5, 1966 march to Marquette Park. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
White rioters encountering Chicago police at a Clark gas station in Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. A Confederate flag is on the right. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
Whites moving east on 63rd Street to confront marchers on the way to Marquette Park on August 5, 1966. The Clark gas station in the background is the site of the photos by Bernard Kleina.
The infrastructure of the former Clark gas station still exists today on 63rd street (July 2018). Screen shot dated October 29, 2018.
The old Clark gas station looking east on 63rd Street at Whipple. Screenshot October 29, 2018.
On Friday, August 5, 1966, Al Raby and Mahalia Jackson led a group of about 500 open occupancy protesters into Marquette Park in south Chicago Lawn. A white mob of over 10,000 had gathered there and verbally abused the marchers and then turned physically violent. King, who up to this point had not participated in these marches, arrived and joined the march on the north side of the park. It was here, between Francisco and Mozart Streets south of Marquette Road that Martin Luther King was struck in the head behind the right ear by a baseball-sized rock and felled to one knee.
The open housing marchers, angry and disgusted, made their way the short distance out of the park and towards 63rd and Kedzie where King dodged a knife thrown at him. The crowd began to shout “Kill him!” as well as other racially charged epithets and about 2,500 whites now started throwing bottles, burned cars, smashed bus windows and clashed with police for the next five hours.
King with (from left) Mahalia Jackson, Jesse Jackson, and Al Raby at the New Friendship Baptist Church at 848 W 71st St in Chicago —the staging point for the 3 and a half miles walk to Marquette Park —on August 4, 1966. Photo: Chicago Tribune.
Marching south down Kedzie Avenue to Marquette Park in Chicago on August 5, 1966. Bourne Chapel is located at 6541 S. Kedzie, just two blocks from the park. Today the funeral home is gone. The yellow-brick building housing Tony’s Barber Shop in 1966 is still there today, though the barber shop business is gone. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. falls after being struck by a rock from a taunting white mob in Marquette Park in Chicago on August 5, 1966. King would also dodge a knife hurled at him in the park. King soberly reacted by saying: “Oh, I’ve been hit so many times I’m immune to it.”
Vandals overturn a car before the August 5 march in Marquette Park. Photograph by Jim Klepitsch.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with supporters in Marquette Park shortly after someone hurled a rock that hit him in the head. Photo by Bernard Kleina.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s comments on that day’s violence entered the annals of civil rights and American history and marks a failing grade for Chicago: “I’ve been in many demonstrations across the south, but I can say I have never seen – even in Mississippi and Alabama – mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”9
A permanent memorial to Dr. King and the Chicago Freedom Movement was erected in Marquette Park on August 5, 2016 for the 50th anniversary of the Marquette Park marches. This MLK Living Memorial at 67th Street and Kedzie Avenue includes a bench to contemplate the 300 tiles created by Chicagoans of all ages representing their understanding of “Home” and representations of a diverse community who continue to work to advance Dr. King’s vision of peace and justice.
In Chicago on Sept. 15, 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, characterized an open housing agreement reached with Mayor Richard Daley and civic, business and religious leaders “a one-round victory.” King had named Chicago his first target in the North for racial equality in January 1966.
In 1960 virtually no blacks – only 7 according to that year’s U.S. Census– lived among a white population of 100,000 in Gage Park/Chicago Lawn/Marquette Park areas – cited in American Pharoah: Mayor Richard J. Daley His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, Little Brown and Company, New York, 2000, p. 392. Fifty years after the Marquette Park march in 2016, the surrounding neighborhood of Chicago Lawn is a very different place from the all-white enclave King encountered. Whites now account for just 4.5 percent of the neighborhood’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. African-Americans make up 49 percent and Hispanics 45 percent –http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/mitchell-rev-martin-luther-king-still-bringing-us-together/- retrieved August 5, 2016.
Results of West Side riots – American Pharoah, p. 389; Substance of 14 demands – Ibid., p. 385.
Media mock Daley’s plan and King re-engages gang members– Ibid., 389-391.
Black voter support declines – Black Politics in Chicago, William J. Grimshaw, Loyola University Presas, 1980, p. 25; whites feel “betrayed” – American Pharoah, p. 394.
Chicago public school teacher Al Raby (left) of the CCCO and Edwin “Bill” Berry (right) of the Chicago Urban League inspect the open-housing agreement reached in Chicago in late August 1966 with Ross Beatty (center) of the Chicago Real Estate Board. It contained mostly broad volunteer promises for modest integration in all Chicago neighborhoods by the end of 1967, a mayoral election year. At an August 26, 1966 meeting at a downtown hotel with King and Daley both present — and after city faith leaders promised their resolute support of the agreement — Ross Beatty only tepidly endorsed the plan: “Well,” he confessed, “we’ll do all we can, but I don’t know how I can do it.”
June 19, 2022: Video in Marquette Park in Chicago of the Living Memorial taken during my visit.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Living Memorial is on the north side of Marquette Park in Chicago where the park is bisected by busy Kedzie Avenue. It was near this location that Dr. King, as he led protesters into the park during the historic Chicago Freedom Movement march on August 5, 1966, so to protest for open housing, was struck in the head and felled to the ground by a projectile thrown at him by angry white mobs who had gathered and were throwing bottles, rocks and bricks.
The memorial was dedicated on the 50th anniversary of the march (August 5, 2016). It is composed of a plaza, low seating wall, and three carved brick rectangular obelisks by artists Sonja Henderson and John Pittman Weber. The sculptural reliefs depict Dr. King and other prominent community members who marched with him that day.
If you liked this blog post , please visitParts 1 and Part 2 in the series here:
N.B. When this post was published in July 2016, Aristide Maillol’s Enchained Action — a torso cast in bronze and created in 1905 in France — enjoyed a lengthy time on the Women’s Board Grand Staircase at the Chicago art museum. In 2017 the torso was removed by museum curators and placed in an undisclosed location out of public view (see – https://www.artic.edu/artworks/82594/enchained-action). It was replaced by Richard Hunt’s Hero Construction (1958) (see – https://www.artic.edu/artworks/8633/hero-construction).
September 2015. 20th Century. France. Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), Enchained Action, c. 1906, Bronze. 47 1/2 × 28 × 21 in. (121.2 × 71 × 53.3 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago. August 2015. 20th Century. France. Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), Enchained Action, c. 1906, Bronze. 47 1/2 × 28 × 21 in. (121.2 × 71 × 53.3 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago.
Text and photographs by John P. Walsh.
In September 2016 the Musée Maillol re-opens in Paris following its unfortunate closure due to poor finances earlier in the year. Under the new management team of M. Olivier Lorquin, president of the Maillol Museum, and M. Bruno Monnier, chairman of Culturespaces, the museum’s new schedule calls for two major exhibitions each year which will look to honor the modernist legacy of the artist, Aristide Maillol (French, 1861-1944) and the museum’s founder, Maillol’s muse, Dina Vierny (1919-2009).
This photographic essay called “Encountering Maillol” is constituted by 34 photographs taken by the author in The Art Institute of Chicago from 2013 to 2016 of the artistically splendid and historically notable sculpture Enchained Action by Maillol and random museum patrons’ reactions when viewing it. The impressive bronze female nude from 1905 stands almost four feet tall atop a plain pedestal which greets every visitor who ascends the Grand Staircase from the Michigan Avenue entrance. Enchained Action is one of Maillol’s earliest modernist sculptures and is doubtless filled by a dynamism not encountered anywhere else in his oeuvre.1
Modelled in France in 1905 by a 44-year-old Maillol who by 1900 had abandoned Impressionist painting for sculpture (first in wood, then in bronze) Enchained Action is one of the artist’s most impressive early sculptures. From the start of his sculptural work around 1898 until his death in 1944, the female body, chaste but sensual, is Maillol’s central theme. What can be seen in Enchained Action expresses the intensity in his early sculptural work which is not found later on—particularly the artist’s natural dialogue among his experimental works in terracotta, lead, and bronze each of which is marked by an attitude of robust energy expressed in classical restraint and modernist simplicity. Enchained Action exhibits Maillol’s early facility for perfection of form within a forceful tactile expression which deeply impressed his first admirers such as Maurice Denis (1870-1943), Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) and André Gide (1869-1951) and cannot fail to impress the museum goer today.2 By force of this new work in the first decade of the twentieth century, Maillol started on the path of becoming an alternative to and, dissonant heir of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).3
Maillol’s early sculptural work is important for what it is—and is not. Modeled around three years after he completed his first version of La Méditerranée in 1902 in terracotta and for which his wife posed—a major modernist achievement of a seated woman in an attitude of concentration—and whose radically revised second version was exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, Enchained Action forms part of Maillol’s revolution for sculpture starting around 1900. Maillol made a radical break with neoclassicism and stifling academicism with its strange blend of realism and mythological forms—and with a rising generation of young sculptors such as Joseph Bernard (1866-1931), Charles Despiau (1874-1946) and Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929)—blazed a new path for sculpture. Except for Maillol, all these young sculptors worked in menial jobs for Rodin. Because of Maillol’s chosen artistic distance from Rodin’s work, Maillol did not need to react to it and so rapidly achieved his own new style as soon as 1905, the year of Enchained Action.
