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Bruce Schwarz
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Contact: Rick Kendall, 603-477-9301
Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park announces the debut of a new traveling exhibition featuring the work of two of American history’s most distinguished sculptors. “Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French” includes several pieces that have never or seldom been on exhibit before. The national tour opens in Alabama on May 31 and will travel to additional sites over the next two years.In the late 19th and early 20th century, the powerful sculptures of Saint-Gaudens and French shaped the visual and intellectual landscape of the nation during the post-Civil War era. From Saint-Gaudens’s Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial in Boston and the designs for the 1907 US gold coinage, to French’s The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, and Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, both sculptors produced works that are among the best known and most revered sculptures in the country.
“Despite being friends, correspondents, and occasionally rivals for commissions, Saint-Gaudens and French have never been the subject of a major exhibition that examines their intersecting significance,” said Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park Superintendent Rick Kendall. “We are grateful for the partnerships that have made this exhibition possible.”
Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, Chesterwood, and the American Federation of the Arts collaborated to organize the traveling exhibition. It features approximately eighty works, including sculptures, paintings, gold coins and etchings, by Saint-Gaudens, French, and their contemporaries, drawn primarily from the collections at Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park and Chesterwood. Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in N.H. maintains the largest collection of Saint-Gaudens artwork in the world and operates as a museum of fine arts. It also preserves his home, studios, and gardens. Chesterwood, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is French’s former summer home, studio, and gardens in Massachusetts and holds a large collection of his artwork. The exhibit showcases how the artists and their works shaped and reflected America’s complicated negotiation of national identity in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression.
Visitors to “Monuments and Myths” are introduced to the artists’ studios and the diverse group of models, assistants, carvers, and casters who were vital to their practices. The next part of the exhibition examines how their monuments and architectural sculptures were designed to communicate ideas of national identity in civic spaces. Subsequent sections consider the artists’ portraits and decorative arts alongside the cultural norms of their patrons and clients, and showcases funerary monuments, detailing America’s shifting attitudes towards public mourning. The final section focuses on the sculptors’ portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Civil War memorials, subsuming some of the best-known artworks in American visual culture, including French’s Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial and examples derived from Saint-Gaudens’s Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment Memorial.
“Monuments and Myths” is accompanied by a new scholarly catalogue, with contributions by Renee Ater, Dalton Alves, Philip Deloria, Donna Hassler and Dana Pilson, Kelvin Parnell Jr., Thayer Tolles, and National Park Service Director Chuck Sams. These essays probe the intersections of these artists and their works and pose questions on race and representation, America’s position on the global stage, evolving norms of sex, labor, and class, and the weight of America’s past. Major support for the catalogue has been provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Support for the exhibition and the publication has been provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
After opening at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University on May 31, 2023, the exhibition will travel to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee (March 1 – May 27, 2024), the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (June 29, 2024 – January 5, 2025), and the Brunnier Art Museum, University Museums at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa (February 8 – May 18, 2025).
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ABOUT THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE. More than 20,000 National Park Service employees care for America’s 424 national parks and work with communities across the nation to help preserve local history and create close-to-home recreational opportunities. Learn more at http://www.nps.gov/
ABOUT SAINT-GAUDENS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK. Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish, New Hampshire, preserves the home, gardens, and studios of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The property was his summer residence from 1885 to 1897, his permanent home from 1900 until his death in 1907, and the center of the Cornish Art Colony. Original sculptures are on exhibit, along with reproductions of his greatest masterpieces. The estate was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1962, and in 1964 Congress authorized the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park as a unit of the National Park Service. For further information, visit the park’s website: www.nps.gov/saga.
Last updated: February 13, 2025