NEW LIFE FOR LIBERTY continued
from the New York Tribune. "In view of the climate," the Tribune said, "it may be presumed that Liberty will be draped. Indeed , she is always represented as wearing a sort of disheveled nightdress. There are those who believe that the Genius of American Liberty should be clad in trousers. No Frenchman, however, can be found who shares this delusion , and if the artist wilJ only spare us the odious Phrygian cap, we shaJJ be entirely contented with the orthodox style of drapery." Bartholdi was not the man to go counter to opinion of that kind, even if his design had not already been virtually completed. (It has to be added that Madame Bartholdi in trousers might have made many a would-be immigrant tum tail.) He was not so much an original poet as an entrepreneur, a manager, a negotiator and a persuader. He also had an unfailing eye for a running mate. ln addition to Eiffel he had American architect Richard M. Hunt, and but for Hunt the statue would not have had the pedestal that nobly supports it, never once setting itself up as a rival for our attention. No sculptor likes to see his work upstaged, and the relation of a sculpture to the ground beneath it is an edgy business. Bartholdi's statue, 46 meters high and weighing 225 tons, had to be hoisted free of the existing fortress. But how free was free? It could not be held up in an INDIANS unconvincing, unorganic way. Nor could FOR it seem to have settled down on top of an LIBERTY undistinguished hump. To solve the probJay ant Kulkarni, lem , Hunt swiftly produced a design in a Brooklyn, New which mass and detail were ideally conYork, artist, won trasted. The final effect was neither to the Indians for push the statue to a height at which it Liberty logo comwould look like an irrelevant toy, nor to petition held early make it settle too close to the ground. We this year. Kulkarfeel at once that this statue is where it ni's artwork was among several submitted ought to be, and that it will stand there last year by various artists. The runnerforever. up was Suhas Tavkar of New York City. As is the case with perfect stage Born in Bombay, Kulkamj graduated management, what Eiffel did for the in commercial art from the Sir J .J. School project passes completely unnoticed. of Applied Arts, Bombay, in 1971. StartOnly in his working drawings can we ing out as a layout artist, he rose to study the inner nervous system of the become art director, working for various statue- the intricate network of support magazines and advertising companies in that makes it possible for the huge Bombay as well as in the Arabian Gulf structure to hold its really rather awkbefore going to the United States in 1982. ward pose with immunity from mishap. Currently Kulkarni works as an art direcThe statue was made of copper, beaten tor of a Manhattan advertising company delicately into shape over plaster forms, and has specialized in promotional prowhich were then discarded. What looks at first glance to have been built like the grams, corporate identity, advertising Great Pyramid, has in point of fact an campaigns and symbol/logo designs. The fund-raising campaign through Ininterior that bears almost no relation to dians for Liberty has been launched by the ample and motherly forms of Barththe National Federation of Indian Orgaoldi's Liberty. Eiffel saw it as his task to nizations in America, which has pledged build a slender but strong metallic bone $100,000 for the statue . The Indian comLeft: An old photograph barely shows an munity's contribution will be permanentethereal Liberty wrapped in a vaporous cloud ly acknowledged at the Statue of Liberty from an armada of steam boms during and Ellis Island national monuments. a celebration. Right: The close-up of her head
matter of amazement that this prototype of freedom and generosity in human affairs should have been modeled on a woman who was a byword for bigotry. Such was her hold upon her sons that Auguste hardly dared to get married (at the age of 42) to someone of whom she might not have approved. His brother Charles went out of his mind partly, it was thought, because he was afraid to tell his mother he was having an affair with a Jewish woman. The features of Liberty in Bartholdi's statue can be read as emblematic of perseverance and determination. They quite lack the emotional momentum, Jet alone the unambiguous sensuality, the revolutionary gore and the flaunting Phrygian cap that Eugene Delacroix had given to her counterpart in Liberty Leading the People, painted in 1830. As to which image puts the more invigorating case for liberty, there can be no discussion. Delacroix's work was so inflammatory that it was not until 1874 that it was hung permanently in the Louvre, 44 years after it was painted. The Statue of Liberty was altogether more decorous. This was in accord with the American taste of its time. In that context, Marvin Trachtenberg quotes an editorial of 1875
shows tourists looking through windows under her iron-studded crown.
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SPAN JULY 1986