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N.Y. Comm. Advertiser

APR 14 1897

A Great Sculptor. 

It is now three years since George Grey Barnard exhibited his work in the salon of the Champs de Mars and received from the most authoritative of the French art critics praise interesting in its sincerity and remarkable in its enthusiasm. During the exhibition he was the talk of Paris, and when he decided to return to his own country, America, it was against the advice of his artist friends in Paris, who told him truly that although he was coming to the land where he was born, he was coming to a land where he was unknown, and where he would be less appreciated than in critical Paris. But Mr. Barnard, with something of that same intensity of purpose that caused him to withdraw from the Beaux Arts and work for eight years alone, dared even America, no little temerity for a man whose genius had entered so strongly into the original. Last year he exhibited in the Logerot Gardens the same works that he had shown in Paris, but there was very little public appreciation, and it is only now, three years after what might be called his Paris triumph, and two years after he had returned to America, that he, and American, undoubtedly the greatest of living sculptors, is given serious consideration in one of our leading magazines. In the current number of the "Century" William A. Coffin has written an interesting, if not entirely satisfactory, account-I wish Mr.Coffin had made it possible to write "appreciation"-of Mr.Barnard and his sculpture. From an artist of Mr.Coffin's ability and a write of his perspicacity one might have expected something more adequate, something that would make us feel that he knew he was dealing with the work of one who is more than a "new" sculptor. For Mr.Coffin's sake, it is pleasant to believe that he was writing under superinduced limitations. 

It has been said of Barnard that he is an ideal Rodin. The suggestion, for it is a suggestion, incomplete and in a way not desirable, calls for more than light explanation. In distinguishing the classic from the romantic art, the Greek sculpture from the sculpture of the renaissance, we draw the line so as to have breadth on the one hand and character on the other, a line between great general conceptions and great emotional struggles and moments. In Phidias we have perfection of form and in Buonarroti perfection of force, and the distinction, as one considers it the more, widens so much that it would seem that there must be something between. Rodin, who went back to Michaelangelo, came back to the nineteenth century, and is to-day the sculptor of decadence. From the sixteenth century he drew his inspiration, from the nineteenth his feeling, and with all his power, all his poetry, all his genius, all his marvelous achievement, he fails in one particular. Barnard, too, has gone back to Michaelangelo. Yes, and even further. He has gone back to the classic calm, and in the return he has gone beyond the century in which he lives, so much so as to make it possible to almost speak of him as didactic. John Addington Symonds has said that the true force of Michaelangelo, the thing that made him the commanding master and that distinguished him from all his fellows of the quatocento, was the passionate delight he took in pure humanity. Vital and human as his art is, I don't think one would say that of Rodin, but it may with truth be said of Barnard. It is pure humanity that enthralls him, broad humanity, and even what is outside of humanity, that animates him. He is inspired by that part in him which is purely and greatly human, and which he brings out and establishes the connection between himself and humanity by expressing in marble. If Rodin has greater power, Barnard has greater poetic power, and in that sense he may be an ideal Rodin, but it is more "ideal" than "Rodin." Barnard is an idealist, not in the Greek sense of the term, but in the human sense, in the sense that teaches. In the Frenchman all is brutal life; in the American there is idealization, not in form, but of desire. Like Schoperbaurer the philosopher—not the pessimist—he has seen the world as it will. 

In his article Mr. Coffin has not, it seems to me, seen the true greatness of the sculptor's group "I Feel Two Natures Struggling Within Me." Beautiful as the "Boy" is and striking as the "Pan" may be, they are both insignificant when compared to the first named remarkable work. The originality of the workmanship, the vitality of the figures, the profound understanding of the human form and the great arrangement of mass make it a work for which there seems nothing but enthusiastic praise. The great sweep of line, the modelling so firm, full and direct, make it easy to see why his fellow workmen themselves have accorded so high a rank to the sculptor. The best description of the group, in fact the only one, is that written by M. Thiebault Sisson, of "Le Temps," when it was first shown in public. It will bear reproduction here: 

"The heroic alone seems capable of attracting him, but an heroic special in its kind; special also in his manner of treating it. He does not show us one man battling with another, his conception has a far deeper meaning and lesson, man struggling with the elements; men fighting with the inner man, with the baser instincts of his nature. He was witnesses the overthrow and fall of the noblest in life; the highest aspirations toward good, stifled by the meanest brute force in humanity; and it has been his desire to embody in a colossal group, one phase of these innumerable struggles. Full on the fallen moral being instinct plants a triumphant foot; but the victory is doubtful, the victim of an hour revolts; he rembles, he suffers in expiation of his fault, but he will rise again stronger and wiser for the contest. In the realization of this conception the artist has exhibited a fire, and given proof of knowledge which places him very high in his art. Possibly the composition may lack a little of that precision and clearness that conventional allegory requires, but in spite of that the group has movement and life, and the execution is as bold as it is finely shaded. All is said with majestic energy, an energy that knows its power and scorns useless details."
Here is idealism, if you will. But it is not the idealism that makes an obvious appeal, but rather the idealism that approaches to mysticism. 
*  *  *
Of Mr. Barnard's life there is not much to write. It is more crowded with thought than it is with events; it is represented better by his several achievements than by a chronicle of dates. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1863, moved to Illinois with his father, entered the Chicago Art School in 1881 and went to Paris in 1883. Several years later, inspired by the feeling that what he had to do must be done alone, he withdrew from the atelier in which he was studying and set up his own studio and worked there—alone. There he completed his "Brotherly Love," so dramatic and delicate, so poetic, so real, and his "Two Natures." There he developed his mysticism, his feeling for the absolute. For he is a mystic and a poet, and in his writings, unpublished, unconnected and without literary form as they are, he expresses that some wonderful idealistic vitality. He sees life, but not as others see it, life ennobled, in its entirety, both the past and the future. When one considers that the sculptor has been but a few years in his thirties, that he is yet a young man, that his greatest work was done some six years ago, one feels with animation the greatness of the future, a future as great for the country as it is for this tireless individual. It seems strange to have among us here in America, where so many attempts at sculptural art have verged on the ridiculous, a man who can, does and will rank with the greatest. The only trouble is that in having him so near we may not see him in his true light. That is a fear, but is a fear that does not come when one stands before the marble of one who has the fire, the force, the vitality, the poetic insight and the emotional nobility of dominant genius. 
GEORGE HENRY PAYNE.