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Gutzon Borglum

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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"GUTZON BORGLUM (1867-), American sculptor, was born in Idaho, March 25 1867. His father was a physician who emigrated from Denmark in 1864. He was educated at St. Mary's College, Kan., studied art at the school of the San Francisco (Cal.) Art Association, and during 1890-3 attended the Academie Julien and the Rcole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He then returned to America for a year, but in 1896 went to London, and during the next five years exhibited much sculpture and painting there and in Paris. In 1902 he moved his studio to New York. In 1904 he received a gold medal for sculpture at the St. Louis Exposition. He was a member of numerous organizations, including the Royal Society of British Artists and the Societe Nationale des Beaux Arts, France. He was a disciple of Rodin and a leader of the insurgency in America. His theory of representing history by sculpture is thoroughly in accord with that of ancient Greece. The huge scale of many of his conceptions can be compared only with that of antique Oriental monuments. For example, he proposed a Confederate memorial on Stone Mt. near Atlanta, Ga., to be cut in relief along the face of that granite mountain as a frieze representing an army on the march, conspicuous from a great distance. In 1919 he exhibited a head of Lincoln cut from a block weighing six tons. The same year he was chosen to design a monument for Warsaw, commemorating the rebirth of Poland. Among his colossal figures are the Twelve Apostles for the cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York, and another head of Lincoln in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington. Other works include the Sheridan monument in Washington; " Mares of Diomedes " and " Ruskin " in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; statue of Lincoln, Newark, N.J.; statue of Henry Ward Beecher, Brooklyn; the Wyatt Memorial, Raleigh, N.C.; " The Flyer " at the university of Virginia; gargoyles for a Princeton dormitory; " Wonderment of Motherhood " and " Conception."