CHAPTER FIVE

_OVERSEAS ART_

Gutzon left California in 1890 accompanied by his wife and forty unsold canvases. He was fairly happy. He had made a little money, he had learned something about art and he had a growing circle of friends in California. On the other hand, he gave little evidence that he might be something other than one more simple art student from the Pacific coast. That is what makes his progress remarkable.

He stopped in Omaha to visit with his father and, almost unaccountably, left a pile of his canvases with a Mr. Leininger, a dealer and patron of art. It is a little difficult now to identify or appraise these works. This is a pity, for, good or bad, expensive or cheap, they all seem to have found somebody who loved them. They never came back to haunt his garret, nor, for that matter, did the ones we are told he sold “at an exhibition in New York.”

There is little known about the “exhibition in New York” except that Mrs. Frémont, the general’s widow, had been informed of it. She wrote a note to the one person in New York who might be able to give a lift to the young artist. And that’s how Gutzon met Theodore Roosevelt, then Police Commissioner, who became a lasting friend.

Through some similar effort Gutzon also met Collis P. Huntington, one of the builders of the Southern Pacific railroad. Their encounter would be of no interest here save for the example it gave of the young man’s purpose and directness and of his confidence in himself. Huntington, impressed by Gutzon’s work and charm as well as his friends, wanted to know what he could do to help him. Gutzon shook his head and smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “When I get through with this exhibition I’m going to Paris to study art.”

This was something new to Huntington--as it would have been to any art patron in New York. “I am amazed,” he said. “Almost nobody comes to see me that doesn’t want me to do something for them.” He bowed and went away and Gutzon never saw him again.

* * * * *

Gutzon sailed on the _Bourgogne_ with plenty of hope and the proceeds of his art sales in Omaha and New York. He admitted that he felt proud of himself. He had been out of St. Mary’s seven years.

In 1891 a description of him was included in a passport issued by the U. S. Embassy in Paris and signed by Whitelaw Reid. It gave his age as twenty-four years; stature, 5 feet, 8½ inches; forehead, broad; eyes, gray; nose, regular; mouth, medium; chin, round; hair, dark; complexion, dark; face, oval--and it is a matter of great puzzlement to one who knew Gutzon for forty years. It shows the picture of a somewhat thin, energetic young man of dark complexion, regular features, broad forehead and no great height. Yet, not until he had read this record did an old friend realize that Borglum’s complexion was anything save that contrived by weather and wind. Even more astoundingly came the revelation that Gutzon was less than six feet in height. He looked to be taller.

Nobody seems to have found much about Gutzon’s art studies in Europe worth recording. He passed two years in Paris, studying at the Julien Académie, at the École des Beaux Arts and under individual masters. He exhibited in the Old Salon as a painter in 1891 and 1892. His picture called “Clouds” attracted some attention. In 1891, through a deliveryman’s mistake, a piece of bronze was taken to the New Salon. It was accepted by the New Salon, which made him a member of the society.

The notice informing him of this unexpected honor was followed by a personal letter of congratulation written by the celebrated painter Puvis de Chavannes, who had succeeded Meissonier as president of the Salon. Borglum’s work of sculpture was called “Death of the Chief” (_Mort du Chef_) and represented a horse with lowered head beside the body of a dead Indian. A copy of the group was unveiled in Los Angeles in 1947.

The great experience of Gutzon’s life in Paris was meeting and forming a friendship with Auguste Rodin. He said afterward that it wasn’t a new experience. “It was rather a feeling of coming home,” he said, and finding something he had dimly sensed in himself and was trying to express. Rodin at the time was having trouble with the Academicians and would follow a long road before being acclaimed the great master the world now recognizes. Gutzon’s attitude toward life was much the same. He was also committed to a long quarrel with that state of mind which accepts stereotyped standards and resists change or improvement. Gutzon wrote this about Rodin:

I hold Rodin to be one of the great individuals of history. He was one of the rarest souls of whom we have any record during the last 3,000 years. He is passing and there will be nothing left to speak for this man, who stands with Phidias, Donatello, Rembrandt and Shakespeare, but a trail of broken fancies. The nineteenth century has made no adequate use of his incomparable gifts.

He quoted Rodin’s remarks as recorded by M. Gsell in his book about the master:

To any real artist worthy of the name, all nature is beautiful, because the eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in a book, the inner truth. Not a feature deceives him. Hypocrisy is as transparent as truth. The beauty of the Greek ideal is ever present and there is as much loveliness in the human form today as when Phidias immortalized his race. But this loveliness is passing into oblivion unrecorded, because the artists of today are blind. That is all the difference.

Whether or not we follow what Rodin said, there is no doubt that Gutzon did. He brought home with him from Europe nothing that so continuously affected his life. Again he writes of Rodin:

Rodin meant more. He meant what I will add. The artists have not seen, nor felt, nor understood the present, although they still seem to appreciate the beauty of the Greek.

Great emotion, with great understanding, again united with mastery over medium, are indispensable in the production of masterpieces in song, form or color. Prophetic insight, coupled with great love and trained to be a master in one of the mediums which the human race has invented or discovered to express itself, is lost in our day, as Rodin laments.

