Day 254 - Truth and Research

July 15, 2021

Gallery 701 serves largely as a corridor to the American Wing Cafe and is home to a number of well-known Tiffany windows. One of these, a view of Oyster Bay framed by wisteria vines, was, I learn, commissioned for the New York town house of one William Skinner as a reminder of Wistariahurst, his family estate in Holyoke, MA!  It's strange to think of Holyoke, now one of the most depressed cities in the state, as having residents with that kind of wealth, but I suppose that at the end of the 19th century, its mills were humming and its economy thriving 

 I suspect that these  windows are all that many visitors look at en route to lunch.  That would be too bad, because the gallery has a number of works that are interesting from a history of culture perspective, if nothing else. For instance, there's a marble relief that Jacob Schiff commissioned Saint-Gaudens to sculpt of his two young children, named (unfortunately) Frieda Fanny and Mortimer Leo.  Only the best for this Jewish plutocrat.  There are elaborate mosaic panels from the sign that used to stand above the Tiffany showroom on Madison around 44th Street; these panels must have signaled to passers-by the quality (and priciness) of the works within. There's a staircase that Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler designed for the Chicago Stock Exchange Building, which was built in 1893-4 and demolished in 1971. (Now why was that  torn down, I wonder)?  And there's a stained glass window by a Prairie School architect (not Frank Lloyd Wright) that reminds me a great deal of a restaurant I saw in Prague that had its fin-de-siecle ornamentation intact; I suppose both the Prairie School and the Vienna Succession had a common ancestor in the Arts and Crafts movement. 

The gallery feels a bit like a collection of curiosities, and nothing is more curious than today's works,  two  bronzed plaster panels entitled "Truth" and "Research" that were designed by Otis Levi Warner and Herbert Adams and date to 1896-1898.  The panels are models for two bronze door panels at an entrance to the Library of Congress. Unsurprisingly, the two concepts are represented as women (very white women) in  Greco-Roman goddess-y garb. "Truth" holds a mirror and a snake, which are supposed to be symbols of accurate observation and of wisdom, respectively, although in fact, the image makes me think of Cleopatra holding the asp. Kind of bizarre, especially the snake. (Yes, the snake represents knowledge - but of what kind? Surely the sculptors knew the Adam and Eve story!)  "Research" is more conventionally depicted  raising a torch in her left hand.  What is of particular interest to me about these models is that for years they adorned the library in Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn! (Now, I suppose, it's the "learning center" in the "Erasmus Hall Educational Complex.") So there was a time when school children of New York were thought to be worthy of having good (or at least inspirational) art around them. There's no indication of when or why the panels were removed. Were they seen as no longer "culturally relevant"(not that they ever were!)? Still, their removal strikes me as rather sad.

 

May 5, 2024

In reviewing this entry, I realize that I have no idea what I meant by my comment about "cultural relevance." That the figures are white women in classical dress and in no way represent the diversity of the school's population? Yet surely we are all share the ideals these images symbolize. Nonetheless, I'm reluctant to delete my snarky comment of three years ago.