Artists Make Public Figures

It’s a painting of time, but it’s portrayed as a celebration, a dance, a whirl of energy. The artist, Edwin Austin Abbey, focused on ​“the dynamics among the figures and their movements,” an accompanying note states. ​“The transition from day to night remains unresolved, but the exuberant movement of the daylight hours is described with great clarity.” It’s a 24-hour party — a perhaps surprising way to render the ceiling of the legislative chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol. 

These days, legislative bodies, state and national, are usually described as slow at best and dysfunctional, even dystopian, at worst. But the mood among public artists in Pennsylvania was different at the beginning of the 20th century, as it was, apparently, in several places across the country. 

If an artist were asked to paint the ceiling of a legislative chamber now, what would they be inclined to depict?

A few such nagging questions and startling moments of disconnection await the viewer of ​“The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876 – 1917,” a special exhibition running now at the Yale University Art Gallery on Chapel Street through Jan. 5. 

Curated by Mark D. Mitchell, the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, ​“The Dance of Life” portrays artists of the American renaissance who, in Mitchell’s words, ​“embraced life, hope, and shared purpose as themes, despite the endemic violence, corruption, racism, and poverty around them. And they aspired to share their vision with everyone, in libraries, universities, museums, capitols, train stations, and the world’s fairs that were wildly popular at the time and counted their visitors by the millions.” 

Without having to be completely explicit about it, the show’s sense of optimism and faith in humanity comes across as a sobering reflection on our current anxious time, staring down the barrel of another contentious national election, stalked by the ghost of the possibility that whatever transfer of power occurs might not be peaceful.

“At the end of the 19th century, a cosmopolitan generation of American artists turned away from the death and devastation of the Civil War and embraced life as their subject,” an accompanying note states. ​“To decorate a wave of new civic spaces being built at the time — including libraries, universities, and museums; state capitols, courthouses, and train stations; parks, squares, and world’s fairs — the artists chose the human figure to embody the ideals of the age: the power of democracy over autocracy, of innovation over stagnation, of a stable and vibrant future over a stormy and divided past.” It continues, saying that ​“the clearest and most direct expressions of their ideas rested not in their large-scale commissions, which were mostly executed by teams of assistants, but in their preparatory studies and other iterations. The energetic pencil sketches, pastels, oils, and bronzes on view reveal the ways in which the artists shaped their visions of community, memory, and a shared hope for the future.”

The notes in the exhibition go even further in explaining a generational shift that happened after the Civil War, in which artists ​“coming of age” in 1876 — the nation’s centennial — turned away from a distinctly American artistic isolation and instead ​“joined a wider creative world that included Europe and, increasingly, Asia.” Inspired by the Italian Renaissance of a couple centuries earlier, the exhibition argues, those artists created an American renaissance in their own time, one that got infused into a number of public works commission around the turn of the last century.

One such place was Trinity Church in Boston, which commissioned, among many others, the artist John La Farge to create works depicting Biblical prophets. La Farge’s Jeremiah was ​“swathed in weighty fabrics” that hearkened directly to his Italian forbears. ​“The figure’s full beard and large, expressive hands fill the sheet with a monumentality that is evident even at this size.” Meanwhile, the idea of creating art — and hope — for the ages apparently wasn’t lost on visitors to Trinity Church at the time of its completion. ​“Early appraisals of the building recognized that, like its celebrated rector Philips Brooks, the artist and architect sought to restore public faith by refreshing historic forms from a time ​‘when religion and art had not yet separated.’ ”

Artists’ embrace of the human form meant, in part, a throwing off of some previous Puritanical constraints on American art. ​“American discomfort with the body — especially the nude — was a Puritan legacy that had long relegated the figure to the margins of American art,” an accompanying note states. ​“In the wake of the Civil War, however, attitudes changed, and the body gained prominence as an accessible, democratic subject. The emergence of the figure,” the note continues, ​“was accompanied by an expectation for realism.”

Appropriately, ​“The Dance of Life” as an exhibition is full of exquisitely rendered nudes, with faces one recognizes as individuals. This meant, for starters, that a certain amount of sensuality enters the artistic discussion. It also meant that high-profile leaders — like Abraham Lincoln — had a number of artworks made of them that were infused with emotion. But it also meant giving real human faces to some regular soldiers, to powerful effect. 

“For a prominent, high-relief Civil War memorial set on Boston Common, Augustus Saint-Gaudens sought to individualize the images of African-American soldiers in the volunteer Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regimen.” The studies were ​“based on the likenesses of several Boston men of military age whom he hired as models. The studies preserve the remarkable individuality that Saint-Gaudens invested in the figures and sustained in the final commission.” By giving the soldiers their full humanity, the busts convey more directly the sacrifices those Black soldiers made for the cause of expanding human rights — the fruition of which none of them would see in their lifetimes, even if they survived the war.

Mitchell points out that all of the artists in the show were famous in their lifetimes. For most of them, their names have faded with time. But one — John Singer Sargent — stands out as turning out to have staying power. Included in the exhibition are studies related to pieces commissioned by the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, and a library at Harvard University. In the case of the above study, Sargent’s ability to render the human form was detailed enough that we know exactly who the model is: Thomas McKeller, who ​“was a hotel elevator operator in Boston when he met the artist John Singer Sargent in 1916. Over the next eight years, he modeled for key figures in some of Sargent’s most prominent commissions,” an accompanying note states. ​“Although McKeller was typically unrecognizable in Sargent’s finished works, in the studies his appearance is often highly individualized.” From the figure of one man, Sargent drew multitudes.

How would today’s most prominent visual artists decorate the walls and ceilings of our public buildings — our city halls and state capitols, our libraries and courthouses and museums — if they were tasked with conjuring an aspirational spirit for our age? It’s telling that the question feels so hypothetical. Murals like the ones in ​“The Dance of Life” don’t get commissioned much any more. Government buildings built since 1950 lack much of the grandeur that seemed like more of a priority 50 years before that. It’s tempting to ask if that’s maybe one small reason we are where we are now.

“The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876 – 1917” runs at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through Jan. 5. Admission is free. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.