The good, the bad & the ugly

An opinionated, irreverent look at Boston's public art

by Christopher Millis

Absence my presence is. Strangeness, my grace.

-- Rumi

Until recently -- the concept died shortly after World War II -- we thought of ourselves as citizens, as belonging to a community, a country, a place. Boston wasn't just where we lived, it was how we lived. And once upon a not-so-distant time, the public art of our cities served to express our citizenship. Which is why, these days, looking at virtually any monument erected before World War II, from Paul Revere in the North End to Edward Everett Hale in the Public Garden, seems a little like attending the funeral of a relative we never knew. These monuments issue from a language we no longer speak.

The heyday of Boston's public art, the three decades on either side of 1900 more or less, points to that language. What's outstanding about the memorials erected between 1870 and 1930 is the personality of the subjects they depict, and that of the artists who created them. No one would think of messing with Olin Levi Warner's 1886 figure of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison on Commonwealth Avenue. Although Garrison is seated and holds no more than a newspaper in his right hand, the calm ferocity of his expression -- his face turns away from our gaze with the dignity of a caged primate -- would make Jesse Helms wither.

Neither would any of us dare to pull at the skirt of Cyrus Dallin's 1922 Anne Hutchinson on the State House lawn; though her face cranes upward toward Heaven, the power suggested by her body makes Grace Jones seem like a wimp. Just the phrases chiseled on the monuments of that era pack more punch than the entire structures of more recent years. The reverse side of Daniel Chester French's 1914 Public Garden tribute to Wendell Phillips reads "I love inexpressibly these streets of Boston/Over whose pavements my mother held up tenderly my baby feet/And if God grants me time enough I will make them too pure/To bear the footsteps of a slave."

Public art is to a city as skin is to the face of an adult; though it rarely determines one's health, it regularly determines one's social life. These days Boston needs both a dermatologist and an inspired plastic surgeon. The statues are a wreck, mute victims of years of neglect. Over by the Hatch Shell, the plaque has been torn from the front of Mayor Tobin, so that his splayed right hand rests on what looks like termite damage. The wall behind Governor Walsh in the same area has two of its three bronze fixtures torn away. Bodies stand decapitated in the reliefs surrounding Martin Milmore's 19th-century Civil War monument on the Common, and not as symbols of battle, either. George Washington towers over the Public Garden in what wants to be one of the great equestrian monuments of its kind in the United States, but the blade of his sword has been ripped from its handle, rendering the resolution on George's face almost buffoonish. There's a rusted hole so big in the middle of David Kibbey's otherwise forgettable Trimbloid X, on the Esplanade by Clarendon Street, you could stuff the arts commissioner's considerable salary inside.

But the problem with public art in Boston isn't just skin deep -- ungainly symptoms are everywhere. The memorial to the Hungarian Uprising in Liberty Square looks like the Iwo Jima memorial in drag. The Vendome Fire Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue reads like a comic-book version of the Vietnam Memorial in DC. The problem is nostalgia. Since we no longer have a sense of living in history, since we're no longer citizens but employees, public art has stopped honoring individuals and started honoring groups. The heartfelt visages on the unrepentant political renegades of our late-19th- and early-20th-century statues have been replaced by depersonalized, often didactic abstract memorials to citizens who were wiped out.

The result is a breathtaking banality, as with the Holocaust Memorial behind City Hall. For those who haven't noticed it -- and not being noticeable is its most salient attribute -- six glass columns have been crowded into the median that separates the backside of City Hall from Faneuil Hall. They're supposed to suggest the chimneys of the camps, polished, hollow affairs that rise over steel grates, with the numbers that were tattoo'd on the arms of the incinerated delicately etched in the transparent walls. Instead, lined up as they are almost directly behind the standing bronze figure of Lloyd Lillie's dynamic, irascible lifesize bronze James Michael Curley (who, incidentally, wears a campaign button for himself), they suggest the mayor's humidor, individual containers for keeping a dignitary's big cigars fresh. This tribute to political correctness is insultingly bland: pleasant instead of horrible, nondescript rather than arresting, it could be included on any garden tour.

