The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (40 page)

Ingram’s coverage of the expo took no notice of anything by William Wetmore Story.

The most qualified reviewer was the New York artist-writer William J. Clark, a friend of Saint-Gaudens
.
Edmonia would have to wait years to read his insightful comparison with Story’s queen. Clark not only bubbled but also drew distinctions she would have found particularly satisfying:

An even more remarkable sculpture from the hand of a female artist than Miss Foley’s fountain which was in the Centennial Exhibition was the Cleopatra of Edmonia Lewis. This was not a beautiful work, but it was a very original and very striking one, and it deserves particular comment, as its ideal was so radically different from those adopted by Story and Gould in their statues of the Egyptian Queen. Story gave his Cleopatra Nubian features, and achieved an artistic if not a historical success by so doing. The Cleopatra of Gould suggests a Greek lineage. Miss Lewis, on the other hand, has followed the coins, medals, and other authentic records in giving her Cleopatra an aquiline nose and a prominent chin of the Roman type, for the Egyptian Queen appears to have had such features rather than such as would more positively suggest her Grecian descent. This Cleopatra, therefore, more nearly resembled the real heroine of history than either of the others, which, however, it should be remembered, laid no claims to being other than purely ideal works. Miss Lewis’ Cleopatra, like the figures sculptured by Story and Gould, is seated in a chair; the poison of the asp has done its work, and the Queen is dead. The effects of death are represented with such skill as to be absolutely repellant – and it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art. Apart from all questions of taste, however, the striking qualities of the work are undeniable, and it could only have been reproduced by a sculptor of very genuine endowments.
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Acknowledging Edmonia’s heritage and reflecting that only vague references to her work had ever come to him, Clark went on to hail the work in no uncertain terms: “the real power of her Cleopatra was a revelation.”

A signal that some Americans had come to their senses, Clark pointed out how Story’s
Cleopatra
benefited from Hawthorne’s best-selling novel.
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Art critic and sculptor Laredo Taft later concurred, “it was the novelist who gave to the statue its reputation in England and America…. Into the work he read a vast deal more than ever the sculptor was to realize.”
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Perhaps Clark meant to spark debate about Edmonia’s
Cleopatra
by writing, “it is a question whether a statue of the ghastly characteristics of this one does not overstep the bounds of legitimate art.” Why Edmonia’s depiction of death’s agonies should have tested boundaries recalls the ongoing clash between the passion of Catholic art and plain puritan reserve, between realism that was finding a new voice and the staleness of the hundred-year-old Greek revival.

Death in itself was not a novel theme. Images of Jesus’ slow death on the cross enrich every Catholic church, home, and so on. Who could view
Michelangelo's
Pietà
(ca. 1498), now in St. Peter's Basilica, without being moved?
Beyond the world of saintly icons, the dead, nude
Shipwrecked Mother and Child
(1850) was so richly admired that Edmonia’s mentor, E. A. Brackett, gathered and reprinted favorable reviews. Cleopatra’s death was food for many artists: Claude Bertin produced a bust in the late 1600s, now in the Louvre. François Barois carved
Cléopâtre mourant,
in 1700. Bartholomo Neroni, called Riccio, had drawn it. John Parker, Guido Cagnacci, Antoine Rivalz, and Gérard de Lairesse had painted it. An engraving of Guido Reni’s painting appeared in the
Art-Journal
in 1861. In Rome, Damià Campeny, a follower of Canova, carved a dead
Lucretia
in a pose strikingly similar to Edmonia’s queen. Dramatists too numerous to mention have staged agonizing death scenes since classical Greece – by suicide, murder, and combat – and not without emotive excess and gory props. Giuseppe Verdi’s
Aïda,
first performed in 1871 was triumphant. It ends in a vivid suicide as the Ethiopian princess shares her lover’s fate.