Maillol’s concept and primary approach to the beauty of the human body was to simplify and subdue forms. This pursuit began in early 1900 and advanced until the artist’s first time outside France on his trip to Greece in 1908 with Count Kessler (1868-1937). An important early sculpture—Recumbent Nude, 1900—was cast with the help of his lifelong friend Henri Matisse (1869-1954). This friendship had ramifications for the Art Institute’s Enchained Action in that it was purchased from Henri Matisse’s son, art dealer Pierre Matisse in 1955 right after his father’s death. While it would prove quaint for The Art Institute of Chicago to install Maillol’s limbless torso of Enchained Action on The Grand Staircase to pay homage or evoke the Louvre’s Winged Victory or Venus de Milo, it is historically significant so to embody Maillol’s artistic outlook in 1905 for his new sculpture, of which Enchained Action is an example. In the years between 1900 and 1908, Maillol searched beyond realism and naturalism to create sculpture with an abstract anatomical structure that jettisoned the sign language of physical gestures which are emotional and where limbs could be problematic for Maillol’s end design. The human torso of Enchained Action foregoes limbs and head to alone embody and convey the artist’s import for it.4
On The Art Institute of Chicago’s Grand Staircase Enchained Action displays Maillol’s sensitive surface modeling capturing human flesh’s animation and sensual power more than its suppleness as found in Italian masters such as Bernini –such difference serves Maillol’s purpose for his subject matter. The torso is differently pliant—toned, muscular, and strident. It displays the humana ex machina whose stance and posture express the modern hero’s defiance and whose nakedness retains the beauty uniquely imbued in the female human body. Enchained Action is a different work altogether than every work Maillol modeled and cast up to 1905. His art progresses in experimentation by its direct interface with politics. Enchained Action is not only an artwork but a political artwork where Maillol empowers both spheres. For today’s viewer who reacts to nudity in art with the shame of eroticism, they may see (or avoid seeing) its sprightly breasts, taut stomach, and large buttocks of Enchained Action only in that mode. The museum limits such visitors to this narrow viewpoint because they do not explain to them Maillol’s artful technique, conceptual artistic revolution by 1905, or unique political and socioeconomic purpose for this imposing artwork in plain view.
With an aesthetic interest established for Enchained Action—for it signals a break with the artistic past and the birth of modern sculpture in its abstraction – a question is posed: what are the political and socioeconomic purposes for this work? Its original and full title reveals a radical social implication: Torso of the Monument to Blanqui ([En] Chained Action). Abbreviated titles—and such appear at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Torso of Chained Action) and in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris (L’Action enchaînée)—neatly avoids or even voids the sculpture’s original radical social message. Maillol’s Enchained Action is dedicated it to the French socialist revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881).
In 1905 Maillol’s Enchained Action was a public monument honoring the centenary of Blanqui’s birth and consolidation of the French socialist movement that same year into the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), a single leftist political party that was replaced by the current Socialist Party (PS) in 1969. Given this background a visitor may simply stare at or bypass the torso but perhaps for reasons of politics rather than eroticism. The title omission—first promoted by André Malraux in 1964 for the Tuileries’ copy—does disservice to Maillol’s accomplishment and its full title should be restored. The Metropolitan has an incomplete title but on thee label includes information on Blanqui and clearly states their version was cast in 1929. The Art Institute of Chicago’s casting date for the torso is obscure. For a better appreciation of the artwork, familiarity with its social and political historical context is important to locate the intended nature of the energy expressed in it. Torso of the Monument to Blanqui ([En] Chained Action) is a figure study of a strident naked female torso and an expression of radical politics in France at the turn of the last century.
By 1905 Maillol’s new sculptural work attracted important collectors. Rodin introduced Maillol that year to Count Kessler at the Paris gallery of Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) and to other progressive writers, art critics, and painters. Maillol’s work was a new art form for a new century. It was in 1905 that Paris friends, among them Anatole France (1844-1924), Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929), Gustave Geffroy (1855-1926), Jean Jaurès (1859-1914) and Octave Mirbeau, approached Maillol to persuade the avant-garde artist to accept a commission for the politically sectarian Blanqui monument. It would be a tribute très moderne to a fierce socialist revolutionary but and the entire Blanqui family tradition which had voted to guillotine Louis XVI in the French Revolution and plotted against each ruling regime in France afterwards. Immense confidence was placed in Maillol by these bold turn-of-the-century intelligentsia and by the artist himself who came from a generation that came to believe they were the torchbearers of a new art.
In France public opinion was frequently divided on art matters. When Rodin agreed to Maillol’s commission—he wanted Camille Claudel to do it, but she had become seriously psychotic by 1905—the older sculptor admired and purchased Maillol’s new sculpture—in addition to experiencing his own deep familiarity with the vagaries of creating public monuments. Committee members, by and large left-wing sympathizers, made a favorable impression on Maillol who agreed to do the work. On July 10, 1905, Maillol promised Georges Clemenceau, “I’ll make you a nice big woman’s ass and I’ll call it Liberty in Chains.”5 After that, Maillol’s new sculpture—a symbolic monument to a political revolutionary erected in October 1908 under protest of town leaders on the main square of Blanqui’s native village of Puget-Théniers in the south of France—became the subject of unending intense scrutiny. How to respond to a large and powerful standing figure, tense and in motion where human struggling is borne to the edge of absorbing mute serenity by restraint of chains symbolizing Blanqui’s thirty years in jails by successive French governments?6 In the first ten days of working on the new commission, Maillol made three small sketches and two maquettes of an armless torso followed by other preliminary work. He finished a final clay version in 1905 whose contemplative intimacy reflected socialist Jean Jaurès’sagenda for political life: “We are inclined to neglect the search for the real meaning of life, to ignore the real goals—serenity of the spirit and sublimity of the heart … To reach them—that is the revolution.”7 Sixty-five-year-old Rodin whose critical judgment of the new sculpture which undertook to streamline art forms to the point of austerity against Rodin’s “monstrous subjects, filled with pathos” remarked tersely on Enchained Action.8 Although Maillol saw this public monument as more reliant than ever on Rodin’s concepts, M. Rodin after seeing it was reported to ambiguously mutter: “It needs looking at again.”9
It may be better to judge Enchained Action inside its historical moment. Former Metropolitan curator Preston Remington (1897-1958) praised his museum’s copy of the torso calling it “splendid” and “impeccable” in its observation of the human form. Yet he concludes that it is “essentially typical” of the sculptor for it “transcends the realm of visual reality.”10Enchained Action displays none of the delicacy, awkwardness, luminosity, or calm of the artist’s earlier sculptures and predates major developments in Maillol’s oeuvre after 1909 which differs extensively from that of Enchained Action11 and for which is based much of the artist’s legacy, even by 1929 when Remington is writing. Is it fair to identify Enchained Action as “essentially typical” even as it sublimates form? Viewed in 1905—a watershed year for modern art, including an exhibition of Henri-Matisse’s first Fauvist canvases at the Salon des Indépendents and at the Salon d’Automne—Enchained Action became that year Maillol’s largest sculptural statement to date. The commission, while relying on Rodin’s concepts in its depiction of strenuous physical activity—a quality Preston Remington recognized as “exceptional” in the torso and yet as a critical judgment ambiguous as to whether it refers to Maillol’s reliance on Rodin—afforded Maillol further confidence to execute his monumental art after 1905 for which today he is famous. While for Mr. Remington the representative quality of Enchained Action was what he sought for a museum collection, its exceptional qualities in values that are literally not “essentially typical” for the sculptor.
The complete final figure of Monument to Blanqui([En] Chained Action)—and not only the torso that is displayed on the Grand Staircase of The Art Institute of Chicago—depicts a mighty and heroic woman struggling to free herself from chains binding her hands from behind. Both of these “complete” versions are in Paris and found in the Jardin des Tuileries and in the Musée Cognacq-Jay. Maillol’s later studies for Enchained Action commenced without its head and legs that expressed a heightened anatomical intensity in place of Rodin-like strife.12 Chicago and New York each have a bronze replica of the torso. The Tate Britain has one in lead. Following the Great War, Maillol’s Monument to Blanqui ([En] Chained Action) standing for 14 years in Puget-Théniers’ town square was taken down in 1922 so to erect a monument aux morts. During World War II fearing that the extant original sculpture would be melted down for Nazi bullets, Henri Matisse purchased it from Puget-Théniers and gave it to the city of Nice. The original bronze was saved and now stands in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris.13
NOTES
Dynamism not anywhere else in his oeuvre – “Maillol/Derré,” Sidney Geist, Art Journal, v.36, n.1 (Autumn 1976), p.14.
In 1964-65, 18 large bronzes were placed in the Jardins du Carrousel, Paris, owing to André Malraux and Dina Vierny, Maillol’s last model-http://www.sculpturenature.com/en/maillol-at-the-jardin-tuileries/ – retrieved July 26, 2016; Metropolitan copy cast in 1929 –http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/196526; AIC cast date obscure- http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/82594?search_no=6&index=12 – retrieved September 8, 2015; Maillol meets Count Kessler – http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/204794-retrieved May 25, 2016; torchbearers – Rodin: The Shape of Genius, Ruth Butler, Yale University Press, 1993, p.284; Rodin admired Maillol’s new sculpture- Lorquin, p.52; Rodin wanted Camille Claudel for commission– Lorquin, p. 55; “make you a nice big woman’s ass…”- quoted in Lorquin, p 56.
Sketches, maquettes, final version – Lorquin, p. 57-58.; Jaurès quoted in Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920, James T. Kloppenberg, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford, 1986, p. 297.
“A Newly Acquired Sculpture by Maillol,” Preston Remington, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 11, Part 1 (Nov., 1929), pp. 280-283.
Such works as Night (1909), Flora and Summer (1911), Ile de France (1910–25), Venus (1918–28), Nymphs of the Meadow (1930–37), Memorial to Debussy (marble, 1930–33; Saint-Germain-en-Laye) and Harmony (1944) which are composed, harmonious, and monumental nude female figures often labeled “silent” by critics.
