confirmed. Before developing this con I like that last saying. People too often clusion in detail I must say something think of the classic idiom in American about the building which it has been Savage's privilege to adorn. MORE ORE than seventy thousand members of the Order of Elks served in the Great War and more than a thousand of them died in service. Seeking to commemorate the patriotism embodied in these facts, the Elks decided to erect a building which should be both memorial and national headquarters. They found a beautiful site in Chicago at a point sharing in the distinction of. Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan, a site free from the danger of overshadowing by tall structures in the future. Forthwith they invited various architects to participate in a competition, and this was won by Mr. Egerton Swartwout, of New York City. He too enjoyed a splendid opportunity and proceeded to take advantage of it. He designed an austere, lowlying mass for the administrative offices, with a majestic circular memorial hall rising in the centre. This hall is a kind of Pantheon, a truly monumental edifice, on the style of which I may cite the architect's own words: I might say it was classic, and more Roman than Greek; would prefer to say it was modern, and that it was American. It is certainly modern in its conception, and while it is classic, it is not archæological. It follows along the lines of that adaptation Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. of the classic which got such a noble start in this country just after the Revolution--the style used in the Capitol and other buildings in Washington. It is our national heritage. From the painting by Eugene Savage. architecture as purely a borrowed veneer, forgetting the long processes through which it has entered the blood of Amer ican art. But this is not a disquisition with its gorgeous marbles and its rich on the building, admirable though the coffered ceiling, and the scope which Mr. Swartwout gave here and elsewhere to the decorator. The embellishment of the scheme begins as we approach it. Two pedestals flank the path that leads up to the entrance to the Memorial Hall. For these Mrs. Laura Gardin Fraser has modelled two reclining elk in bronze. Around the exterior of the hall, just below the stately colonnade which supports the dome, runs a frieze by A. A. Weinman, his composition being divided into two parts. One of these is dedicated to The Terror of War and the other to The Glory of Peace. For the west lobby leading from the Memorial Hall to the Grand Reception Room Mr. E. H. Blashfield has painted three large decorations. One panel symbolizes Charity, another Peace and Harmony, and the third Justice and Fidelity. For four niches in the great hall Mr. James Earle Fraser has been made responsible, filling them with statues of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love, and Fidelity. The decoration of the Grand Reception Room has been given to Mr. Savage, but I say nothing of it, for it is only in the preliminary stages, and my purpose here is to deal with work that he has done. Again I must delay contact with it in order rapidly to traverse the experience that has led up to it. EUGENE SAVAGE was born at Covington, Ind., in 1883. He came from old pioneer stock. His father was a banker, his mother a woman who occupied her leisure hours with drawing and music, especially regular visits. For the last seven years music. She governed the singing in the he has had his studio in New York, local church and reared her children on the choral masterpieces of Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven. Musing on the things that have aided him, Savage alludes to "Gregorian restraint." There is nothing "precious" about this phrase as he uses it. I can feel in his work the play of that ancient simplicity. The elder Savage died when his son was only three. Mrs. Savage, making decisions for her family, was not satisfied with the resources of a small town and so moved to Washington. There her son went to Gonzaga College and studied at the Corcoran School at night. By the time he was seventeen he was established in Chicago, making commercial drawings and attending night classes at the Art Institute. He studied also at the Academy there. It was as a student in Chicago in 1912, when he was twenty-nine, that he won a fellowship in the American Academy at Rome, and there his destiny was fixed. His years in Rome gave him, as he frankly puts it, everything on which he stands, though it was during his Roman period that he went off to Munich and spent a couple of months there studying painting from life. Back in America in 1916, he taught at Cooper Union for a time, and then for two years pursued the same course at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He has been Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. From the painting by Eugene Savage. steadily teaching. He has had charge of the painting classes at Yale since 1924. But this is made possible by and has produced most of those pictures which have made him known in the exhibitions and have won him numer SAVAGE was exactly the man to profit by McKim's great Roman idea. That idea, as I have stated in this place before, was not to make American artists crass disciples of the old Italian masters. It was to take a young American of proved ability and subject him to the ennobling pressure of classical and Renaissance influences, to fertilize his imagination, to enkindle his sense of beauty. All this happened to Savage. He saturated himself in Giotto, his old musical upbringing making the Primitives especially sympathetic to him; but he carried his adventures even further, and Raphael's Jurisprudence was among the heroic designs he copied. Still, the Primitives made perhaps the deepest impression upon him, and "I returned to America," he says, "as near as possible a fourteenth-century painter." The only dislocation of his drift occurred for a time when the linear magic of Chinese painting attracted him as almost more powerful than that of the Italian tradition. This matter of line has a special status in Savage's development. It was the first quality in him that drew me to his work. It then seemed to me innate. It was emphatically so. In his youth he used to make drawings of the etchings of Rembrandt through sheer love of line. But, curiously, it took some time for him fully to grasp the linear principle. He handled it rather confusedly when he was first at Rome until two painter-comrades there, George Davidson and the late Harry Stickroth, Symbol-Bearers: Justice. From the painting by Eugene Savage. thing save the inborn gift which has made him one of the auspicious figures in American art. handed on to him the inspiration they had got from Kenyon Cox and George De Forest Brush in New York. Through their philosophy he learned to appreciate the basic value of line, the true significance of color, and the logic underlying the just organization of a picture. With his eyes opened wider he absorbed himself in the Primitives with understanding enlarged. They had, by the way, a deep effect upon his manner of painting. He was at first inclined to that mode of brushwork and surface treatment which spells manual virtuosity, but the Primitives changed his gait, and his work has long been more in their key, very suave, and founded greatly on linear character. WHAT was his problem at Chicago? As regards substance, a certain point of departure was supplied by the inscription running around the Memorial Hall: "Inculcating the principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love, and Fidelity-Promoting the Welfare and Enhancing the Happiness of Mankind -Quickening the Spirit of American Patriotism." Seeking some scheme of symbolism that would be in harmony with the ideas thus announced, Savage decided to take his motives from the Beatitudes, illustrating specifically their fulfilments. Thus, when he comes to "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled," his tendency is to emphasize fruition rather than the effort it rewards. Turning to the illustration, the reader may feel that the design it shows does not any too explicitly redeem the promise made in these words. The kneeling figures and their upright companion are not precisely luminous exemplars of those that "hunger and thirst after righteousness." Their earthy antitheses, the nudes and the serpent below, are the more obviously comprehensible. All through the series of twelve panels, in which either Beatitudes or "Symbol-Bearers," typifying Charity, Justice, and so on, are dealt with, Mr. Savage's ideas are disposed to be, as I Study. From the drawing by Eugene Savage. noted at the outset, recondite and obscure. It would take a very subtle and altogether too voluminous analysis for me to make the sequence plain-and it would not be altogether plain then. Here I am inclined to deprecate the artist's habit of mind. It is too cloudy, too vague, too dependent on movements of imagination which he himself doubtless understands but which the spectator must often find it difficult, if not impossible, to interpret. This is especially unfortunate in the decorations of a hall destined to receive throngs of people having small traffic with symbolism. I |