Abbott Pattison - sculptor

 

Abbott Pattison, Winged Figure

This small bronze just caught my eye in the catalog of an upcoming  auction.  It has that same cheerful uplift that’s often seen in my father’s work.  Midwestern men of the same generation, both were medaled for combat in WW2 and then came home to begin careers in sculpture.  Both were skilled  in a variety of media, though it does appear that Pattison never carved wood and my father never worked metal.   The  big difference is that Pattison studied art at Yale while my father studied at Olivet - a tiny progressive liberal arts college in Michigan which at that time offered an Oxford style tutorial with a curriculum of great books.  The Jewish mythopoetic sculptor, Milton Horn,  was one of his tutors.

Richard Miller, 1975 

(rather Hellenistic, no ? - with a cast so sharp it looks like the original clay)

Yale encouraged Pattison to become an eclectic modernist sculptor.  Horn introduced my father to earlier practices.  Both would end up making pieces that were buoyant and sometimes goofy.

 

And both appeared in the first (and regrettably last) survey of contemporary American sculpture presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951.

 The jury included Robert Beverly Hale, then the Associate Curator of American Art at the Met and still famous for his lectures in anatomy on videotape. The sculptors on the jury included:  Donal Hord, Cecil Howard, Robert Laurent, Hugo Robus, David Smith, and William Zorach.

Pattison, Striding Man, 1948

Richard Miller, Bull

Pattison's Surrealistic, eviscerated, discombobulated man brings to mind the Chicago Monster Roster.  These post-war artists, some of them veterans,ike Leon Golub, reacted strongly against the upbeat figurative idealism of Fascist, Communist, and American public sculpture.

My father's piece is  more like art-deco.  But it isn't  merely decorative.  It feels cultic enough to belong in the ancient Middle Eastern temple or palace.

Milton Horn, Job, 1947

Horn's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust was also included in this exhibit.

Regretfully, this was the high point of my father's career. He was hired but soon fired from the Cincinnati Art Academy. He was too independent  to hold a teaching position at a reputable institution and he would get few commissions.

Pattison, however,soon  became Sculptor in Residence at the University of Georgia - where he produced the  2-ton, twelve foot monument shown below:

Abbott Pattison, Iron Horse, 1954

It caused quite a sensation on that  conservative campus.  Students vandalized it so often, it was eventually moved out to a farm where it stands today
 

Pattison: Fountain of the Great Lakes, Oak Brook

Lorado Taft, Fountain of the Great Lakes, 1913

Taft's version  offered the innocent play of unclothed sorority girls at a stately masque. Pattison has updated it by making them a bit more raucous -- and possibly drunk. Are they at some kind of feminist retreat deep in the woods?

 

Richard Miller, Noli me Tangere

Meanwhile, my father added a bit of whacky irreverence to outdoor festivities in this piece from the 1990's. 

 

It  may not have been possible for an American artist to get all that serious in the late 20th Century.

Le Marron Inconnu

 

 

 

Albert Mangones, Le Marron Inconnu, 1967

 

 This appears to be one of the great public statues of the 20th Century.

So full of power,  drama,  tension ...  and foreboding. (the figure displays violence, vigor, and appetite - a rather volatile combination). It commands the space around it ---  for as far as the eye can see. The poor young man has nothing but a loin cloth, a heavy knife, and conch shell of water.

And freedom.

It was made by an architect. This is his only sculpture to be found on the internet.

Amazing!

The Ed Johnson Memorial in Chattanooga Tennessee

 

 

 

 Jerome Meadows : The Ed Johnson Memorial (detail)

 

114 years before George Floyd was choked by a policeman in Minneapolis, Ed Johnson was lynched by a mob in Chattanooga.  If there's been any noticeable improvement in race relations over that century , it would be that  Floyd's death triggered  a national discussion about policing and social injustice. The perpetrator was convicted of murder. The Johnson lynching, however, seems to have been just one more episode in the use of terror to dismantle Reconstruction and establish apartheid across the South. A few of the leading perpetrators, including the sheriff, were convicted of contempt of court  and soon returned home as local heroes.

The above statuary group  memorializes that event.  With one foot on his noose, Johnson is shown as a spirit taking flight in front of the two African American attorneys shown behind him.  They appealed his case and and got a stay of execution from the Supreme Court. Despite that success, however, Johnson was dragged from jail and hung from a bridge, while the offices of the two attorneys were later burned and they were forced to flee the state.

 Belle Kinney  Scholz : General Alexander P. Stewart, 1915

Nine years after the lynching, The Daughters of the Confederacy funded the installation of the above bust of a Confederate general  in front of the very same county court house where Johnson was convicted by an all-white jury.

Not a very subtle message, was it ?

It's a fine statue - at least from this view.  It was executed by one of the many female students of the great Chicago sculptor, Laredo Taft.  Nearly 100 confederate statues were removed across the South in 2020 - and this should have been one of them.  Its connection to lynching, racial injustice, and white supremacy is rather blatant. It certainly does not belong in front of a court house that should be dispensing equal justice to all.  Regretfully,  however, local authorities recently voted to keep it there.

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So it's good that the community will now experience that injustice from another point of view.

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This is a positive, uplifting, almost religious  monument. Johnson steps on his noose just as a saint might present the weapons that martyred  her. Their power has been defeated because spirit is immortal.

Jerome Meadows, the artist,  does not specialize in figurative sculpture.  This monument is unique in his oeuvre. But he is an inventive, thoughtful,  and aesthetic creator. He saw what he needed to be done and he found the means to do it. 

His three figures stand like a grove of trees - their legs rooted to the ground, their bodies rising up to the sky -- their arms gently swaying like branches in the wind. They are far more pleasant than the rather ugly old iron bridge beside it.

I would like to have seen more inner power in the heads - but these may be the first life size heads Meadows has ever modeled.

The back side of the monument leads down to the Tennessee River.

The see-through silhouetted standing figures recalls the Haitian folk sculpture cut from oil barrels.

One of the figures represents Johnson, the other represents Alfred Blount who was lynched there in 1893. 

This is another one of the finalists for the memorial's design.

Presumably, the figurative relief was optional.

This was the third finalist

Likewise, the four other figures must have been optional

Having a taste for neither bombast nor cartoonish melodrama, I'm glad that Meadows won the competition.

He tells the story - but he also transcends it.