Enchained Action was first modeled with arms. The story of how the first limbless final version came about involving Henri Matisse – see Lorquin, p.58.
May 2016. September 2015.May 2015. August 2015. August 2015. August 2015. July 2015.November 2015.September 2015.August 2015. September 2015.September 2015.August 2015.August 2015.May 2015. July 2015. May 2016. August 2015.September 2015. August 2015.July 2015. November 2015.September 2015. May 2015. September 2015. May 2016. August 2015. August 2015. July 2015. 20th Century. France. Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), Enchained Action, c. 1906, Bronze. 47 1/2 × 28 × 21 in. (121.2 × 71 × 53.3 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago.
In situ: Aristide Maillol’s Enchained Action. The torso is cast in bronze and created in France in 1905. It sits on the landing of the Grand Staircase (main entrance) of The Art Institute of Chicago.
August 2015. August 2015. August 2015. August 2015. September 2015. September 2015. September 2015. September 2015. 624kb 35%September 2015. 5.66 mbSeptember 2015. 6.70 mbSeptember 2015. 4.88 mbSeptember 2015. 668kb 30%September 2015. 30%May 2016. 3.67mb DSCN2516July 2015. 5.01 mb DSC_0539 (1)August 2015. 2.87mb DSC_0641 (2)August 2015. 2.01mb DSC_0964 (1)August 2015. 2.75mb DSC_0975 (1)August 2015. 2.75mb DSC_0976 (1)August 2015. 2.77mb DSC_0972 (1)August 2015. 3.28mb DSC_0983 (1)August 2015. 3.31mb DSC_0088 (1)November 2015. 3.64mb DSC_0314 (2)Maillol in 1925. Photograph by Alfred Kuhn. (Public Domain)https://www.academia.edu/27662632/ENCOUNTERING_MAILLOL_A_CONTEMPORARY_PHOTOGRAPHIC_ESSAY_OF_ARISTIDE_MAILLOLS_ENCHAINED_ACTION_ON_THE_GRAND_STAIRCASE_OF_THE_ART_INSTITUTE_OF_CHICAGO
FEATURE image:Ewerdt Hilgemann, Habakuk (Homage to Max Ernst), 2014, stainless steel, Borzo Gallery and The Mayor Gallery. In/Situ Outside 2015.
EXPO CHICAGO 2015 is the 4th annual exhibition of international contemporary and modern art held in Chicago at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall on September 17 – 20, 2015. This year’s exhibition featured 140 art galleries representing 16 countries and nearly 50 major international cities including New York City, Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, Rome, Berlin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.
In/Situ, Sung Jang, Mobi, 2015, injection molded plastic, Volume Gallery, Chicago.In/Situ, Daniel Buren, From three windows, 5 colours for 252 places, 2006. Lisson Gallery, London. The artist creates a template for a sequence of 18 rectangular panels with each one suspemded from the ceiling. Each panel is subdivided into 12 transparent Perspex squares, both clear and in color. Carlos Rolón/Dzine. MCA Chicago. Hung Liu (Chinese-born American, b. 1948), Untitled (Dandelion), 2015, mixed media, 60 x 60 in., Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York. Hung Liu’s paintings are steeped in Chinese culture.Expo Chicago 2015. A. George Miller (American, 1905-1984), Untitled (City Nocturne), ca. 1950s, 16 x 24 in. Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago. A. George Miller attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago starting in 1923. and was one of three official photographers for the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago.Sergio Carmargo (Brazil, 1930-1990), Untitled #504, 1970 and Anish Kapoor (India, b. 1954), Untitled, 2014, Fiberglass and paint (“Yellow Void”), 160 x 160 x 56 cm. Lisson Gallery London Milan New York.Hunter Reynolds, Survival AIDS-ACT UP Chicago – A Revolution, 2015. Photo weaving, 8′ x 30′ Courtesy of artist & P.P.O.W. NY and Iceberg Projects Chicago.Hunter Reynolds in collaboration with Elijah Burgher and Steve Reinke in Survival AIDS Mummification Performance presented in partnership with PPOW and ICEBERG Projects for Survival AIDS Chicago Act Up a Revolution.Expo Chicago/2015.Gregor Hildebrandt.Kate Werble Gallery, NY.Chantal Joffe (UK, b. 1969), Green Strapless Dress, 2013, oil on board, 72.5 x 48.5 in., Galerie Forsblom, Finland. In a 2009 interview, Joffe said, “I really love painting women. Their bodies, their clothes – it all interests me.”Expo Chicago 2015. Expo Chicago 2015. Vik Muniz (Brazil, b. 1961), Album: Over There, 2014. digital c-print, edition of 6, 71 x 105 in., Rena Bransten Projects, San Francisco.David Allan Peters, Untitled #24, 2015, acrylic on wood panel, Ameringer McEnery Yohe, New York.Roberto Fabelo, Sueño de navegante, bronze, 2015. Cernuda Arte, Coral Gables, Florida.Suzanne Martyl (American, 1917-2013), Asclepias, oil on masonite, 14 x 11 in., Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago. Suzanne Martyl or Martyl Langsdorf – or Martyl. The artist said that she “always found it fascinating to look and look and look, and spend all kinds of time until something would just ring a bell, and I would know how to rearrange nature to make a good composition.”Books include British photographer Darren Almond; Chicago Social Practice installation artist Theaster Gates; English artist Damien Hirst; and German photographer Andreas Gursky.VMU Gallery 101 / Art Fund curated by Rimas Čiurlionis, and coordinated by photographer Alex Zakletsky, presents a video installation of artists from the conflict zone in Ukraine including the work of Bella Logachova, Andriy Yermolenko and Ivan Semesyuk.Rimas Čiurlionis, special exhibitions.Victoria Gitman (b. 1972, Buenos Aires; lives in Hallandale, FL), Untitled, 2015. Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Sensuous and conceptually sophisticated oil paintings that are look natural.Paul Wackers, Look At What I Did Now, 2015, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 48 x 40 in., Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York. Expo Chicago 2015.Andy Warhol, Love in the Spring, c.1955, watercolor and pencil on paper, 18×23 inches, McCormick Gallery, Chicago and Vincent Vallarino Fine Art, New York.Central Academy of Fine Arts School of Design, Beijing, China. Author at right. CENTRAL ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS SCHOOL OF DESIGN BEIJINGMarc Sijan ( American, b. 1946), Kneeling, resin and oil paint, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico (detail).Marc Sijan ( American, b. 1946), Kneeling, resin and oil paint, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sijan’s super-realistic sculptures are, by the artist’s own words, “homages to humanity’s fascination with its own forms — a fascination which has compelled artists throughout the millennia to mirror life in virtually every medium.”Elizabeth Catlett (American, 1915-2012), Reclining Woman, bronze, 37 x 19 x 9inches, 1959. Behind, left to right: Charles Howard (American, 1899–1978), Friedel Dzubas (German-born American, 1915-1944) and Michael Goldberg (American, 1907-2007). McCormick Gallery, Chicago & Vincent Vallarino Fine Art, New York City. Black and white ensemble of abstract and figurative Modernist painting and sculpture.Chilean artist Carlos Costa with one of his “Wind Studies,” 2015, a conceptual project based on structuring basic natural elements. Local Arte Contempoeáneo, Santiago.FORUM GALLERY ADAA Gaston Lachaise Woman walkAt Forum Gallery New York: Gaston Lachaise, Woman Walking, 1919, cast in 1968, polished bronze, 19 1/2 x 10 x 7 1/2 inches, Edition 6/6.ing 1919 (cast 1968) polished bronze 19 x 107.5 in.Teresita Fernandez, Ghost Vines (Yellow Gold), 2015, brass. Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, (above and below) Josh Garber, Ourselves, 2015, welded bronze, 30 x 15 x 14 in., Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago.Josh Garber, Ourselves, 2015, welded bronze, detail, complete artwork: 30 x 15 x 14 in., Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago.Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles, California. Expo Chicago 2015.Dealers, Expo Chicago/2015.Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna. Pace Prints, New York City. Cernuda Arte, Coral Gables, Florida. Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.Expo Chicago 2015. (Above and below) In/Situ Antony Gormley, Freefall, 2007, 2mm square section stainless steel bar, 290 x 185 x 180 cm. White Cube, London. Freefall reveals the space where the body was rather than represent the body itself. They are intended to be “drawings in space.”Marc Chagall (1887-1985), Self Portrait, 1947, oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 28 1/2 in.. Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago. Gregory Scott, Van Gogh’s Bedroom, 2015, pigment print, oil on panel, pigment print, oil on panel, HD video, ed. of 8. Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.Augustus John, Portrait of a Young Woman, 1923, charcoal on paper, 14×10 inches, Browse & Darby, London.Browse & Darby London.Lucian Freud (German-born British painter, 1922-2011), Head & Shoulders of a Girl, 1990 etching, edition of 50, Browse & Darby, London.Berthe Morisot (detail), Femme et enfant au bois, pencil on paper laid on card stamped ‘B.M’ and numbered, 21 x 15 15/16 inches. Browse & Darby London.In/Situ. jessica Stockholder, Celestial Season, 2015. Plastic baskets, wire tires, chain, lights, driveway mirrors and paint. 96x70x70 inches. Kavi Gupta, Chicago. a luminous “cloud,” the piece floats just above the boundaries, bouyant and playful at once warm and cool akin to a breeze on a summer’s day. Michiko Itatani (b. 1948), Untitled, from Virtual Pair #2, 2007, oil on canvas. Camilo Restrepo (1975, Medellín, Colombia). Bowling for Medillin I, 2014, ink water soluble wax pastel, tape, newspaper clippings, glue, stickers, saliva on paper, 72×240 inches. Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York. Since 1999 the artist lives and works in Paris, France.Fiona Rae, The Very Once-In-A-Lifetime Moment, 2010, oil and acrylic on canvas, Buchmann Galerie, Berlin and Lugano. Jan Matulka (American, 1890-1972), Seated Nude with Eyes Closed, oil on canvas, c. 1922, 48 x 34 1/2 in., Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago.Dayron Gonzalez, Momento de Gloria (Moment of Glory), 2015, oil on canvas, 80×60 inches, Cernuda Arte, Coral Gables, Florida.Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, a contemporary art gallery in Culver City, California.Forum Gallery, New York City. Isaac Lazarus Israëls (1865-1934), Young Woman on per at Scheveningen Holland c. 1920. The Conservation Center, Chicago. Human Rights Watch. Iván Navarro (b. 1972), Come to Daddy (Black and White), 2015, neon, drum, one-way mirror, mirror and el-energy, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris and Brussels. Eight feet high, Dan Flavin’s Untitled (Fondly, to “Phip”), 1976, is red, green, and pink fluoresent light. David Zwirner, New York. Foreground: Matthias Bitzer, Revolving Future, 2014, Metal. Background: Pier Paolo Catzolari, Untitles (Elevation Myself), 1982. Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.Expo Chicago 2015.Expo Chicago 2015. Susan Hefuna, Afaz, 2014, palm wood, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago. With a sense of monumentality of a fragile object, the crates are based on those made by craftspeople near Cairo in Egypt. Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.Chicago skyline from Navy Pier after attending Expo Chicago 2015. (25% of original image).