It turns out that, with few exceptions, public art that commemorates Great Ideas -- try the Monument to Ether in the Public Garden for a look at the previous fin de siècle's kitsch -- or the Mass Death of the Formerly Disenfranchised ends up aspiring to mediocrity. Whereas public art that realizes it's the last surviving medium through which to honor heroes (another word that's disappeared from our vocabulary) frequently achieves passionate, lasting results. Augustus Saint-Gaudens's brilliant tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his infantrymen (across from the State House on Beacon Street) stands out as one of the most heartrending public pieces in the United States, in part because the troops are rendered not en masse but as distinct, troubled individuals. The African-American men who flank the horseback-riding Brahmin renegade appear worn out from their own courage; one senses that the deaths into which they are marching -- nearly the entire regiment of 900, including Shaw, were killed in the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July of 1863 -- aren't terribly unlike the lives they're leaving behind, but that doesn't stop them.

Compare this monument with Andrzej Pitynski's 1979 Partisans at the foot of the same hill. Partisans is intended as a tribute to guerrilla freedom fighters everywhere; the artist, in other words, had no war, no names, nobody specific in mind. And it reads as generic. Five bedraggled men on horseback, their postures hyperbolic as a press release, hold their bayonetted rifles like slim, sharpened crucifixes. Featureless and interchangeable, they register like a public-service announcement on the dangers of overexertion.

Boston's public art falls into three categories: magnificent, execrable, and won't-bum-your-eyes. The three areas along the continuum are unusually distinct, like autumn weather -- it's sunny, or miserable, or easily ignored. Below are two walking tours of Boston proper (excluding subways, houses of worship, museum grounds, and the lawns of universities), the first designed for a friend you'd like to have move here, the other designed for someone you want to discourage from ever visiting again.

The Seducer's Guide to Boston's Public Art

However you choose to get there, begin in the North End, where you can stop for good coffee, buy figs cheaply by the pint, and behold behind Old North Church, in the mall between Salem and Hanover Streets, Cyrus Dallin's 1940 bronze equestrian memorial of

1) Paul Revere

Dallin was an old man when he created the legendary figure on horseback -- he died four years after its installation, at 83. But for all that the image of the midnight rider appears on virtually every map and tour guide and every third postcard of the city, it's still powerful. Situated on a huge granite pedestal, the larger-than-life Revere turns out to be doing not at all what you expect. With his chin pulled inward and his face nearly shielded by his brimmed hat, you almost can't see the face of the famous crier. Furthermore, he's not riding at a gallop to Lexington but pulling at his horse's reins; he's slowing to give that famous warning. Dallin's work is a lot more complex and interesting than the frequency of its reproduction might lead you to believe.

From the North End, make your way down Hanover Street (averting your eyes from the dreadful mosaics in the little tunnel on the way to Haymarket). Ordinarily you'd want to keep your eyes peeled for one of the most literally and figuratively brilliant works to come along in the last 30 years:

2) Asaroton

Imagine getting a commission to commemorate the US bicentennial and having the chutzpah to create casts from garbage. That's what Mags Harries did to enchanting effect, embedding polished bronze detritus, scraps of newspaper and strewn vegetables, into Blackstone Street, which runs parallel to the produce hawkers in Haymarket Square. By far the most wry and inventive work of its kind in Boston, Asaroton has been removed from its place beside the real garbage while the Central Artery undergoes bypass surgery. Half of it, though, is on display in the Science Museum's Big Dig exhibit. Whether it returns depends on the disposition of the Haymarket post-Big Dig. The title Asaroton refers to the floor tiles of Roman antiquity.