Not every important critic commented on Edmonia’s historic entry. However, more than one hundred years later, historians such as Judith Wilson continue to compare the competing visions – Edmonia’s and Story’s – of Cleopatra:

The difference between the two artists’ treatment of the fabled queen’s suicide is striking. Story’s dying monarch slouches glamorously in resignation … Although her massive frame and air of grave dignity convey both her former force of character and imperial might, the overall mood is one of defeat and despair. In contrast, the upper torso of Lewis’s sovereign arches back and her head is thrown up and over to one side … Even in death, Lewis seems to say, the Queen of the Nile radiates the indomitable pride and wily independence that precluded her surrender to the Romans.”
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Yes, use of “indomitable” and “wily” echoes New England mentors’ early impressions of Edmonia as if the words shared some spiritual DNA.

To celebrate July Fourth, the Centennial crowded its main events into Philadelphia’s historic Independence Square. A Virginia regimental band played the southern sentiments of “Dixie” and “My Maryland.” Did anyone sing “John Brown’s Body?” Veterans – in Union blue and Confederate gray – marched down Chestnut Street. It was a presidential election year, mandatory for every pol to speak. In the Square, waves of jubilation honored battles, heroes, and the power of the Declaration of Independence. Susan B. Anthony and her suffragettes surprised officials by seizing the podium to read their Declaration of Independence of Women. It hardly made a ripple in the flood of words.

Two days later came a resounding shock – Sioux warriors had wiped out the celebrated General George A. Custer and the entire Seventh Cavalry! It seemed unbelievable. As more details emerged, it had to be accepted. Hard-riding warriors led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull annihilated an American army, scalping corpses where they lay.

Edmonia must have worried about her brother living in Bozeman, only two hundred miles west of the carnage. They might never see each other again.

Articles about “red devils” filled the press and set off cries for revenge. Attributed to General Sheridan, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” became the customary comment. Punitive Army expeditions chased the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Blackfoot – who sometimes counterattacked.

The aftermath of Custer’s shocking defeat still held page one when news came of a different sort of massacre in South Carolina. Touched off by insults during a Fourth of July parade, a white mob drove more than 150 blacks from their homes in Hamburg.
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Seven died; only one was white. The mob spent the night looting. It was an omen of Jim Crow rising. Many Americans shrugged it off as natural, the outcome of righteous racial dominance.

Hamburg echoed the carnage at Colfax LA three years earlier. There, a white supremacist group executed fifty members of the mostly-colored Reconstruction state militia who had trusted a white flag of truce to lay down their arms after a gory confrontation.

Slavery had ended, but terrorism took its place. Fearing black equality – education, economic power, the right to bear arms, sexuality, political influence, legacy, and all the other advantages enjoyed by Americans – white supremacists acted with the implicit blessing of the power elite. Often hiding under hoods, they attacked Roman Catholics as well as blacks. Anti-Reconstruction propagandists distorted the character of colored Americans on a massive scale. “Redeemers,” who pretended morality by adopting a pet name for Jesus Christ, sought votes by denouncing Federal programs and power, by calling opponents “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags.”

President Grant’s denunciation did little to relieve the sense of betrayal felt by colored Americans. For the public at large, the Hamburg massacre was completely overshadowed by Custer’s shattering defeat at the hands of an ‘inferior’ race. Colored people were vulnerable, unsure of their standing. Talk of the Centennial’s wonders took a rueful edge. The mass murders certified that the promise of Reconstruction, implemented by “radical” Republicans in Congress ten years earlier, was to be shredded.

Despite the news and Philadelphia’s summer heat and humidity, Edmonia kept her post beside
The Death of Cleopatra.
Unfazed by loutish assaults, she was deeply hurt by the negativity of well-dressed blacks.

The
Christian Recorder
had monitored her career for years. Its editor, Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner, had pleaded for black participation in the Centennial, in particular for the memorial to Bishop Allen.
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Inexplicably during the expo, he had barely mentioned her, only a note of her staying at Mrs. Young’s boarding house. Adding to the mystery, Bishops Arnett, Payne, and others who championed her to create something for the Centennial less than a year earlier apparently had little say.

The
Recorder
employed aging Robert M. Douglass, Jr., as its art critic. His original review of the Centennial trembled with admiration for three white artists.
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While ignoring Edmonia, he reported the medals won by Bannister for art and by Ashbourne for his inventions
without
describing the astonishment at their color. It seems talk of the stir was taboo.