In/Situ Outside 2015.
Part of the Expo Chicago/2015 experience is temporary public art installations on the Chicago lakefront and throughout the city. Starting with Expo Chicago/2014, “In/Situ” works showcase large-scale installation art and site-specific works. Giuseppe Penone’s Idee di Pietra-Olmo (“Idea of Stone-Elm), 2008, Marian Goodman Gallery is a 30-foot tall bronze tree incorporating a boulder conveying the effects of human interaction in the natural world.In/Situ Outside. Ewerdt Hilgemann’s “Habakuk (Homage to Max Ernst), 2014, stainless steel, Borzo Gallery and The Mayor Gallery.
FEATURE image: Phreatic or steam-blast eruption from the summit crater of Mount St. Helens on April 6, 1980. USGS/Public domain.
By John P. Walsh, May 18, 2016.
“Nobody lies about her lodestone any more. She burned and destroyed the whole park! Killed people too – what a pity! Only scientists are out there now. What’s there to see, dear? Isn’t it all in ruins?”
This is what the lady innkeeper told me in Portland, Oregon, before I set out in the car one early morning in July 1991 to visit the crater.
“It’s a pity she blew. It was such a pretty mountain before. WAS, I say. The kids loved camping at its base. It was so easy for them to get in and out. Then she blew and changed everything.”
I waved my good-byes and started the two-hour drive.
As seen from Spirit Lake, Mount St. Helens in 1980 BEFORE the eruption on May 18, 1980. United States Forest Service (USFS) photo by Jim Nieland. USGS/Public domain.Earthquakes, avalanches and a ten-minute eruption on May 18, 1980 toppled nearly 4,000 feet from the mountain summit. Author’s collection. Fair use. In April 1980 a bulge developed on the north side of Mt. St. Helens as magma pushed up inside it. View from the northeast. Photo by Peter Lipman. USGS/Public domain.Phreatic or steam-blast eruption from the summit crater of Mount St. Helens on April 6, 1980. Aerial view to the southwest. The ash-laden cloud surrounds and obscures a finger-like ash column with an upper white cloud formed by atmospheric condensation of water vapor. USGS/Public domain.
At 8:32 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980, an earthquake followed by a landslide and near simultaneous volcanic blast changed forever – and in less than 10 minutes – a Cascades landscape of 230 square miles. Months before the unexpected blast, volcano watchers had camped near the mountain, including scientists and photographers, who were interested to gauge its recent unusual seismic and geological activity and capture what the mountain may do. Local property owners pressured authorities to be let back into their homes during this uncertain and, as it turned out, critically dangerous waiting period. Especially good weather brought out an extra contingent of weekend campers, backpackers and curiosity seekers to the mountain, many from Portland only 70 miles away.
Eruption of Mt. St. Helens From Portland, ending 123 years of dormancy. This is the distance from which I traveled from the B&B to the National Volcanic Monument in July 1991 which is over 100 miles away. Fair Use.
Everybody I talked to during my 1991 visit remembered 83-year-old Harry Randall Truman who lived by the mountain for over half his life and refused to leave in the days and weeks before the May 18, 1980 eruption. Not sure whether the mountain would blow or not, Truman, who served in the U.S. military in Europe in World War One, resigned himself to the mountain’s fiery whims. When the 1000-story high burbling volcano finally did blow, the avalanche and blast buried Mr.Truman, as it did Spirit Lake, in 350,000 acre-feet of fire and ash debris. Mr. Truman’s body was never recovered nor did he represent the only loss of human life in the eruption.
Harry Randall Truman (1896-1980), who lived by Mount St. Helens for 54 years, died in the blast when he refused to evacuate. Fair Use.Harry Randall Truman lived less thana mile from the 1000-story Mount St. Helenswhen it erupted on May 18, 1980. Fair Use.Reid Blackburn, 27, a photographer at The Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Washington, was killed in the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Blackburn got caught in the blast at Coldwater Camp. While his car and body were recovered four days later, his camera only resurfaced after a week.The day before the blast – in this May 17, 1980 photo – 30-year-old volcanologist David Johnston is shown in the evening at his camp near what is now known as Johnston Ridge near Mount St. Helens. A principal scientist on the monitoring team, Johnston perished while manning an observation post 6 miles away on the morning of May 18, 1980. Johnston was the first to report the eruption, transmitting “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” before he was swept away by the lateral blast. Johnston’s remains were never found, but state highway workers discovered remnants of his USGS trailer in 1993. Photo by Harry Glicken on May 17, 1980 at 19:00, 13 1/2 hours before the 1980 eruption. USGS/Public domain. On Sunday, May 18, 1980 at 8:32 a.m., the bulging north flank of Mount St. Helens slid away in a massive landslide — the largest in recorded history. Seconds later, the uncorked volcano exploded and blasted rocks northward across forest ridges and valleys, destroying everything in its path within minutes. USGS/Public domain. This camper contains two victims of the Mount St. Helens eruption in a gray landscape about eight miles from the mountain, May 20, 1980. USGS/Public domain. View downstream of the North Fork Toutle River valley choked by a debris avalanche deposit from the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. USGS/Public domain. Streets of Yakima, Washington, May 18, 1980. Debris clouds moved east over the state of Washington and then the rest of the Continental United States and parts of Canada for weeks.Fair use.Taken from a rest area near Lewiston, Idaho, on May 18, 1980, Mammatus clouds caused by volcanic ash over the Palouse of southeastern Washington, north central Idaho and northeast Oregon. Photograph by Betty Ehr.Fair use.Mount St. Helens’ eruption May 18, 1980. The image is in the public domain in the United States because it only contains materials that originally came from the United States Geological Survey (USGS). See – https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount-st.-helensSixth in a series of photographs by Gary Rosenquist. (see- https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/msh/catastrophic.html – retrieved June 24, 2021.)
Author entering the “Restricted Zone” of Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument in July 1991. About eight miles away, the collapsed north face of the mountain looms in the distance. Only a few months before the authorities had re-opened Mount St. Helens for the first time since the blast. It was named a National Volcanic Monument and deemed safe again for visitors. Mount St. Helens was partially destroyed by a series of earthquakes followed by the largest debris avalanche in history and a blast and pyroclastic flow that flattened everything in its path over 230 square miles. Author’s collection.
Only a few months before my July 1991 visit the authorities had re-opened Mount St. Helens for the first time in more than a decade. It was named a National Volcanic Monument and deemed safe again for visitors. After Bear Meadow I followed the prolonged twisting road to past Ghost Lake, Meta Lake and Norway Pass until I reached Independence Pass. From its overlook I saw for the first time the ashen slough that had been Spirit Lake. For years prior to May 1980 several camps inhabited the shore around the lake’s perimeter. There had also been various lodges around the oblong-shaped lake including the one Mr. Truman lived in. On May 18, 1980 Spirit Lake met the full impact of the volcano’s lateral blast. The sheer force of the blast lifted the lake out of its bed and propelled it about 85 stories into the air to splash onto adjacent mountain slopes. Despite the weeks of warnings about a potential eruption of Mount St. Helens, the sole film records of the actual event are in photographs.
The long and winding road into the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument travels towards Spirit lake and the volcanic rim.Author’s photograph, July 1991.
At 8:32 a.m. on May 18, 1980 a 5.2-magnitude earthquake triggered the bulging north slope of Mount St. Helens to slice and fall away into the biggest debris avalanche in recorded history. This landslide was rapidly succeeded by the powerful lateral blast that sent scorching hot ash and rock hurtling out of the mountain at approximately 300 miles per hour, toppling and incinerating everything in its northward path. Fifteen miles away from the mountain temperatures reached Fahrenheit 572 degrees.
Spirit Lake a few days after the eruption on May 18, 1980. USGS/Public domain.
