NCAS Letter to the Commission of Fine Arts: The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Sculpture
Mr. Thomas Luebke
Secretary
Commission of Fine Arts
441 F Street, NW, Suite 312
Washington, DC 20001
Re: Statue of Martin Luther King, Jr.
June 16, 2008
Dear Mr. Luebke,
The National Civic Art Society, which is dedicated to the perpetuation of the Founders’ vision of the national capital, wishes to comment on the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington’s monumental core. We believe these observations will be relevant to the commission’s evaluation of a revised sculptural concept at its meeting this week.
We concur with the concerns the commission raised in its April 25 letter to Mr. Lawler of the National Park Service about the model the commission reviewed that month. We also believe the statue of Dr. King must meet a very high standard. And we are convinced that both Dr. King’s legacy and the monumental core are going to get short shrift unless the modeling of the statue takes a radically different tack from what we’ve seen to date.
The pose of the model presented in April is unacceptably crude, and the commission’s comments in that regard in its letter to Mr. Lawler require no elaboration. The modeling, moreover, is unacceptably superficial, given the sculptor’s obviously excessive reliance on photographs. We must question whether the sculptor is capable of rectifying this glaring defect. The esthetically as well as anatomically informed interpretation of a compatible model or models is clearly alien to his outlook and method. Such an approach would endow Dr. King’s statue with a much more evocative characterization of the man, conveying a sense of his embodied state in a powerful, visceral way. What we have seen so far is pathological oversimplification, readily evident in the King model’s leaden, inarticulate surfaces.
Dr. King’s statue belongs in the American civic pantheon along with the George Washington statues by both Houdon and J.Q.A. Ward — the latter’s is situated on the steps of Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan — Daniel Chester French’s Lincoln on the Mall, and Augustus Saint Gaudens’ relief portraits in the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on the Boston Common. This approach has nothing to do with the production of touched-up, quasi-photographic “Social Realist” images, but rather involves the creation of a monumental sculptural topography, in which every mass and space, every surface plane reinforces the overall design.
The King model we’ve seen is worrisomely devoid of such organic complexity. And a statue 28 feet in height bearing its defects will have a disastrous impact on the surrounding landscape. It will appear bloated and pharaonic — more appropriate to the Emperor Nero than to Dr. King. We also urge the commission to be mindful that monumentality and size are two very different things. Monumentality is a matter of scale, or the interrelationship of parts. A monumental statue of Dr. King is what’s in order, not one that is merely big.
And while we have no objection in principle to the idea of having the figure of Dr. King emerge from the Stone of Hope, the commission should bear in mind that this idea does entail the risk of trivial sculptural pyrotechnics, as opposed to the masterful engagement with the human form in the statues Michelangelo left unfinished.
In conclusion, the King statue presently runs the risk of being an exercise in kitsch — a simulacrum of traditional representational sculpture devoid of substance. In our opinion, the model the commission reviewed in April clearly demonstrates that Dr. King has not found his sculptor. The Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation should search for an artist capable of effectively emulating the finest achievements in American commemorative sculpture. The alternative is to opt for an esthetically thin, essentially conceptual scheme such as we have in the present case. That’s not good enough for Dr. King.
If we can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us. I am providing a copy of this letter to our Board of Directors, and I would gladly provide you with biographical information on them.
For the Board of Directors,
(signed)
Howard Segermark
Chairman