This paragraph seems to sum up Gutzon Borglum’s position on the matter of art expression, and it explains his reaction to much of what is called Modern Art. Years afterward he augmented it with another bit of learning out of his two years of study in France. At a meeting in honor of the French during the First World War he said:

France has been a foster mother and I shall always remember her, as Hugo put it, as my second birthplace, because to be “educated in another place is to be reborn there.”

So I was born in France at Auvers-sur-Oise. Here at Auvers I had a quiet little home and for three years grubbed and labored with my stubborn Americanism.

Finally I returned to America after having tried while there to acquire French art. And then it came to me in an hour. I shall never forget that hour. It came to me that the value and greatness of French influence are in their superiority and their devotion to the “inspiration” and not special concern for technique.

France has taught me respect for the sincere effort of other men, courage in my own, and that originality lies in being true to one’s self.

I learned that what is known as “French Art” is not the art which has placed France as art mistress of the modern world. Rather, it is Millet, Corot, Rousseau, Chavannes. It is not the Parisian article, any more than it was Falguière or any other dozens of masters of the technique, but Rodin and Dalou who helped French sculpture to its high place in our century and fixed France with the ancients.

Gutzon was not a pupil of Rodin, but he was a frequent visitor in his studio. He used to tell of watching Rodin make quantities of water-color sketches of his model, who was allowed to sit at ease and to change her position as she wished. He gave Gutzon some of these sketches, which have been preserved. They are inscribed “A mon ami, Borglum” and signed “Rodin.” Letters from him across the years have also been kept. During the First World War, when Paris was being bombed, Gutzon invited Rodin to come to the United States and use his studio in Stamford. Rodin declined and said he had decided to find refuge in Rome.

During this early period in Europe, Gutzon also passed an interesting year in Spain about which his American friends seem to have known very little. As a record of his stay, many spirited sketches of bullfights are still extant. One of them is owned by O. R. McGuire, the art connoisseur of Washington, D. C. He also made a copy of Velasquez’ portrait of the court jester, and a wood carving done by Gregory Pardo, pupil of Michelangelo, in the Toledo cathedral. His studies of Cortez’ conquest in Mexico and the tragic fate of the Aztecs made a deep impression on him.

He prepared background sketches for a large painting which he started on his return to California. It depicted the gray dawn on the broken causeway of Mexico City when the soldiers of Cortez were floundering against the Aztecs in the gap. The episode, known to history as _noche triste_, was a subject that haunted Gutzon through his life. But although he first planned his picture of it for exhibition at the Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, he seems never to have finished it.

Other sidelights of his year in Spain are found in a letter to Mrs. J. Seddon of Hollywood who bought a painting labeled “Don T., Toledo, Sept. 1892.” She had written to him for information about it, and his reply to her query was this:

I am very much interested in the picture, and I have wondered what had become of it. It ought to be in good condition, for it was honestly and well painted.

It is the portrait of a Catholic priest, Don Tomas, pronounced To-mass. He was the canon in charge of the great cathedral in Toledo, a remarkable little man, very kindly and friendly, but he belonged to the period of Philip II. He was extremely fond of bullfights. He and I attended them regularly.

I first started to paint him smoking a cigarette, but when he saw it, he threw the cigarette away and said it was undignified for a priest. He is sitting in the outer room, the library room, which forms the entrance to the Council Chamber where some 250,000 more or less heretics and Protestants were tried, burned, exiled or condemned to the galleys. The chamber beyond was like a court, surrounded with seats against the wall in which the judges sat. Into the middle of the room, the victim, or the accused, was brought.

I don’t remember much of the carving of the background, but the room was richly carved by Gregory Pardo, pupil of Michelangelo. The work was done between 1549 and 1551, and this particular chamber is called the Sala Capitula and was executed under orders of the Archbishop of Toledo and in the reign of Philip II.

Gutzon returned from Spain to California in 1893 and brought a bit of the Old World with him. He arrived to find a matter seemingly awaiting his attention, as most matters did--the restoration of California’s Spanish missions. It cannot be said that Gutzon Borglum ever came to lavish his indignation over affairs with which he was unfamiliar, and admittedly he was indignant over no small number or variety of them before he died. In this instance he found a battlefield made to order, because he had been studying the old records of the Spanish missions in Spain.

His argument about the course and methods of the restoration became his first recorded controversy, and was dragged out and redebated every time he had a disagreement with somebody about something else. But, for all that, it wasn’t much of a fight.

Charles Lummis, the editor, was at the head of a group of Californians interested in restoring the ruined missions. He appears to have been somewhat irritated when Gutzon came home from Spain and demanded an important share in the work. The reconstruction plans, the sculptor declared blithely, were prodigiously wrong. Incensed by this, Lummis wrote several angry letters to Gutzon. Gutzon, never at a loss for words, replied in kind. Unfortunately, some steps in the correspondence seem to be lacking. There is no indication of how this battle came to be resolved; however, the strong language presently ceased. Gutzon got his way about the methods that should be pursued in restoring the buildings, and he and Lummis became close friends. It appears that many of Borglum’s arguments turned out that way.