Finally, two weeks before the expo closed, the
Recorder
gave way to a “Letter to the Editor” from John Patterson Sampson. He was a noted teacher and lawyer who had written from Washington DC more than ten days earlier the following comment, headed “CLEOPATRA.”

Standing before this magnificent work of art, wrapped in admiration, I asked a bystander some questions in regard to the design and nativity of the artist, when I was reminded this was the work of an American colored lady. I said, “Oh yes, I have heard of her, and this is what I have been waiting to see,” but really I was so much interested in the work itself that I had not thought of her. Just then a very ordinary looking colored girl (as I thought) offered very kindly to show me other statues carved by the same lady. She took me to another department where I saw several beautifully carved statues of Sumner, Giddings
[sic]
, a group of infants, &c., all of which seemed to be the centre of attraction – in the class of statuary in which they were found. I am no critic in aesthetics and yet I could see that her works, took the popular eye. I was more surprised when I found my guide, a plain and unassuming young woman, was the veritable sculptress herself. After some conversation I soon found Miss Lewis to be a downright sensible woman; a young lady of no foolishness, a devoted lover of her race, a woman courageous in the faith of her final triumph and the fullest recognition of the equal brotherhood of the race she so successfully represents. She spoke of her trials and said she rested under the burden of two despised races, the Indian and the Negro. Some of her own people, who had been more favored in point of opportunity, gave her no encouragement but came to criticise her work, of the merits of which they knew nothing; it was presumptuous; she had no time for them; and instead of fooling here with our people aping the prejudices of the whites, “I am going back to Italy to do something for the race – something that will excite the admiration of the other races of the earth.”
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As Rev. Sampson made clear, Edmonia was furious. After warm receptions by colored people all over America, she did not expect to be ignored, insulted, and stupidly criticized by local colored folk.

Twenty-five years later, writing about Philadelphia, W. E. B. Du Bois suggested, “So hard has been the rise of the better class of Negroes that they fear to fall if they stoop to lend a hand to their fellows.”
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This ‘better class’ rejected Edmonia and her work – even her memorials to anti-slavery heroes – especially the disturbing
Death of Cleopatra.
That she showed her work in a town run by bigots may have raised fears of hostile overreaction. That she was a Catholic also may have been a factor. The
Recorder
editorialized against Catholic interests in colored people. Yet, Bishops Arnett and Payne so admired Edmonia they sat for their portraits.

The best to be said for Rev. Tanner is he mustered the courage to publish the letter. His son, Henry Ossawa Tanner,
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then in his teens, would follow Edmonia over hurdles of alienation in America a generation later, and then go to Europe where he sought recognition as a painter.

Philadelphia did not reflect the views generally held by colored people. A letter to the
New York Progressive American
understood Edmonia’s mission. Criticizing the Centennial, it praised her:

Passing through the main building, you are surrounded with the productions and representations of every nation, save that of Africa; and anyone who is interested in any way in that race of people feels that there is something wrong somewhere; somebody has been left out, or to say the least have been overlooked.

But on entering Memorial Hall any person at all sensitive as to the non representative position in this centennial exhibition of the nation becomes greatly relieved. While it cannot be said Africa or the negro race have any department as a national or race affair, it will be with gratification to the colored people throughout the country, and with much credit to Miss Edmonia Lewis, who in her group of “Sleep” and “Hiawatha’s Marriage” also “Old Arrow Maker and his Daughter” grouped in marble, and terra-cotta busts of “Longfellow,” “Sumner,” and “John Brown,” and more especially does her production of the death of “Cleopatra,” do her credit. Not only credit to herself, but it wipes out the burning stigma that has been for centuries fastened upon this would be prosperous people. It brands the nation with shame before God and, in the eyes of man, and renders Miss Lewis’s name conspicuous among the most skillful and eminent artists of ancient or modern times. Miss Lewis cannot be esteemed too warmly by her people, she has made for herself and race a name that will live long after she shall have ceased to be.
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