"Remove Not the Ancient Landmark"

Public Monuments and Moral Values

Donald Martin Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367700713
• eBook ISBN: 9781000340402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

First published in 1996, "Remove Not the Ancient Landmark" explores the ways that public monuments symbolize and convey moral values. It analyzes the roles that monuments have always played and the influence they continue to exert on societies around the world. The book also explores the origins and nature of humanity in light of the monuments.

PART I

1. Introduction

Donald Martin Reynolds

“Remove Not the Ancient Landmark”: Public Monuments and Moral Values explores the ways that public monuments symbolize and convey values. The essayists analyze the roles that monuments have always played and the influence they continue to exert on societies around the world. In Part I essayists explore the origins and nature of humanity in light of the monuments we have inherited.

From the ordinary human being’s need to memorialize individuals to society’s acknowledgment of noble ideas and great achievements, art historian E. J. Johnson, chairman, Department of Art at Williams College, illustrates the breadth and richness of the ways in which monuments operate. He scans the broad spectrum of traditional as well as avant garde forms to illustrate the variety of monumental expression throughout the world from antiquity to modern times. James Ackerman, professor of Fine Arts (retired), Harvard University, discusses three major forms of public monuments in antiquity—the arch, the column, and the equestrian statue—and their later adaptations. In view of their identification with autocratic power, he sees their demise as symbols a hopeful sign for the future of humanity.

In defining monument, Wayne R. Dynes, professor of art history at Hunter College, traces its origins to antiquity and its duality as written word and permanent structure. He shows that the monumental tradition answers a perennial need expressed in both physical and verbal monuments. Moreover, he shows that they both record the nobility of human action in ritual sanctified by the values of society, and they thereby assist our own survival.

Ian Tattersall, chairman, Department of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, explains that the urge to monumentality was born more than 100,000 years ago with the human species’ achievement of anatomical modernity. Long dormant within the primitive psyche, the human capacity for creativity and self-expression awaited the appropriate cultural, technological, and economic stimuli. Among the earliest ritualized and symbolical activities were the burials of Neanderthals. Demonstrating the human capacity of caring for another and suggesting the belief in an afterlife, Neanderthal burials may have been humankind’s first monuments.

In developing a psychology of public monuments that articulates what monuments represent, how they are perceived and appreciated, why they are built, and what inspires their creation, Murray Schane, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, illustrates the significance of that psychology today. Moreover, he shows that the dualism existing in the field of psychotherapy parallels the gulf between the individual and society that is expressed by public monuments. In his analysis of the monument to Raphell Lakowitz at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York City, Dr. Schane demonstrates how that psychology explains the divide between the self as its own creation and the self as created and sustained by society.

Mary Mothersill, chairman, Department of Philosophy, Barnard College, explores what is asked of a public monument—what it conveys, and how and when its message is true or false. Establishing four categories in which to consider public monuments, she analyzes the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. as a successful example of what a monument is supposed to be: a beautiful memorial with an important message.

Art historian Donald Martin Reynolds, founder and director of The Monuments Conservancy, discusses the significance of public monuments as embodiments of human values and how monuments establish a continuity with the past and with the rest of creation. He relates how New York City’s “Monuments to Neglect” inspired the establishment of The Monuments Conservancy, Inc., a not-for-profit foundation, whose mission is to perpetuate the integration of public monuments into the community through a policy of education and preservation.

Alarmed by the widespread destruction of objects by improper and irresponsible restoration sweeping the art world in recent years, James Beck, professor of art history at Columbia University, proposes a “Bill of Rights” for works of art to assure their protection. Citing examples of well-known works recently restored, Professor Beck shows the need for such guidelines.

David Rosand, professor of art history at Columbia University, focuses on the city of Venice as a monument whose survival is threatened by the elements as well as by improper restoration techniques. Ironically, Professor Rosand surmises, the lagoon that liberates its architecture from defensive responsibility allowing its unique openness of design is the ecological source of its ultimate disintegration. Discussions of Sansovíno’s Logetta and frescos by such masters as Giorgione illustrate the vulnerability of Venice’s monuments not only to the waters of the Adriatic but also to the devices of modern restoration.

