(jazzy piano music)
- [Steven] We're standing in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn
looking at an enormous marble sculpture called Civic Virtue.
This nude young man holding a sword over his shoulder
and then this complex sculptural group below,
but this is only a fragment of what this sculpture
originally included.
- [Michele] This was an enormous work of art
that was commissioned by the mayor
of the city of New York in 1909.
And it represents civic virtue.
The female figures below represent vice.
And so, civic virtue is triumphing over civic vice.
- [Steven] So we're not talking about real people.
These are personifications.
These are ideas that are being articulated
through human form.
- [Michele] And that was an approach
that was very common in art history
going way back to the Renaissance.
- [Steven] This seems to be very much a part
of the Beaux-Arts style that looked back to the Baroque,
that looked back to the Renaissance,
that looked back to ancient Greece and Rome
and tried to bring that into the modern world.
- [Michele] MacMonnies, the sculptor trained in France
and use this allegorical personification
of abstract ideas that was quite commonplace.
The problem was by the time he finished
the approach was no longer so commonplace.
- [Steven] So by the time this was to the open to the public
modern art had happened, Cubism existed.
People were thinking about art in very different ways.
- [Michele] Except that the response to this monument
had little to do with modern art.
The response to this monument had to do
with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1919
which gave women the right to vote.
- [Steven] And there in lied one of the significant problems
that this sculpture encountered.
- [Michele] Women who had been politically active
argued that the figure of the man
was stomping on the women's necks.
- [Steven] And when we look closely,
we see that is not the case.
So that was a kind of political hyperbole.
- [Michele] In 1922 those who had worked hard
on behalf of women's suffrage argued that ideally
a man should be shown side by side with women
and not striding atop of them.
And the Commissioner of Parks in New York City,
Robert Moses, felt that the work was
not just outdated, but ugly.
So when City Hall Park was due for reconstruction
in 1938 during the Depression, Moses used that
as the opportunity to move the sculpture.
And it ended up in Queens next to the Queens Borough Hall,
which was the center of Queens government.
- [Steven] But here we are in Brooklyn looking at it
and we're not even looking at the fountain as a whole.
We're only looking at the sculptural group
that would have been at the top.
- [Michele] The work in Queens went pretty much unnoticed
until the early 1980s.
And at that point, a high-level Queens official
decided that she found the work offensive
for some of the same reasons that her forebears in 1922 had.
That began a series of public relations efforts
to get the work moved again.
Meanwhile, the statue was allowed to decay.
- [Steven] It's marble, and it's exposed
to all of the industrial pollution of the 20th Century,
which is the natural enemy of marble,
the results of which we can see
in the pitted surface of the sculpture before us.
- [Michele] The statue's location in Queens
was right next to a major highway.
There is acid rain and there is auto pollution.
So by the 1980s, the work was starting to turn black.
- [Steven] All of the fine details have been lost.
The sculpture has in some ways melted,
as so much marble sculpture has.
- [Michele] This monument belongs to the City of New York,
which accepted the monument as part
of its permanent collection.
By charter mandate, the city is responsible for taking care
of the monument, and that became a problem.
If the constituency and the neighborhood don't care
and don't call for conservation,
the politicians who would have had to shell out
a lot of money were less motivated to do that.
So the situation cascaded.
- [Steven] So the sculpture is still part
of the city's collection, but the sculptural group
is on long-term loan to Greenwood Cemetery
who has taken on its maintenance.
- [Michele] Greenwood Cemetery has in effect become
and embraced the role of steward
of some of the city outdoor sculptures.
- [Steven] Originally the artist had intended this subject,
Civic Virtue to be a heroic representation
of good government over corruption.
And so the sculpture is a product of the progressive era.
It's part of the City Beautiful Movement.
- [Michele] This progressive era was a moment where
there was a lot of concern about cleaning up city government
and the City Beautiful Movement
was an effort to on the one hand, make cities look better,
which meant make them look more like Paris, Rome, Vienna
and London with their wide streets and their clipped trees
and their use of sculpture as accents.
It was also meant to represent well-functioning government.
- [Steven] Politics in New York in the first decades
of the 20th Century are completely intertwined
with the politics of immigration
and art was seen as a way of educating,
of ennobling the citizens of the city.
- [Michele] Becoming an American meant dispensing
to some degree with the culture and outlook
of the countries from which those people came.
And those people very much wanted to do that in many cases.
- [Steven] And so the sculpture is different.
It's no longer atop it's basins.
Water is not splashing around it.
It's no longer in lower Manhattan.
Instead here we are in a quiet
if wind swept glade in Greenwood Cemetery.
- [Michele] This is a great example
of what public private partnerships can bring about,
the protection and conservation
of a fascinating work of historic art.
(jazzy piano music)