While in 2016 plant and animal life continue to recover and augment as it has for decades now, my boots in 1991 crunched into a gray, dusty moon-like surface. From Spirit Lake to Windy Ridge I was confronted by trees flattened like toothpicks as far as the eye could see, and a cauldron emitting wispy white smoke. The base of the mountain is four miles wide. The journey had taken me from civilization and delightful wilderness into mile upon mile of badlands. My bodily presence was miniature in an immense, silent, and deserted landscape, the scene only a decade earlier of the most powerful natural event in the Continental United States in over one thousand years. While I heard some people talk about this volcanic eruption as comparable in its destructive power to that of a detonated atom bomb, I know that sort of comparison is ludicrous. For all its destructive force, this is not a disaster as it contains, if one requires patience to believe it, a natural benignity – or what scientists call a natural disturbance on a grand scale which allows mankind to study the natural cycle of death and life in a landscape. An atom bomb provides none of that -it only bestows extinction and contamination.
“The standing dead” by Rudimentary is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 A gray, dusty moon-like surface with trees flattened like toothpicks as far as the eye could see. At Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Author’s photograph, July 1991.
Ash and gas, accompanied by lightning, ascended 15 miles into the air at the speed of a mile a minute. In a blast that killed 57 people – many of whom were there to study and record its possible eventuality – it also decimated approximately 7,000 large animals and 12 million salmon. No trees of dense forest were left standing within 6 miles of the summit. Rescue operations continued for days with varied success.
“Eruption of Mt St Helens May 18, 1980, Gifford Pinchot National Forest” by Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region is marked with CC PDM 1.0.Army National Guard helicopter pilot Harold Kolb rescues two men and their sons from the eruption of May 18, 1980. USGS/Public domain.Army National Guard helicopter pilot Harold Kolb rescues two men and their sons from the eruption of May 18, 1980. USGS/Public domain.Mudflow deposits cover State Highway 504 near of Toutle, to a depth of over six feet. Photo by USGS R.L. Schuster/Public Domain.This aerial view shown May 23, 1980 from a search and rescue helicopter. USGS/Public domain.USGS/Public domain.SGS Photograph taken on May 18, 1980, by Austin Post/Public Domain.Encountering a washed-out road to the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center in late summer 1980.Debris ash in Moscow, Idaho, over 350 miles away from the blast on May 18, 1980.After the May 18, 1980 eruption, five more explosive eruptions took place at Mount St. Helens in 1980 including this spectacular one of July 22, 1980. Photo by Mike Doukas.July 1980 aerial view of pyroclastic flow from Mt. St. Helens. USGS Photo July 22, 1980, by Harry Glicken. USGS/Public domain. Pyroclastic flow during August 7, 1980, Mount St. Helens eruption. The view is from Johnston Ridge, located 8 km (5 mi) north of Mount St. Helens. Photo: Peter Lipman. Public Domain.A helicopter stirs up ash while trying to land in the devastated area on August 22, 1980. Photo by Lyn Topinka United States Geological Service. USGS/Public domain. September 1984: Fireweed on the slopes of Spirit Lake four years after the eruption. Public Domain. An eruption from Mount St. Helens on March 8, 2005. In 2016 the volcano is showing increased signs of significant seismic activity. AP Photo/USGS Matt Logan. USGS/Public domain. In 2016 in nature it is survival of the fittest – while woody plants are beginning to appear with the promise of a forest, the boll weevil is eating the wood. Photo credit: Michael Hynes. This photo of an erupting Mount St. Helens has been published and viewed widely on television over the years since the eruption. Photo credit: Richard “Dick” Lasher. Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Mount St. Helens, Columbia River, Oregon, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 18 x 32 1/4 inches (45.72 x 81.92 cm), Public collection.
Scenes of the eruption and its aftermath set to music from “Mount St Helens,” a symphony in three movements by Alan Hovhaness (1911-2001), Hovhaness completed the commissioned symphony in January 1982 and it premiered in March 1982, Hovhaness who lived in Seattle at the time, wrote for his symphony: “When Mount St. Helens erupted on the morning of May 18, 1980, the sonic boom struck our south windows. Ashes did not come here at that time but covered land to the east all across the State of Washington into Montana. Ashes continued to travel all around the world, landing lightly on our house a week later, after their journey all around our planet.”The volcano was particularly restless in the mid19th century, when it was notably active off and on for a 26-year span from 1831 to 1857. Canadian artist Paul Kane (1810–1871) painted Mount St Helens Erupting At Night in 1847 (Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto). Though considered once dormant, the volcano has been continually active in degrees over the centuries as this nineteenth century painting attests, and remains so today after the major 1980 blast. Public Domain.Mount Saint Helens today. The powerful lateral blast in May 1980 sent scorching hot ash and rock hurtling out of the mountain at approximately 300 miles per hour and resulted in toppling about 40% of the mountain’s height. “Mount Saint Helens” by jimculp@live.com is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
FEATURE image: Cú Chulainn dying in battle, 1911, bronze, by Oliver Sheppard (1865 – 1941), General Post Office (G.P.O.), Dublin, Ireland. Public Domain.
Dublin’s O’Connell Street in the wake of The Easter Rising in 1916. The centenary of that event which proclaimed an Irish Republic is this year.
By John P. Walsh. May 12, 2016.
Today marks the centenary of the final executions of Irish rebel leaders by British firing squads in connection with the 1916 Easter Rising which proclaimed an Irish Republic and left Dublin in ruins. James Connolly and Seán Mac Diarmada—the final two of 14 executions that began on May 3, 1916 with the executions of Pádraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Thomas Clarke—died in the same fashion as the others: taken at dawn from their cells into a Kilmainham Jail yard—Connolly tied to a chair because his battle wounds in the Rising made him too weak to stand—and summarily shot dead. Three years later, in April 1919, military forces under British command halfway around the world in India reacted with similar cruel and vindictive logic to national protest—this time one that was nonviolent—which by official British statistics killed 379 and wounded 1200 Indians in what is known as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Proclamation of the Irish Republic with its seven signatories. Public Domain.
EXECUTED ON MAY 3, 1916:
Pádraic Pearse.
PÁDRAIC PEARSE (1879-1916), school headmaster, orator, and writer. The extended court-martials and executions by British General Maxwell of Irish rebel leaders—as well as arrests of hundreds without trial following the general surrender on April 29, 1916—fulfilled Pearse’s romantic and revolutionary ideology expressed in notions of “blood sacrifice.” Pearse’s idea was that Ireland “was owed all fidelity and always asked for service (from its people), and sometimes asked, not for something ordinary, but for a supreme service.” Pearse was one of seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation.
Thomas MacDonagh.
THOMAS MACDONAGH (1878-1916). Poet, playwright, educationalist. A leader of the Easter Rising – MacDonagh was one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. He wrote letters to loved ones in jail before being executed expressing the hope that his death would share in the custom of blood sacrifice for Irish freedom. MacDonagh wrote that he was proud to “die for Ireland, the glorious Fatherland” and anticipated that his blood would “bedew the sacred soil of Ireland.”
Thomas J. Clarke.
THOMAS J. “TOM” CLARKE (1858-1916). Deeply involved with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) since youth, Clarke established in 1915 the Military Committee of the IRB to plan what became the Easter Rising. A signatory of the Irish Proclamation, Clarke was the oldest rebel to be shot by the British in May 1916. Sergeant Major Samuel Lomas who helped shoot the three Irishmen on May 3, wrote that unlike Pearse and MacDonagh who died instantly, “the…old man, was not quite so fortunate requiring a bullet from the officer to complete the ghastly business (it was sad to think that these three brave men who met their death so bravely should be fighting for a cause which proved so useless and had been the means of so much bloodshed).”
The rising involved a treasonable conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of British soldiers among the 418 people killed in and around Dublin. The penalty for such action would certainly call for capital punishment in Western European countries in 1916. It is surprising that executions were kept to under 15 rebels, although British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (1852-1928), following the first three executions on May 3, 1916, expressed concern that the trials and death sentences were being briskly implemented. General Maxwell’s blunder was to stretch out the executions over two weeks, where the element of daily shock and surprise as to who made the list of the dead forever changed the tide of Irish public opinion against British rule.
General Sir John Maxwell.
General Sir John Maxwell (1859-1929) was the military governor in Ireland. He ignored all appeals by British politicians — including the Prime Minister and Roman Catholic bishops in the United Kingdom — to halt the executions.
EXECUTED ON MAY 4, 1916:
Joseph Plunkett.
JOSEPH PLUNKETT (1887-1916). Hours before he was executed on May 4, 1916, sickly Joseph Plunkett married his fiancée Grace Gifford in the prison chapel. Thomas MacDonagh, who was executed on May 3, had married Grace’s sister Muriel Gifford in 1912. Plunkett, who came from a wealthy background, was a poet and journalist, a member of the Gaelic League, and a standing member of the IRB Military Committee that planned the Easter Rising. During the Rising, Plunkett’s aide de camp was Michael Collins. Plunkett signed the Irish Proclamation.
Ned Daly.
EDWARD “NED” DALY (1891-1916). From Limerick, Ned Daly was commandant of the 4th Battalion, where some of the fiercest fighting of the Rising took place. Daly’s father had taken part in the Fenian Rising of 1867; his uncle, John Daly, served 12 years in English jails; and his sister, Kathleen, was married to Thomas Clarke. Daly commanded the Four Courts garrison during Easter Week 1916. Though there were not enough Volunteers to hold all posts, following the bitter battle of Mount Street Bridge, Daly and his comrades still held the Four Courts, and other significant outposts in Dublin until called by Pearse to a general surrender.