In analyzing a selection of monuments erected in several new countries born since World War II, historian Oleg Grabar of the Institute for Advanced Study, links East and West, past and present. Many of those countries combined traditional forms or invented new ones in creating some outstanding monuments to express the aspirations, feelings, and needs of their existing societies. Thus, Professor Grabar reveals, it is possible to create a monument out of life and not only out of death. Moreover, monuments project social values within Third World countries in the same ways that they do in Western countries.

One of the most distinguished and impressive monuments to American sculpture is Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina. Joseph Veach Noble, Brookgreen’s chairman emeritus of the board of trustees, sketches the garden’s history and discusses the display of the sculpture collection there and some of the major pieces and their creators.

Part I concludes with a tribute to Rudolf Wittkower, in which the late Howard McParlin Davis, professor of art history at Columbia University, analyzes the tomb of Urban VIII in St. Peter’s in Rome, which links past expression to present day interpretations of values.

“Remove Not the Ancient Landmark …”

“Remove not the ancient landmark, which your fathers set up” is a biblical imperative from the twenty-second chapter of the Book of Proverbs, one of the sapiential books of the Old Testament. The verse refers to the piles of stones in ancient Palestine that served as fences or landmarks that defined each family’s ancestral land claims. Removing those landmarks was a most serious matter then, as the neglect and destruction of our public monuments is today.

Part II moves from a concentration on the celebration and perpetuation of public monuments to a consideration of the neglect and destruction of our public monuments. The mass destruction of monuments in Russia following the dissolution of the USSR and the removal and transformation of monuments in twentieth-century Germany illustrate that alternative, while the creation of new monuments and the preservation of historical memorials and sites underscores the salutary benefits derived from their celebration and perpetuation.

In Russia the world was witnessing the most widespread revolution against totalitarian government it had ever seen. Many people are still destroying its monuments, as if to expunge the evil of atheistic communism from the face of the earth by removing its landmarks. A cluster of those broken statues lies on a lawn near Gorky Park in Moscow, where they were dubbed “Sculpture of the servants of the totalitarian regime.”¹ They included the colossal bronze statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the State Police; busts of Khrushchev, Molotov, and Stalin; Sverdlov’s statue from the Square of the Revolution; and a seated Kalinan from the Metropol Hotel. A few blocks away, Lenin towers over October Square. The future of his mausoleum, which has stood next to the Kremlin Wall in Red Square for six-and-one-half decades, is uncertain.

Destroying monuments is not new. Since ancient times, conquerors have destroyed their predecessors’ icons and monuments. But because monuments are measures of humanity’s journey along the road of civilization, cooler heads caution the iconoclast: “What is past is prologue,” as Shakespeare reminds us with characteristic wisdom. There are those of us who ask that some of those monuments be preserved and that they become the subjects of ongoing research and study, so future generations will be reminded of the tyranny of atheistic communism in order to prevent its return.²

Looking at those “discarded monuments to lost ideals” piled up in Gorky Park, a Russian psychiatrist, Konstantin Danilin, said, “Of course, this is a disgrace. They should all be in some museum to the past, where something could be learned, not just discarded like this.”³ An old man with his grandson also examined the wreckage: “No, I can’t say this is good. We trashed the old statues, now we’ve trashed these, then we’ll be trashing the next ones. There’s got to be a better way to do it. Toppling old statues is easy and satisfying. But, if they are simply added to the litter of history, nothing has been achieved.”⁴

Richard S. Wortman, professor of history at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, explains how the Russian autocracy used statues to present its changing imagery in the late 19th and 20th centuries. His examination of major monuments during that period provides useful insights into the current widespread demolition of public monuments in the former Soviet Union. Illustrating the remarkable ideological change now taking place in Russia, the Russian-American sculptor Ernst Neizvestny explains his monuments to the Russian martyrs under Stalinism currently being erected in the Ural Mountains. What will be the fate of these monuments should communism return?

Removing monuments to revise history is an action not relegated to the former USSR. John Czaplicka, assistant professor of fine arts at Harvard University, demonstrates that the monuments erected under the state socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic of this century were threatened or destroyed when that regime fell. Removing monuments is one way of revising history. If the monument no longer exists, perhaps the era it represents will also be forgotten.