Gutzon’s most important comment on the California missions never saw the light until some time around 1927, when he was discussing the missions of Texas. He wrote:

In the winter of 1893-1894 we organized in California the Association for the Preservation of the Franciscan Missions, founded or built by the followers of Junípero Serra. In preparing for that work I made a trip to Spain and spent a year there studying the Spanish civilization and securing the records of Junípero Serra’s work in the New World, some original publications and the records of the building of the missions.

On my return I recovered and re-established the boundaries of perhaps the most beautiful ruins in America, San Juan Capistrano, thirty or forty miles from Los Angeles and the only mission I hold that is comparable to the San Jose Mission near San Antonio, Texas. With the help of Indians who carried the dirt on their backs, I removed the debris from the dome of the main church which had fallen in during the earthquake of 1812, destroying some life. Under the debris we found diamond-shaped flagging that formed the floor. I made careful drawings of all the buildings, the pilasters and cornices in place, cut beautifully by the Spaniards, much of it of limestone.

In this work we came suddenly face to face with the very serious question of how far we could go in the matter of reconstruction--what constituted human rights in the work of restoration, retouching and rebuilding, how much of our work would immediately become vandalism--how far could we go without meddling with the form and design and the actual work of the men who built these fine structures. After much debate, the kind of debate that took place in Rome many years later, it was determined that we must do nothing more than save and preserve the work as we found it.

Where we found a stone that clearly had fallen out and where it was recognizable, we might replace it. But to rebuild or in any way reconstruct or restore what we conceived might have been the character of the building at the time, all agreed would be vandalism. There is no question that the Franciscan missions are still a live subject of interest because they are not buried under modern debris of cement and make-believe restoration. The late Charles F. Lummis, president of the association since 1894, was adamant in his resolution against any meddling with the ancient methods of the work.

Of his art studies during this formative period Gutzon wrote:

As I became acquainted with the masterpieces in the fine arts, I soon became aware that a landscape painter could not draw or paint horses, cattle or sheep; that a cow painter could not paint a convincing landscape equal to his cow painting as a matter of creative production. The same applied to figure painting. I made up my mind that I should master each of these subjects, and I began at once. As I painted and drew almost exclusively in my first twenty years of art work, I drew and painted incessantly dogs, cattle, horses, portraits, figures, and never had to turn to a fellow artist and ask him to draw my figure or cow or horse or sheep.

Reflection on this caused me to note that most men, as well as artists, were one-track minded--that the average layman knew nothing of art, nor the place in civilization held by the masters of the fine arts, or even that civilization in its crudest forms was solely the product of the arts, or that the reaching urge in all civilization was the expressed mood of nature, seeking through them an outlet.

The reaching, enveloping soul of musical harmonies is the prelude to an understanding of the creative impulse. And again, who is insensible to the tremendous power of words? The marriage of words? The Milky Way of words which language conjures up and creates? Who has not been conscious of the strange beauty of words ancient as Lancelot--of heart, love, soul loneliness, craving and conflict? And as these thoughts grew on me I became aware that the circle of any human group was too small to live deeply within; that all moods of life were something alive in the cosmic in which the creative mind moves in limitless orbit, sensitive to every impression; that the larger the spoken language, the greater, more comprehending became one’s expression.

Gutzon, in this period, was no finished sculptor. He did some work with stone and metal--but sporadically--for some three years. He painted tirelessly. He was back at Sierra Madre, and life was placid and pleasant.

His friends made much of the Baldwin ranch. Mrs. Frémont had already sent to him there, before he went abroad, young Philip Rollins, who became his lifelong friend. Rollins was much interested in horses and in pictures. He had seen a painting of Gutzon’s in Mrs. Frémont’s possession which he said was worth a thousand Corots. “I have never looked so far into the sky in any painting,” he said. And he brought that admiration into his friendship.

In San Francisco Gutzon had a little trouble with the estate of Leland Stanford. Mr. Stanford, during his lifetime, had ordered three pictures from Gutzon, who was then in Paris. One of these was a small canvas priced at $500, accepted and paid for. The others were larger. Stanford accepted them but died before any payment had been made.

Rollins brought suit against the estate for Borglum, but the claim was rejected. The widow declared that there was no written contract. Mrs. Frémont was much incensed and wrote Gutzon a very gossipy letter about the worth of widows who needed written contracts.

In 1896 Borglum left California again, expecting to settle in England. His last act before leaving was to model a bust of his dear friend and patron Mrs. Frémont. A photograph of the bust is the frontispiece of Mrs. Phillip’s biography of Mrs. Frémont and is credited to “John Gutzon Borglum, 27 years old, painter and sculptor, recently returned from Spain, following his triumphs in the Paris salons of 1891 and 1892.”

What Borglum thought of this credit he does not say. He was headed for a permanent berth in a foreign country, and for once he didn’t seem to be quite certain of where he was going.