Desperately Seeking Harriet
The American artist
Patricia Cronin on the trail of a forgotten sculptress
Patricia
Cronin’s sculpture Memorial to a Marriage has attracted
considerable attention. She installed the pair of naked women in white
marble in the middle of the Woodlawn Cemetery in New York, on the grave
she will one day share with her girlfriend. Currently, the artist is a
fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where she’s busy researching the
work of a 19th-century sculptress once steeped in scandal. The project is
also funded by the New York Foundation for the Arts, which awarded her the
Deutsche Bank Fellowship 2007.
Patricia
Cronin
Memorial to a Marriage
Woodlawn
Friedhof
Photo: Lee Sandstead
While
George W. Bush met with minister
president Romano Prodi and
opposition leader Silvio
Berlusconi on a recent visit to Rome, his wife Laura
set sight on the city’s culture. The First Lady visited the Quirinal
Palace, explored the necropolis
beneath St.
Peter’s Cathedral, and dropped by the American
Academy, where she also visited an exhibition by the artist Patricia
Cronin. Cronin’s monochrome watercolors depict sculptures by Harriet
Hosmer, an American sculptress who lived thirty years in Rome. The
artist was famous during the final decades of the 19th century, if not a
bit infamous. Today, she is largely forgotten. And so Laura Bush was
confronted with not one, but two women whose way of life defies
conservative conventions.
Patricia
Cronin
The Sleeping Faun By
Harriet Hosmer, 1865
The Harriet
Hosmer Catalogue Raisonne Project
©
Patricia Cronin
It’s doubtful that the
president’s wife was shown the erotic gouaches Patricia Cronin made her
name with in the mid-nineties. The explicit close-ups depict the artist
having sex with her girlfriend, the painter Deborah
Kass. Monument to a Marriage (2002) also celebrates their love
– this time in marble, in the Neo-Classicist style of the 19th century.
The white sculpture shows the two women on a bed in an intimate embrace;
their naked bodies are clearly visible beneath a thin sheet. Cronin
installed the three-ton work in the Woodlawn
Cemetery, on the grave she will one day share with her lover.
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Patricia Cronin
Memorial
to a Marriage
© Patricia Cronin
The
cemetery, which is frequently regarded as the New York version of the Père
Lachaise in Paris, is home to the graves of American icons such as Herman
Melville, Duke Ellington,
and Miles Davis; the last six
mayors of New York City and a number of honorable congressmen and senators
also rest in peace here. Cronin smuggled a subversive monument into the
midst of the melancholy angels, broken columns, and mausoleums built in
the style of medieval castles or antique temples. A lesbian love death as
a monument to a marriage that, according to the law, never existed.
In
the course of her research for the sculpture, Cronin happened upon Harriet
Hosmer – the first woman to make a career as a sculptress. The life of the
1830-born American would supply an ideal subject for a feminist novel.
Because he lost his other children and his wife to tuberculosis, Harriet’s
father raised her like a son. The doctor was convinced that he could only
arm his daughter against the dreaded disease through strenuous physical
exercise. It quickly emerged that the athletically talented girl could not
only ride and shoot splendidly, but was artistically gifted as well. As a
result, her father set up her first studio, while a doctor friend taught
her the basic principles of anatomy. Harriet refused to comply with the
traditional women’s role, preferring men’s clothing and even daring to
travel the Mississippi without a chaperone. One of her early sculptures
attracted the attention of Charlotte
Cushman. The lesbian actress with a weakness for male roles was about
to embark for Rome. She convinced Harriet’s father to allow his daughter
to accompany her there. There was hardly a chance for the young artist to
develop in the United States, because most art academies refused to admit
women.
Will
o' the Wisp, 1858
Harriet Hosmer
Courtesy
Smithsonian American Art Museum
In Rome,
Hosmer’s talent impressed the English sculptor John
Gibson, who took on the 22-year-old as his only student. His
Neo-Classicist works, influenced by Canova
and Thorwaldsen,
left their mark on her developing style. She quickly enjoyed her first
successes with her marble sculptures and sold 50 copies of her Puck
– one of them to the Prince
of Wales.
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