Edmonia Lewis, the Misunderstood Sculptor Who Brought Stone to Life
When the sculptor Edward Brackett arrived at the jail in Charlestown, Virginia, in the fall of 1859, he found the most notorious man in America in less than ideal condition. John Brown was badly wounded. During his raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, he had been stabbed with a sword and smashed in the head, and now he was spending his last days in a cell, mostly horizontal on a cot, living in his own stench. Commissioned by two abolitionists to capture Brown’s likeness before he was hanged, Brackett made a marble bust that turned his face into a sort of cross between Moses and Socrates, with Brown’s iconic beard rippling out of his chin like a white flame. “The bust as you see it, is a little poeticized,” Brackett wrote, explaining his vision. “John Brown was not himself a great man, but rather a forerunner of great things. He was a blind instrument, blindly cutting the way to the death of thousands and the birth of a new age.”
This might as well be a defense of American sculpture in the second half of the nineteenth century, which lost itself in such a frenzy of Civil War monuments, memorials, plaques, and busts that you would be hard pressed to find a single sculpture of a person who doesn’t look like an instrument of some creed or cause. There are no kitchen workers scouring pots or raconteurs drinking rum punch; most of the figures seem utterly incapable of offering directions or telling a joke, much less running, sweating, or allowing blood to flow through their veins. They are rigidly ideal. Even one of the most historically astute and naturalistic sculptures of the period, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s “Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment” (1884), has an angel swooping down from above, as if providence, not the decisions of human beings, were guiding the soldiers toward their deaths.
A young woman named Edmonia Lewis saw Brackett’s bust of Brown and, with a letter of introduction from the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, went to study with Brackett in his Boston studio in 1863, just as the momentum of the Civil War was swinging toward the Union. Standing there with her mallet and chisel, Lewis must have seemed like a strange comet to Brackett: she was four feet tall, had a firm handshake and an unplaceable accent, and was a Black woman of Mississauga descent. She was also a quick study. First, she learned to model hands and feet out of clay, then she progressed to a medallion of John Brown’s face and a marble bust of Robert Gould Shaw (hot commodities in abolitionist circles). Within a few years, she was producing neoclassical sculpture to international acclaim, eventually attracting the notice of Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Pope Pius IX. But the enthusiasm for her art was always nicked with caveats and doubts. Some of the same white abolitionists who supported Lewis would say that her hands were not “educated enough to work in marble,” that she was better off sticking to stucco or wood. The irony of her medium wasn’t lost on her: she had mastered the aesthetic ideal of a civilization that was determined to undermine, if not destroy, everything she represented.
There’s a Lewis revival in full swing right now, with an ambitious survey that began at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, and is now heading to the Georgia Museum of Art. “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” curated by Jeffrey Richmond-Moll and Shawnya L. Harris, assembles the stray pieces of Lewis’s life and work, bringing together the biggest scholarly haul since Kirsten Pai Buick’s “Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject” (2010). There’s also a book out in June, “Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis,” by Jennifer DeVere Brody, with its own deft archival research. Solving the mysteries of Lewis’s art hasn’t been easy. To give a sense of what scholars are up against: her most famous piece, “The Death of Cleopatra,” almost three tons of marble, was shipped from Rome to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exposition of 1876, and then spent the next century on a Forrest Gump-style journey, reappearing in a Chicago saloon, then on the grave of a racehorse, then in a junk yard, only to be discovered, in the nineteen-eighties, in the storeroom of a suburban strip mall. Again, that’s Lewis’s most famous piece.
Together, the new research presents a meaty challenge to our understanding of nineteenth-century American sculpture. Although Lewis did lots of standard neoclassical fare—high-society busts, church commissions, funerary monuments—the savvy of her work is the way it twists the rhetoric of marble sculpture to new ends, both personal and political. She’s credited with various firsts: the first African American to be a professional sculptor; the first African American and Indigenous woman artist of international fame. But the exhibition and the scholarship, though occasionally a bit fawning, show why the value of Lewis’s art doesn’t hang on these distinctions. If anything, they’ve been used to discredit her. Henry James once described Lewis as a woman “whose color, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame,” as if her race were announced with every piece of marble, to hector you into liking it. Had he even bothered to look at her work?