Willie Pearse.
WILLIAM “WILLIE” PEARSE (1881–1916) was the younger brother of Padraic Pearse. Willie stayed by his brother’s side during the entire Rising at the General Post Office (G.P.O.) which served as rebel headquarters. In Kilmainham Jail Willie was promised he could visit his brother before he died on May 3, but the British hid the truth of it since Padraic Pearse was shot as Willie was being taken to see him.
Michael O’ Hanrahan.
MICHAEL O’HANRAHAN (1877-1916). Michael O’Hanrahan had come to a newly-formed Sinn Féin out of his work with the Gaelic League as a linguist and published writer where he founded its Carlow Branch and later worked with Maude Gonne and Arthur Griffith. Like Edward Daly, his father had been deeply involved in the Fenian Rising in 1867. O’Hanrahan was the National Quartermaster for the Irish Volunteers and, during the Easter Rising, served under Thomas MacDonagh of the 2nd battalion based at Jacobs Factory.
EXECUTED ON MAY 5, 1916:
Major John MacBride.
MAJOR JOHN MACBRIDE (1868-1916). Second in command at Jacob’s Biscuit Factory during the Easter Rising. MacBride had had a colorful career previously as an Irish émigré to South Africa where in 1899 when the Second Boer War broke out he raised a brigade of other Irish emigrants who fought bravely against the British. Upon his return to Ireland he married (and divorced) Maude Gonne. Now facing the British firing squad in May 1916 at Kilmainham Jail, MacBride refused a blind fold. He told his executioners, “I have looked down the muzzles of too many guns in the South African war to fear death and now please carry out your sentence,” which they did.
Irish public opinion changed virtually overnight regarding the rebels who had brought the central city of Dublin down onto their heads during the 1916 Easter Rising. At the surrender Volunteers were jeered and cursed on their way into British hands. Two weeks and 14 executions later, they were forever-after hailed as Irish heroes. The attitude of the Irish populace to their British overlords during martial law turned spiteful. The British lost their credibility as a civilizing force for the island. The executed Irish rebel leaders were not saints although some such as forty-one-year-old Michael Mallin, thirty-four-year-old Éamonn Ceannt and twenty-seven-year-old Con Colbert were devoutly religious Catholics. They offered a modern dream of an independent Irish Republic and did it at the supreme sacrifice of their lives. These rebels’ fixity in the pantheon of Irish history rests in large measure on imagery and legend for their undeniably courageous but failed six-day insurrection. Self-appointed, this group of mostly young idealists who by force of arms, will, and words were able, despite a dastardly outcome, to have had an enduring impact on an independent Ireland is well worth remembering today.
EXECUTED ON MAY 8, 1916:
Éamonn Ceannt.
ÉAMONN CEANNT (1881-1916). Inspired by nationalist events such as the Second Boer War, Éamonn Ceannt joined the Gaelic League which promoted Irish culture. There he met Padraic Pearse and his future wife, Aine O’Brennan. A talented musician and Irish linguist, he joined Sinn Féin and the IRB which was sworn to achieve Irish independence. With Joseph Plunkett and Sean Mac Diarmada, Éamonn Ceannt served on the IRB Military Committee which planned the Easter Rising. He signed the Irish Proclamation. During the Rising, Ceannt saw intense fighting as commandant of the 4th Battalion of the Volunteers stationed south of Kilmainham Jail where he would later be executed. In prison he wrote: “I die a noble death, for Ireland’s freedom.”
Michael Mallin.
MICHAEL MALLIN (1874–1916). With Constance Markievicz as his deputy, Michael Mallin commanded the Irish Citizen Army under James Connolly at St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin during the Rising. At his court martial Michael Mallin, the father of five children, claimed he was not a Rising leader nor had a commission in the Irish Citizen Army. Since the British refused to execute Countess Markievicz, Mallin became their best alternative although his garrison had inflicted little damage from the Green. Mallin had had a fourteen year career in the British Army where, while stationed in India, he became anti-British. In Ireland he rose to become a leading official in the silk weavers’ union where he successfully negotiated a 13-week strike lockout. His negotiating skills led to an appointment as deputy commander and chief training officer of the Irish Citizen Army which was formed by James Connolly to protect workers from employer-funded gangs of strike-breakers. In 2015, Mallin’s youngest child, who became a Jesuit priest, celebrated his 102nd birthday.
Séan Heuston.
SÉAN HEUSTON (1891-1916). A railway clerk, Séan was a member of Fianna Éireann, a youth organization which helped raise soldiers for the Irish Volunteers and had outreach to the IRB. During the 1916 Easter Rising, he held the Mendicity Institution on the River Liffey with only 26 Volunteers when after more than two days, “dog-tired, without food, trapped, hopelessly outnumbered, [they] had reached the limit of [their] endurance” and surrendered. Heuston Train Station in Dublin is named for this Irish rebel who had worked there in a traffic manager’s office.
Con Colbert.
“Con” Colbert (1888-1916). Like Séan Heuston, Colbert joined Fianna Éireann – an Irish nationalist youth organization founded by Bulmer Hobson and Constance Markievicz – at its first meeting in 1909. The night before Con Colbert was shot on May 8 – he had been a student of Pádraic Pearse at St. Enda’s School – he asked to see a Mrs. Séamus Ó Murchadha who was a prisoner since she cooked meals for the Irish Volunteers during the Rising, including Colbert. The 27-year-old rebel told Mrs. Ó Murchadha he would be “passing away” tomorrow at dawn and that he was “one of the lucky ones” to die for Ireland’s freedom. Colbert told her he was going to leave his prayer book to one of his twelve siblings and gave Mrs. Ó Murchadha three buttons from his Volunteers uniform. He asked her that when she heard the shots at first light that would kill him, Éamonn Ceannt, Sean Heuston, and Michael Mallin to say a “Hail Mary” for each of their departed souls. Colbert also requested that the other women prisoners, reprimanded that morning for saluting the men going to the jail’s Sunday Mass, to do the same. According to the surviving Mrs. Ó Murchadha, the British soldier guarding Colbert began to cry as he heard their exchange and said: “If only we could die such deaths.”
May 12, 1916 now arrived. Twelve rebel leaders had been shot since May 3 and there would be two more today. In that short amount of time the traitors of Easter week became Ireland’s martyrs and ascendant heroes. Their pictures started to be hung in Irish homes and their poetry read for inspiration. W.B. Yeats wrote his famous verse about Ireland shortly after the Rising and its executions: “a terrible beauty is born.” A mythical Cú Chulainn dying in battle, an image beloved by Pádraic Pearse, had suddenly become real.
EXECUTED ON MAY 12, 1916:
Séan Mac Diarmada.
SÉAN MAC DIARMADA (1883-1916). Séan Mac Diarmada was on the IRB Military Committee which planned the Rising and a signer of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Mac Diarmada promoted Irish nationalism in the Gaelic League and in the Irish Catholic fraternity of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He organized for Sinn Féin, managed Irish Freedom, a radical newspaper started in 1910 by Bulmer Hobson, and helped found the Irish Volunteers. After the surrender, Mac Diarmada, who had been with Pearse at the G.P.O., nearly escaped but was identified by Daniel Hoey of G Division who, in 1919, was shot himself by a firing squad with Michael Collins standing behind it. The British Officer Lee-Wilson who ordered Mac Diarmada to be shot rather than imprisoned, was also murdered on Collins’s order during the Irish War of Independence. Before his execution, Mac Diarmada wrote: “I feel happiness the like of which I have never experienced. I die that the Irish nation might live!”
James Connolly.
JAMES CONNOLLY (1868-1916). James Connolly stood aloof from the Irish Volunteers because he considered the leadership to be too bourgeois and not concerned enough with the plight of Ireland’s workers. Roman Catholic by birth and committed socialist by choice, Connolly considered using his Irish Citizen Army to strike a blow for Irish independence in early 1916 (Michael Collins later announced that he “would have followed [Connolly] through hell”). The IRB’s Tom Clarke and Padraic Pearse fostered a partnership between the Irish Volunteers and Connolly’s ICA for the Easter Rising in 1916. Connolly became the de facto Dublin commander at the G.P.O. After his capture, because he was severely wounded, Connolly was held in a makeshift infirmary at Dublin Castle instead of at Kilmainham Jail. He might have died just from his wounds, but the execution order was given out and on May 12, 1916 the last prisoner was shot. To his executioners Connolly reportedly said: “I will say a prayer for all men who do their duty according to their lights.”
On May 12, 1916 at Kilmainham Jail in Dublin, James Connolly is brought to his execution by British soldiers. Connolly was shot by a firing squad after being carried in on a stretcher from a first-aid station at Dublin Castle.
“James Connolly” is a tribute to the Irish revolutionary who played a key role in the Easter Rising of 1916. The song was written and performed by The Wolfe Tones, a popular Irish folk band and released on their 1972 album “Let the People Sing.”
NOTES –
“died in the same fashion” – see Britain & Irish Separatism: from the Fenians to the Free State 1867/1922, Thomas E. Hachey, The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C., 1984, p. 176.
For the Jallianwala Bagh massacre see – Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (Monograph series / Indian Council of Historical Research), V.N. Datta and S. Settar, Pragati Publications, 2002; Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgment, 1919-1920, Helen Fein, University of Hawaii Press, 1977; Jallianwala Bagh Massacre; A Premeditated Plan, Raja Ram, Publication Bureau, Punjabi University, 2002; The Historiography of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 1919,Savita Narain, Spantech & Lancer, 1998.
