Lorado Taft (1860–1936)

Lorado Taft was the greatest American sculptor of his day – with the possible exception of Saint Gaudens, to whom he devotes many pages -- and one of the greats of all days. His art was the product at least as much of a poetic insight and a warm sympathy for classical tradition as it was consequence of keen eyes and deft hands. This spiritual side of Taft is captured here in his spirited prose, for he was one of those comparatively rare artists – in nay medium – who could talk intelligently about his chosen medium, to all audiences.
His intended audiences here were students of The Art Institute of Chicago, under terms of the Scammon benefaction. The rest of the world was a secondary consideration, but obviously not a negligible one, as Taft, like other lecturers in this series, was a personage who commanded attention in that broader world. Indeed this book went into at least three printings. Incidentally, those are entitled the Lectures of 1917, numerous references in the text reveal at least two more years’ worth of observation and thought, not leastwise the comments of Europe and the United States after the World War.
For Taft, the meaning of sculpture was intimately connected with the ideal of the monumental. “Monumental” not in the crude sense of physically big or obtrusive, but in the classical sense of evoking a significant idea or value. This colored everything he wrote, and incidentally generated some lively invective against sculptors whose efforts he considered unworthy (e.g. Epstein, Archipenko, Matisse). Concept and performance were as one to him, and a trivial or unworthy idea could not be redeemed by technical perfection, any more than a good idea could somehow excuse a limping or shoddy material product.… (mehr)