The exhibition opens with Lewis’s sculpture “Forever Free” (1866-67). Roughly three and a half feet tall, it shows a man and a woman who’ve just heard the news of the Emancipation Proclamation. The man, shirtless and in cropped trousers, raises his broken shackles in one hand and puts his other on the shoulder of the woman, who’s kneeling, her eyes cast toward Heaven. Seen through the lens of the Civil War and its aftermath, the piece subverts every expectation. Lewis’s clientele, mostly white, would have expected her to make Lincoln the executor of freedom, as Thomas Ball did in his “Emancipation Memorial” (1876), on Capitol Hill, but, instead, she has her enslaved subjects manumit themselves. That might seem empowering, but is it? The woman is shrunken, subservient; the facial features of the two figures have been diluted to make them racially ambiguous. Then, there’s the marble itself: an antique medium applied to a historical event barely three years old, a medium full of associations of purity and racial hygiene put to the tune of liberation. (A bold decision, if you consider sentiments like Henrik Ibsen’s, from 1874: “I would rather see the head of a negro executed in black than in white marble. Speaking generally, the style must conform to the degree of ideality which pervades the representation.”) In sum, Lewis’s piece is a welter of contradictions. It’s timeless and bracingly new, regressive and cutting-edge. It’s the most conservatively radical sculpture I’ve ever seen.
Lewis made “Forever Free” after she arrived in Rome in 1865. Throughout the nineteenth century, American sculptors flocked to the Eternal City to be closer to the source—to the abundance of antiquities but also to the Apuan Alps in the north, with their marble quarries. Lewis found a space on Via Gregoriana, a former studio of Antonio Canova, the grand eminence of neoclassical sculpture, and was only a stone’s throw from the Villa Ludovisi, with its impressive collection of antique statuary, including the “Ludovisi Gaul”: a Hellenistic sculpture of a man who has just killed his wife and is driving a sword into his own chest, and a possible reference for the composition of “Forever Free.” Although Lewis seems to have led a vibrant life in Rome—hosting dinner parties, playing guitar for friends, attending the opera—her circumstances were different from other artists’. The reason she had left America, she told the Times, was “to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.”
From childhood onward, Lewis’s life seemed to ricochet between misfortune and luck, one person’s cruelty and another’s kindness. Born in upstate New York, in 1844, to a free Afro-Caribbean father and a Mississauga mother, she was an orphan before the age of ten. She was taken in by her maternal aunts and learned how to make souvenirs, such as beaded moccasins and birch-bark baskets, that were sold to tourists around Niagara Falls. The details of her childhood are patchy, and it’s possible she wanted to keep it that way: “My early life cannot interest you,” she told an interviewer. “It glided along smoothly, with no event of any importance, until I became seized with the idea of becoming a sculptress.” With the financial support of her half brother Samuel, who seems plucked from a story by Mark Twain—he lived various lives, as a tightrope walker, a barber, a gold miner, a sleight-of-hand showman, and a property developer—Lewis was able to afford a private liberal-arts education at New York Central College, and then at Oberlin, the first coed and racially integrated college in America. In the end, that didn’t make much of a difference. Lewis was accused of poisoning two white female housemates, assaulted by a white mob in response to the charge, and acquitted in court, only to then be accused of stealing art supplies and prohibited from reënrolling. Fortunately, she met Frederick Douglass as he was passing through Ohio. He praised her student drawings and paintings, and urged her to “seek the East.” In 1863, Lewis moved to Boston and started her apprenticeship with Brackett. Two years later, she was in Rome.
There are twenty-nine sculptures by Lewis in the exhibition—the earliest from 1864 and the latest from 1880—and, even though she received commissions into the eighteen-nineties, most of her surviving work belongs to the first two decades of her career. Her busts of wealthy abolitionists and famous men, such as Lincoln and Longfellow, come across as the meat and potatoes of a commercial artistic practice, but her group sculptures are tantalizingly tricky. Each one is like a Russian nesting doll of political self-consciousness, one kernel of meaning hidden inside the next. Are they works of activist art masquerading as decorative kitsch, or the other way around? Are they designed to flatter progressive sensibilities or provoke them? Of the various group sculptures in the exhibition, including “The Old Indian Arrow Maker and His Daughter” (1866-67), “Hiawatha’s Marriage” (1866-70), and “Indian Combat” (1868), the piece I kept returning to, and crashing up against, was “Columbus” (1865-67).
Baudelaire, in an essay titled “Why Sculpture Is Boring,” argued that one of the disadvantages of sculpture was that it “shows too many surfaces at once,” unlike painting, which can offer a single and coherent point of view. As a person ambles around a sculpture, perspectives multiply; interpretations are born and dissolved; shadows play on the surface and complicate the interpretive field, making hair look like spaghetti or a nostril look angry. The funny thing about Baudelaire’s argument, of course, is that it’s a wonderful explanation for why sculpture isn’t boring. The freedom to move around the object, to mentally embroider a narrative on bits of motionless metal or stone—that’s what makes the form interesting. This became clear to me in the case of “Columbus,” particularly with regard to his face and his, um, penis.