As you cut through Quincy Market, which is of more architectural and social than sculptural or culinary interest, pause long enough to take in James Michael Curley -- both versions of him -- on Congress Street. Lillie's other 1980 statue of the mayor has parked him in an avuncular attitude on a bench, behind the standing form. Standing he's about 5'7", whereas were his seated form to rise, he'd measure over six feet -- as if to indicate that when Curley gave advice, he towered. Stroll down Congress Street, take a left past the JFK Building and locate the

3) Site of the Bowling Green, 1700

To the left of the entrance of the Art Deco New England Telephone and Telegraph Building, in Bowdoin Square, is a 1931 bronze plaque by E.W. Saville. The plaque itself seems innocuous at first, its foreground figure standing with bent knee, positioned to bowl the ball in his right hand. Actually it's the two background figures that the relief is really about, two men in Puritan garb, one of whom has just told the other a joke. There's something quietly fiendish about Puritans at play. The image of the man laughing -- he doesn't suggest mirth so much as cruelty, since only his mouth registers the laughter, while his body stands rigid as a gallows -- will make you wish you lived in Rhode Island.

From Bowdoin Square, follow Somerset south, then turn right onto Beacon. At the corner of Beacon and Park Streets, Saint-Gaudens's Memorial to Colonel Shaw will be at your back, and directly in front of you, set back and obscured by a huge Thomas Hooker on horseback and a few trees, you'll discover

4) Mary Dyer

On the State House lawn, near the Bowdoin Street side, sits one of the most remarkable bronzes anywhere, Sylvia Shaw Judson's 1959 statue of Mary Dyer, a Quaker who challenged Puritan religious intolerance and was hanged on Boston Common in 1660. Broad-shouldered, thick-thighed, as erect in her seated posture as if enthroned, Dyer wears an expression of implacable yet humble resolve, a model in all but the fashion sense of the word.

When you've recovered from Miss Dyer, the veritable sculpture park of the Boston Common and Public Garden lies before you down Beacon Street like a spacious gallery. There's a lot to see, and much of it is extraordinary, including two major works by Daniel Chester French on the Common, the better of which is his memorial to the social reformer Wendell Phillips. But nothing here is more vital than

5) Edward Everett Hale

Of all the statues with their heads in the trees in the Public Garden, Bela Lyon Pratt's 1913 depiction of the writer and minister Edward Everett Hale is uncannily animated. Depending on the angle at which you take in his strolling form, with its bald pate and walking stick, he looks alternately brooding and relaxed, disgruntled and mischievous.

Walk down Beacon Street to Esplanade Road and cross the Arthur Fiedler Footbridge to the other side of Storrow Drive and onto the Charles River Esplanade, where you should be sure to check out

6) Arthur Fiedler

The maestro of the Boston Pops finds dignity, refinement, and inventiveness in Ralph Helmick's 1984 six-foot head on the Esplanade just shy of the Hatch Shell. A stylistic tour de force -- Fiedler's visage emerges from the accretion of thin aluminum slabs -- the work is a delight, and never mind its middlebrow appeal.

From the Esplanade, proceed to Dartmouth Street and follow it through Copley Square to Back Bay Station. Poke your head inside long enough to meet

7) Asa Philip Randolph

Just inside Back Bay Station, in front of the ticket booths and to the right of the pretzel vendors, Tina Allen's awkward, oversized, basically misplaced bronze sculpture of Asa Philip Randolph, the African-American man who led the union of pullman-car porters in the early decades of this century, succeeds despite its location. Seated on a round dais where commuters perch among empty soda cans, Randolph's enigmatic expressivity (he comes across as constitutionally generous) makes this one of the least-recognized downtown treasures.

Continuing down Dartmouth, turn right onto Columbus Avenue and then left onto West Canton Street. In a secluded, quiet little playground you'll come upon

8) West Canton Street Child

Nowhere is the abandonment of childhood play better understood as inseparable from its utter sexuality than this diminutive sculpture, by Kahlil Gibran (the writer's nephew), of a little girl swinging a jumprope. The work graces the center of Hayes Park in the heart of the South End.

If you've made it this far, have dinner down the street on Shawmut Avenue at Cedars of Lebanon, the last, great, untrendy Lebanese establishment that remains in this now upscale neighborhood. For dessert (but not if the sun has already set), walk up Harrison Street to Broadway, turn right and cross Fort Point Channel, and catch any outbound Red Line train to see the

9) BostonGas Tank

Although it's not in Boston proper (and thus not on our map), you can see Corita Kent's diabolically playful rainbow on the gas tank in Dorchester from many a brownstone roof. Besides outlining the profile of Ho Chi Minh in the blue cascade of paint (she always denied the likeness), which caused an uproar since the Vietnam War was raging at the time of its creation (1971), the work transforms a bulky eyesore into a gargantuan, attractive paperweight.