Pearse’s idea of blood sacrifice – quoted in Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition, Thomas Hennessy, Routledge, London, 1998, p.126.
MacDonagh letter excerpts – quoted in Last Words: Letters and Statements of the Leaders Executed after the Rising at Easter 1916, edited by Piaras F. MacLochiliann, The Stationary Office, Dublin, 1990, pp.55-56.
418 people killed – Myths and Memories of the Easter Rising: Cultural and Political Nationalism in Ireland, Jonathan Githens-Mazer, Irish Academic Press, Portland, OR, 2006, p.120.
FEATURE Image: ASSUMPTION WINDOW (central panel/detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany- Oct 30, 2015.
ASSUMPTION WINDOW (central panel/detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
INTRODUCTION:
St. Michael Church in Old Town on Chicago’s north side is one of the oldest parishes and church buildings in the city. Founded as a parish in 1852, the church building’s brick walls from 1869 withstood the flames of the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.
Yet those flames left it a charred, empty shell. Hot flames fed on clapboard wooden houses that surrounded the historically-German parish. The bell tower collapsed in the fire’s intense heat. The Great Fire had started about three miles to the south on De Koven Street at the site of Mrs. O’Leary’s barn and her cow and where today stands the Chicago Fire Academy. From the devastation at St. Michael in Old Town, the fire continued its northward march from downtown until it petered out completely about one mile away at Fullerton Avenue.
In 1869 the St. Michael Church building cost over $130,000 to build—approximately $2.25 million in today’s dollars. After the fire, in 1872, its repairs cost $40,000 which amounts to about $700,000 today, although this amount does not include any unknown insurance pay outs. Reconstruction in 1872 did not include the stained glass windows included in this post that were photographed in 2015. Gloriously cleaned and preserved in the sanctuary today, they were created and installed in the early 20th century.
In 1902, in preparation for St. Michael’s Golden Jubilee, the tall, thin stained glass windows that were made in Bavaria, Germany, were installed. The colorful windows marked the fourth set to be installed into the church’s original design by architect August Walbaum. Those first three sets of glass in the same windows dating from 1866, 1873, and 1878 were frosted or tinted.
The Golden Jubilee windows in 1902 drew on centuries of craft and technique in stained glass-making. The Franz Mayer & Company of Munich produced some of the finest stained glass in the world. For St. Michael’s east and west walls they created colorful glass depicting familiar New Testament scenes.
For the Golden Jubilee St. Michael Church also had hand-crafted and installed five new altars by Hackner & Sons of LaCrosse, Wisconsin. The realism and expressiveness of the Franz Mayer & Company windows –in 2013 these windows underwent a complete professional cleaning– offered to the prospering Chicago parish an added sense of wonder and joy in their sacramental worship that can still be experienced and seen today in its intact form.
Mayer’s WEST windows depict events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary: the (non-biblical) Presentation of Mary and (biblical) Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Epiphany, and Assumption.
The EAST windows depict events in the life of Jesus: Finding Jesus in the Temple, Jesus Blesses the Children, Jesus’s feet washed by Mary Magdalene, the Ascension and the (non-biblical) Sacred Heart.
The windows’ rich color tones are rendered by using precious metals — gold dust for red; cobalt for blue; uranium for green.
The story scenes are given a Renaissance Europe setting.
All of these faith events are accompanied by Mayer’s fine depictions of the heavenly host of angels.
Franz Mayer & Company, founded in 1847 as “The Institute for Christian Art,” established a stained glass department in 1860. In 1882 it was awarded the designation as a Royal Bavarian Establishment for Ecclesiastical Art by “mad” King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886) . The Pope later pronounced the foundry a Pontifical Institute of Christian Art. Instead of thinking of St. Michael Church commissioning a venerable Old European arts company to create their stained glass as would be Franz Mayer & Company’s status today, in 1902 Franz Mayer was a new German arts company whose religious artwork would mirror the sensibilities of a new parish on the north side of the new city of Chicago.
The founder’s son, Franz Borgias Mayer (1848-1926), continued to grow the royal manufacturing company for Christian Art. Ten years after St. Michael’s stained glass windows were installed, Saint Pope Pius X (1835-1914) commissioned the same German company to make stained glass for St. Peter’s Basilica as well as windows in important chapels throughout Vatican City.
In the United States, Mayer’s client base and prestige grew in its service of an increasingly prosperous and broad-based Catholic immigrant community. Their ecclesiastical work can be found in Chicago, New York, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Washington and California. As of 2016 Franz Mayer & Company continues as a family-owned and operated business (see http://www.mayer-of-munich.com/werkstaette/).
stained glass department in 1860- Franz Mayer of Munich, edited by Gabriel Mayer, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Pope Pius X commission – Nola Huse Tutag with Lucy Hamilton, Discovering Stained Glass in Detroit, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1987. p. 152.
ASCENSION WINDOW (side panel/detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
ASSUMPTION WINDOW (central panel/detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
ASSUMPTION WINDOW (central panel/detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany- Oct 30, 2015.
SACRED HEART WINDOW (detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
ANNUNCIATION WINDOW (detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
PARABLE WINDOW (detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
VISITATION WINDOW (detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
CHRISTMAS WINDOW (detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
ASCENSION WINDOW (side panel/detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
ASSUMPTION WINDOW (central panel/detail), 1902, St. Michael Church, Chicago. Franz Mayer & Company, Munich, Germany.
Photographs and text:
More of St. Michael Church in Old Town, Chicago? Please see:
All three versions of Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom” at The Art Institute of Chicago, February 14 to May 10, 2016. Author’s photograph.
The photograph above depicts the three versions of Van Gogh’s “Bedroom” in Arles, France, in this blockbuster exhibition’s penultimate gallery.
From the collections (left to right) of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (1889), The Art Institute of Chicago (1889), and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (1888).
The three masterworks were gathered together side by side in North America for the first time in art history.
By John P. Walsh. May 6, 2016.
I saw the Van Gogh’s Bedrooms exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago (February 14-May 10, 2016) on the last Friday afternoon before the show closed. The museum that day was drawing a large crowd and it was challenging to navigate through the multi-room art show in a mass of frequently immobile art lovers. Exactly for what cause some stationary patrons might be transfixed could only be speculated upon but often no art was present. No one I think comes to art shows to be caught in a logjam of people yet that recurrent phenomenon in Van Gogh’s Bedrooms soon became one of its unpleasant features. The expansive exhibition space—striking for its illogical reasoning to display three relatively small masterpieces—proved impractical, or at least a two-edged sword, in terms of containing its throngs.
Those three featured paintings are this show’s raison d’être and prove a marvelous highlight after reaching them by way of a dozen or so high-ceiling galleries. Once arrived to the show’s penultimate room, my eyes settled on the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam’s version as the most intriguing of the three superficially identical works. The other two versions are from the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
When 35-year-old Van Gogh painted his The Bedroom series starting in October 1888, the Dutchman had been an artist only a short while: about 7 years. This had followed a variety of other occupations, although Van Gogh began his professional life as an art dealer. By late 1888—less than two years before his death by self-inflicted gunshot in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890—Van Gogh had traveled long and far from his beginnings in North Brabant. He arrived into Paris in 1885 to paint and join his brother Theo who was an avant-garde art dealer in the Rue Montmartre. Looking to sell more of his artwork, he began painting in the bright Impressionist style for which Van Gogh is probably most famous today. By February 1888 Van Gogh relocated to Arles in the South of France on account of his health and to possibly start an art colony. Still quite poor and alone, this roughly 15-month period in Arles proved to be prolific for the artist’s production when Van Gogh completed 200 paintings, and over 100 drawings and watercolors. Many of Van Gogh’s most famous works were created in this fecund period—for example, his portraits of Eugène Boch (Musée d’Orsay), Postman Joseph Roulin and Augustine Roulin (both Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Madame Ginoux (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) among several others; sunflowers and irises such as Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers (National Gallery, London), Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and Irises (Getty Museum, Los Angeles); 15 canvases of cypresses; and his iconic Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin in the Harvard Art Museums.
None of these contextual artworks were in the Chicago show but demonstrate the range and depth of Van Gogh’s artistic vision in the same time period that The Bedrooms—which shared his body of work’s intoxication with color and decorative strategies—were painted.Despite its title—Van Gogh’s Bedrooms—this show is not content to let their presence in Chicago suffice. Instead, much of the other parts of this massive show were from the Art Institute’s permanent collection of mostly Barbizon and Impressionist artwork. Perhaps if they had been left on whatever museum walls from which they had come, these fine artworks might have maintained an even greater impact for themselves and this show’s ultimate purpose than crowding them onto walls into this special exhibition space. That said, the condensed interpretive curatorial exercise of parts of the permanent collection in this show could prove interesting for visitors who are not willing or able to visit other parts of the museum. In a show that took on the formula of a typical Regenstein Hall blockbuster, its propensity for Impressionist rehash (“delve” was the museum’s word) had a boring art textbook’s sensibility. That the show dipped into the museum storehouse to retrieve the life-size maquette of the Yellow House from AIC’s vastly superior exhibition Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South in 2001, produced a dispiriting effect on at least one viewer who recognized it.But so far I am quibbling: this AIC exhibition brings together the powerful canon of all three versions of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom for the first time in North America which is very special and undoubtedly sufficient to any museum goer’s time and interest. I don’t believe, however, that their full artistic power was best served by being able to see these objects intensely advertised in the media markets and then only hung at the show’s virtual end following a cacophony of mostly extraneous art historical resources however severely earnestly presented. Instead, a surfeit of front-loaded artistic riches labors to obscure these significant Van Goghs that finally appear in the second to last gallery, all of which are jam-packed with art, people, various filmic explorations, somewhat bloviating wall texts, whole house reconstructions, etc.
Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, October 1888. 72.4 x 91.3 cm.
Chicago, 1889. 72.4 x 91.3 cm. Version Van Gogh painted in the asylum at St. Rémy.
Paris, 1889. 57.5 x 74 cm. Destitute bachelor artist Van Gogh gave this version to his mother and sister to assure them in part that he was working..
It is certainly obvious that Van Gogh’s Bedrooms possibly could have benefited by not pulling out all the stops (AIC: “in-depth study”) but to focus on the three colorful masterpieces uniquely gathered in their essential power. If one wants to read blow by blow explanations of virtually every curatorial application in the show, one might turn to other reviews cited in “Further Reading” below. The equitably in-depth appreciation of this trio of Van Gogh works—and minus the Disney World trappings—might be advanced using timed tickets (as done for Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South) and within a pared down and simpler exhibition scope. The way things are constructed by the show’s curator Gloria Groom, Chair of European Painting and Sculpture at The Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition transmits encyclopedic knowledge while largely missing a tangible evocation of bachelor Van Gogh’s humble petit boulevard persona who produced in Arles in 1888 and in Saint-Rémy in 1889 these bold canvases of his simple bedroom and even gifting one of the versions (the one now in Paris) to his aged mother and sister to reassure them in his destitution. For Van Gogh the motif of his private and hard-featured bedroom in Arles continued his bold self-expression in a tightly woven and complex painting composed in broad outlines using a many-hued post-impressionistic palette in thick impasto. Despite Van Gogh’s reputation as mad—he mutilated his ear in this bedroom in December 1888—he soon carried on painting two more versions of The Bedroom (the last one slightly reduced) with the apparent added intention to express to his family and friends that the artist was as stable and restful as his artistic subject.
What should an exhibition advertised as Van Gogh’s Three Bedrooms wish to have its spectators looking for and come away with? By the time a visitor reaches Van Gogh’s three paintings after plowing through the aforesaid gauntlet of people and well-known Chicago art resources, the exhibition almost runs the danger of displaying these highly-prized artworks not as denouement but incidental. These Van Gogh paintings are hardly allowed to speak freely for themselves. Of course they have a fascinating history but to what degree should these particular artworks’ written history be simultaneous to their exhibition? Thinking of the viewer, does the display of three paintings of an artist’s bedroom (albeit Vincent Van Gogh’s) that when placed side by side measures the whole of about ten feet across merit thousands of cubic feet of mostly academic groundwork before a viewer can even see them? To what degree are artistic exhibition and their intellectual exposition necessarily complementary since many museum art shows follow this tactic?
The final gallery after the display of the three bedrooms continued Van Gogh’s Bedrooms’ devotion to comprehensive information and theatricality—although a side-by-side blow-up of the bedrooms’ diverging painterly details was perhaps the most useful techie display so to appreciate the artist’s handling of the individual paintings. Yet it begged a question: could this orientation to detail, to seeing the painting, somehow serve as the exhibition’s primary or sole introduction, such as in a film theater? This last gallery then led directly to the ubiquitous and depressing gift shop hosting the galleries’ multitude disporting themselves basically as they did in and among the art. Hearing its timbre I wondered if a unique opportunity to view together these three Van Gogh bedroom paintings—“the first time in North America”—had under- or overplayed its hand? As its elemental objective, had the exhibition Van Gogh’s Bedrooms rightly oriented and imparted to its viewers an intimate and perhaps personally revealing look into these three sensitive treasures of Van Gogh’s oeuvre? Or had the artist Van Gogh merely omitted to paint into his own scene the proverbial kitchen sink?
By John Walsh – 4:00 pm Chicago time, April 27, 2016.
Despite the corporate media’s unabashed favoritism for Hillary Clinton when reporting the news – it is reminiscent of the Cold War days when Americans were told about the partisan propaganda at Pravda (a frightening journalistic prospect should it ever arrive in some form to America) – the delegate count from April 26, 2016’s five primaries (4 closed and 1 hybrid) comes down to this: a net gain of 52 PLEDGED delegates for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders– or around 2% of the total needed to reach the magic number of 2383 to become the Democratic presidential nominee.
As of April 27, 2016, Bernie Sanders had 1299 PLEDGED delegates and Hillary Clinton 1632 PLEDGED delegates. Neither candidate will likely reach 2,383 delegates– that is, not without the party SUPERdelegates of which Clinton has 519 and Sanders has 39.
It should be well known that the Democratic Party’s nominating process as it is presently constituted is a jimied system, bloated on big money and favoring the status quo, and that its category SUPERdelegates have and will flock to Clinton.
The SUPERdelegates’ reasons to support Clinton may reflect but also transcend her qualifications to be president. The special category of delegates can also work to aid a candidate’s success who may or may not be able to win outright these primaries even under present rules deemed fair.
In Connecticut’s closed primary on April 26, for instance, Clinton won a net gain of 2 PLEDGED delegates over Sanders based on the people’s vote in that contest but she also received an additional 15 SUPERdelegates there (Bernie picked up zero in the state). In Connecticut Hillary won over 170,000 votes to gain 27 PLEDGED delegates and Sanders won over 153,000 votes to gain 25 PLEDGED delegates – or about 6,300 voters per delegate. Yet Clinton picked up those additional 15 SUPERdelegates cast by 15 fellow Americans whose vote, in this case, has a power equivalent to a bloc of 95,000 ordinary Connecticut voters and, further, basically ginned up the Clinton vote by almost 50%.
This sort of election process flouts the enshrined “one man/woman, one vote” rule. rather it is a hybrid of the ordinary voter and a handful of special voters who can beknight a candidate and those happy few in the ordinary voter pool who agree with them.
The present Clinton delegate lead and the corporate media reporting that she is the “presumptive nominee” is part chimera as it is based very much on the SUPERdelegate regime and its establishment clique. Democratic Party; my foot.
Bernie Sanders in West Virginia has a 30-point lead in voter polls over Hillary Clinton for the May 10, 2016 primary. Yet they so far split the number of pledged SUPERdelegates though no votes have even been counted.
On April 26, 2016 Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania’s primary by 20% in the popular vote over Sanders yet was awarded 1,800% more in SUPERdelegate votes.
It should be expected that in states where Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and most of the PLEDGED delegates that she would pick up more of these SUPERdelegates.
Yet such was not the case in 2016 in New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Maine, “Dems Abroad,” Michigan, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island. In these 12 states (and one constituency) it was Bernie Sanders who won the popular vote and the most PLEDGED delegates but Clinton who picked up all or most of the SUPERdelegates – an additional 77 of them in fact.
In a nomination process for president based on delegate count –which delegates? – this kind of system appears or is “rigged.” Voting results in other states exacerbates the perception of politburo-like favoritism at the DNC and its SUPERdelegate regime. Namely, that when Clinton won the popular vote and most PLEDGED delegates she also still gained all or most of the SUPERdelegates. What gives, America?
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978), Freedom of Speech, 1943.
In all of April 26’s five primary states, Clinton picked up 63 SUPERdelegates and Bernie Sanders picked up one (in Maryland, a state he lost).
Sanders won over 1.1 million votes for his one SUPERdelegate and Clinton won about 27,000 votes for each of hers.
SUPERdelegates are where the action is!
If this is the manner in which the Democrats nominate their party’s presidential candidate it works as a deleterious effect for that candidate’s legitimacy for the general election.
Unfortunately, it is likely some or all of these wildly unfair SUPERdelegates will facilitate the nomination of either Sanders or Clinton unless one of those candidates achieves the magic number of 2,383 in PLEDGED delegates. This is a worthy goal which still remains possible – especially for Clinton.
There are 1209 PLEDGED delegates on the table in the final 14 contests and a much smaller indeterminate number of UNPLEDGED delegates (about 195).
Based on PLEDGED delegates, Hillary Clinton would need to win from this point onward 751 of them (62%) and Sanders 1084 of them (89%). These are high and higher electoral numbers for each so one of them secures 2383 in PLEDGED delegates.
Hillary’s challenge to go into the convention with enough PLEDGED delegates has an outside hope to be realistically achievable but it remains likely she will need SUPERdelegates to put her over the top as the party’s standard bearer.
So, if an incomplete slate of PLEDGED delegates is all one needs to be nominated, why not nominate Sanders?
Under this arcane and untrustworthy nominating system, Hillary appears to hold most of the political cards. Sanders can fight on and look to bargain for platform items but the Clinton people will be looking over his shoulder to his voters.
How many of Bernie’s voters do they need to win the general election in November? From that point, deals can be brokered. If Clintonites can peel off enough Bernie voters outright with corporate media-driven stories about party unity and fear mongering over Donald Trump, then any Clinton-Sanders deal may be difficult. But if enough Bernie supporters getting on board for Clinton is problematic –if they clamor for Sanders to be the nominee or on the ticket, or that more of their political beliefs be incorporated into the 2016 Democratic Party platform suchas on campaign finance reform, breaking up the big banks, free public university education, universal medical insurance, a fracking ban, a $15 minimum wage, etc.– all positions spurned by Clinton and her voters – then things should get hugely interesting in Philadelphia in July.
Further, for each of the 14 upcoming primary contests – from Indiana on May 3 to Washington, D.C. on June 14 – Clinton already has 106 SUPERdelegates committed to her candidacy (Bernie has 8). Not a single vote by the people has been counted in any of those places. Welcome to the party.