The sculpture shows the Italian explorer gallantly holding up a blanket behind a naked Indigenous woman who’s kneeling at his side. It looks like he’s about to clothe her, to bring her into the fold of civilization. Her hand is pressed to her chest in a gesture of gratitude, as if to thank him for colonizing her land. (She’s likely an allegory for America.) The exhibition catalogue reminds us that, in the nineteenth century, Columbus wasn’t seen as an agent of genocide but as a symbol of liberation, and argues that the work is “peaceful, even tender, in the figures’ mutual devotion to Christian progress”—that Lewis has turned the Indigenous woman into an active agent of American prosperity. That seems like a bizarre reading to me. For one, Columbus’s face wears the haughtiest, most cocksure expression in Lewis’s body of work. He has the air of a smug and slightly evil magician: the arched eyebrow and the disdainful little smile playing on his lips, the ta-da-like flourish of his cloak to introduce his new acquisition, a sneaky-looking Swiss roll of parchment sliding out of his left sleeve. Unlike “Forever Free,” there’s not a hint of warmth between the man and the woman at his feet. She’s just a casualty of his self-regard.
Looking at Columbus from a slight angle, to the left or right, you’ll notice a very small knob of fabric over his groin. It’s less a bulge and more the intimation of an erection. I initially dismissed it as an incidental fold in his cloak, but then a friend who accompanied me to the show, as well as a few other visitors, remarked on the protuberance. Perhaps it’s from a haphazard strike of the chisel; perhaps the erection doesn’t exist at all. But it matters insofar as it slyly punctures the heroic myth: now it’s a frisson of sexual excitement motivating this civilizing encounter between the Old World and the New. Sleight of hand and the tightrope were Lewis’s brother’s talents, but I’m increasingly convinced that they were hers as well: balancing her own political commitments with those of her patrons, creating a commodity that pretends to say one thing while doing another.
With “Columbus,” as with “Hiawatha’s Marriage” and “Arrow Maker,” the standard line is that Lewis uses marble sculpture to humanize Indigenous subjects, to “counter pernicious stereotypes.” The latter two pieces borrow scenes from Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), a fictional American epic based on a mistranslation of a work by the Anishinabe poet Bamewawagezhikaquay (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft). Within two years of being published, Longfellow’s book had sold fifty thousand copies, and Lewis recognized the commercial appeal of hitching a sculpture to a popular story. Where the stereotype-busting appears is in Lewis’s choice of scene and details. “Arrow Maker” shows a Dakota woman named Minnehaha sitting next to her father, braiding a mat of rushes while he works on an arrowhead; “Hiawatha’s Marriage” shows Minnehaha clasping hands with an Ojibwa warrior, Hiawatha—a bonding moment between two warring tribes. Instead of sculpting a sensational Trail of Tears scene of violent removal, Lewis opts for something tranquil. And she lavishes attention on the accessories: the bear-tooth necklace, the jasper arrowhead, the soft buckskin.
Still, the argument that Lewis’s everyday harmonies and material detail reflect some radical artistic program seems like a stretch. Lewis participated in Black activist circles in Boston, and donated sculptures to religious organizations that supported women’s rights, but her work could also play handily into the status quo. “Indian Combat,” for instance, is a vortex of three half-naked men fighting to the death, with one trying to rip another’s scalp off. The piece was tucked into an alcove off to the side of the Peabody Essex exhibition, as if it were a counter-argument the show didn’t want to countenance. In all likelihood, Lewis knew that Indigenous violence was a sale she could bank on. Working in marble is punishingly expensive, from the material itself to the shipping costs, and she spent years struggling to make ends meet. “You know,” she said, “we must sell our work if we want to live.”
Lewis died in London, in 1907, and was buried in an unmarked grave. The word “art,” which usually seems so large and capacious, somehow starts to feel inadequate when thinking about her work. For Lewis’s sculptures to succeed, their art wasn’t sufficient; they were expected to be more—proof of her humanity or monuments of collective uplift. Even today, she’s remembered for commemorations like “Forever Free,” though part of me wonders if her most enduring pieces are the grace notes. At Peabody Essex, I kept returning to “Clasped Hands of Gerrit and Ann Smith” (1872), a marriage portrait of two life-size hands. Gerrit Smith, one of the Secret Six who funded Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, operated a station of the Underground Railroad with his wife, Ann, from their home in New York. You can tell the hands have been close for years. Neither clenches or grabs; they fall into each other, naturally locked under their thumbs. It’s a kind of realism that’s powerful enough to suggest an ideal without stating it. The Smiths were well-known activists, and so the sculpture could serve as an instrument of the abolitionist cause, a symbolic pact. But it is also a simple expression of love. ♦