Alternatively, there's the assaultive art that experience teaches you to avert your eyes from. If attracting someone to the city is precisely what you don't intend, then take him or her on

The In-laws' Guide to Boston's Public Art

It turns out you can accomplish a whole lot on Boylston Street alone. By all means, start off with the miserable salad bar in the Star Market of the Prudential Center. (Yes, you'll have to suffer along with your unwanted out-of-towners, but it's a small price to pay for a lifetime of peace; besides, if you send them by themselves, they're apt to bolt.) You can dine al fresco in the blazing sun in front of

1) Quest Eternal

As if the Prudential Tower weren't ugly enough, Donald DeLue's 1967 preposterously overmuscled (he makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Pee-wee Herman) man on a pedestal is like a dinner-theater version of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Adam. His huge left arm reaches to the windowless side of the Hines Convention Center; his left leg lifts in a fashion that suggests a dog by a hydrant. It's awful, except for that time when someone put a Papa Gino's outfit on him and balanced a pizza on his extended finger.

Just a couple of blocks down Boylston, in Copley Square, you can set your eyes on the sore of

2) Fountain at Trinity Church

Someone must have been paid handsomely to come up with the inappropriate and crass design for the waterworks in the plaza in front of one of the great churches in this country, two faux Egyptian obelisks flanking 12 gushing pipes. The obelisks themselves are made of cheap pink granite and stand at a perfectly irritating height, too tall to be ignored, too small to be meaningful.

So near as to catch the spray from the fountain, you'll find

3) Tortoise and Hare

Trinity Church lucks out twice, in this instance with Nancy Schon's homage to the Boston Marathon. Two shamelessly cute bronze animals, a Disneyesque rabbit and turtle, each about the size of the mother duckling in the Public Garden (Schon's work as well, so she's quoting herself in this one, except with far less energy and charm), have the feel of turned-over garbage cans: bulky impediments that purport to be naive. They're also an insult to the runners -- would you rather be the plodding tortoise or the overconfident hare?

Continue down Boylston Street, through the Public Garden and the Common and back up to the State House lawn. This time, keep to the left of the front steps and glue your eyes to

4) John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Isabel McIlvain's 1990 sculpture of our man from yesteryear is a three-dimensional cliché, with a face that has all the self-consciousness of a Life-magazine photo shoot and a body that has no more energy than Farberware. Kennedy appears to be walking, but that's only because one foot is in front of the other. It's the sort of work that makes one wish for more ambitious vandals.

Retracing a small part of the original tour, cut down Beacon to Tremont and return to City Hall Plaza. Position yourself in front of the JFK Federal Building, where you'll feel you're about to be consumed by

5) Thermopylae

Dimitri Hadzi's 16-ton abstraction, from 1966, suggests a small stick of dynamite planted in a bronze mastodon. Hadzi has created a gigantic abstraction of thick, clumsy, confused forms that balance on three bulky legs. The sculptor claims his piece was inspired by JFK's Profiles in Courage, and he may not be fibbing. It's just as dull.

Whether abstract or representational, new or Victorian, great public art is almost always informed by a sense of place. Thermopylae could be placed anywhere willing to suffer it; Mary Dyer, on the other hand, has a legitimate home across from the spot where she was executed. Similarly, Mags Harries's Asaroton belongs to the floor of real debris that litters the pavement of the Haymarket; anywhere else and it would lose its resonance.

Beyond the need to address the disgraceful maintenance of our these works, however, the future for public art in Boston requires another level of reform. We cannot afford an arts commission marked by the obsequiousness born of political appointments; it results in trivialities like the Holocaust Memorial, art that succeeds only in being politically unobjectionable. As radical as the idea may sound, maybe artists can be part of the process of administering public art. Yes, they would lobby and squabble and make mistakes, but the results would still be an improvement over the trend of recent years. Bad taste remains superior to no taste at all.