Even cemetery monuments, usually the most endearing because they are personal rather than ideological, must be preserved through celebration. Jonathan Fairbanks, curator of American sculpture at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, focuses on the eternal celebration he finds in America’s funerary memorials. He analyzes the maturing of American sculpture expressed in the nation’s funerary monuments in the Romantic cemeteries from 1830 to 1930, while journalist and author Jean-Rae Turner reviews key memorials in Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey. Her study led to the cemetery’s designation as a National Historic Site. Lenore Lakowitz, founder and chairperson of the Raphell Sims Lakowitz Memorial Foundation, then shows how a monument can inspire the celebration and preservation of the values it embodies.

Sculptor Richard McDermott Miller, past president of the National Academy of Design, explores the coexistence of abstraction and representation in the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and Stanley Bleifeld, sculptor and past president of the National Sculpture Society, discusses his sculpture for the United States Navy Memorial in the nation’s capital. Both of these monuments reflect the desire to find enduring expressions that will outlive ideology, history, and changing taste.

Stephen Murray, professor of art history at Columbia University, is concerned with the interaction between the idea of the unbuilt cathedral as monument and the reality of construction, essential components in the celebration of the great Gothic Cathedrals of the Middle Ages. He addresses the dialectics of the social, economic, and political burdens that come along with that interaction.

* * *

By commemorating specific people, deeds, and events, monuments symbolize and convey systems of values. To encourage the exploration of the dynamic between monuments and values, on March 21, 1991, a symposium in New York convened authorities from various fields. This book is derived from that and the 1992 symposium. The symposium is now held annually, thanks to the generosity of Samuel Dorsky,⁵ and it meets on the first day of spring to symbolize the role of public monuments in the life of society.

Conceived and organized by the editor, the annual symposium is dedicated to the eminent authority on Baroque art and architecture, Rudolf Wittkower. The first symposium was held on the twentieth anniversary of his death. Because public monuments are interdisciplinary by nature, the symposium is an appropriate tribute to Rudolf Wittkower, who decried specialization.

Wittkower encouraged interdisciplinary collaboration throughout his career, which followed his interests from Quattrocento painting to Baroque sculpture and the history of architecture. His spirit of collaborative scholarship dates from his very first publications. Indeed, his first five books were the work of collaboration. He wrote two books, Born Under Saturn (1963) and The Divine Michelangelo (1964), with his wife Margot, his lifetime helpmate and partner. The last course he gave at Columbia University, just before he retired in 1969, was “The Impact of Non-European Civilizations on the Art of the West.”

It is that spirit of collaborative inquiry, so much a part of Rudolf Wittkower’s life and work, that infuses this book.

NOTES

1. 1. Serge Schmemann, “The Old Order, Like Its Idols, is Toppled, but the Victors Find Words of Bereavement,” New York Times, September 4, 1991, p. A13.
2. 2. One effort is being organized by two Russian-American artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. They are developing a program to save the monuments but to change their meaning. They wish to leave the monuments at their sites but to transform them through art into history lessons, which show the evils of the totalitarian tradition they symbolize. (Author’s interviews with Vitaly Komar, during the spring and fall of 1992; see also Vladimir Ryabsky, “Varied Approach to the ‘Iron Felix’,” New Times, p. 46–47). Along these lines, concerning the continued maintenance of Lenin’s body, see Serge Schmemann, “Preserving Lenin, the High-Tech Icon,” New York Times, December 17, 1991, p. A14.
3. 3. Schmemann, “The Old Order…,” p. A13.
4. 4. Ibid. See also Craig R. Whitney, “Russians Are at a Loss For a Respectful Word,” New York Times, September 9, 1991, p. A8. For international implications, see Clifford Krauss, “Ethiopians Rejoice at Fall of Rulers,” New York Times, May 24, 1991, p. 1, and “In Former East Berlin, It’s Off With Lenin’s Head” New York Times, November 14, 1991, p. A3.
5. 5. Samuel Dorsky operated his own art gallery in New York City from 1964 until his death in 1994. In addition to dealing in contemporary art, he contributed works to universities and colleges to provide students with close and ongoing exposure to contemporary art. He supported many artists over the years in a variety of ways, from direct purcha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Part I
• Part II
• Index