 Everyone, thank you so much for having me in here. Yes, I was, this is the Indian Outgo, Pan American Goodwill Tour apparently, because I was in Cupertino a couple days ago, then Chicago a couple days before that, and then barely missed the fleshette rounds that come from being part of a Samsung product rollout, and then had one of those weeks where, as I'm packing in my hotel room, I remind myself to, oh, the laundry has to go on the top of the bag, because when I get back home, I can take it out, leave the rest of it intact, do a quick wash, put it back in, then zip the bag back up. So if I'm a little bit flustered, I hope that the seams are not too noticeable. I'm gonna share with you a small research project that I've been sort of looking at, starting with a simple question I had about a fixture at the Boston Public Library, and as research sometimes happens, trying to find the answer to one question results in a couple more questions, and then a couple of other interesting sidebars, and I hope you'll find this as interesting as I do, because it's been a little bit of a nice little adventure. Now you probably, I should, before I start though, there is some artistic nudity in this presentation dating from the late 1890s, however, I did think it would be sporting to make sure if anybody would be offended by that, they have an opportunity to bail right now, as if you stick around you will find that there is an irony in my feeling the need to announce that. But let me start off by talking about an incident that actually really happened at the Boston Public Library in the spring of 1897. The still cold and lifeless form of a 19 year old woman holding a baby was placed inside a box, carried out right the front door by Workman. She had had a storied career in her nation of birth in Paris. She had been heralded, lauded, she had come to Boston hoping to find a permanent home, but when she got there she was preceded by a reputation that she had not earned. She was called a bad influence, she was called immature, she was called a smutty, she was even called by her worst of her enemies a whore. It was a sad moment and a year long battle to find out what her destiny was going to be and when she was finally carried out the people who at the Boston Public Library who had grown to know her felt the need to strew her little casket with flower petals and according to a report in a Kansas newspaper tears were shed. Now of course I'm being clever here, this wasn't a live woman, this was a statue by the name of Bakante and Infant Fawn. You're seeing the very top of that statue right here by an artist by the name of Frederick MacMoneys. Let's go, before we get to the situation though that led to that very sad ending, let's talk about how this really wonderful piece of art was created. Let's meet the artist, this is Frederick MacMoneys. He was about, born in the 1850s, had this immense career, he was one of these people who knew he wanted to be a sculptor early on. When he was five years old, the family history says that he sculpted a figure of George Washington out of chewing gum on horseback mind you. He started working for Augusta St. Gaudens, probably the most influential and important sculptor of the time of the 1880s, showed so much promise that he borrowed $50 from a more mature friend and traveled to Paris to start his studies. There he was accepted at the Academy de Beau Arts which is the best national art school there in Paris. So influential that a whole art movement called the Beau Arts Movement came out of that school and he exceeded so well there that two years in a row he was named the top student of all the foreign class members there. So this was somebody of whom great things were going to happen because he had the skills, he had the talent and he had the passion for what he was doing. And almost immediately he started creating really, really great work. This was his first public commission in the United States. He was a Brooklyn guy so he was very, very pleased to receive this commission, a statue of Nathan Hale for the park that's outside of City Hall in New York. And you think about all the sort of fusty, you know, classical, even statues of patriots and soldiers and you look at how he was able to do his own interpretation of a moment in this character's history. Here he is, he is about 10 minutes away from death. His shirt has been torn open, his feet are bound, his shoulders are bound behind him and his neck is being made ready for the noose and yet this is the expression on his face. This is not the full-size one of course, this is a replica that is at the Art Institute of Chicago but I'm standing there and looking at it and I'm thinking if I were a British soldier and I was dropping the noose on this guy's neck, I might not think that we're gonna lose the war but I'd be sure that, oh man, if there were more guys like this, this is gonna be a long few years. It is a very, very intense piece and a standout for its time, very much part of the new wave. So that really got his attention for McMoneys in the United States and he started getting more commissions. One of the most significant he got immediately was the ceremonial barge, the barge of state for the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. This was a world's fair when it really was a world's fair. Olympics but actually with economic benefits for the city that hosts it. He made this huge triumphal barge with Columbia, the representation of the United States of the Americas sitting above it with rowers and feraled by angels and holy mother of God, this is like putting a sapphire cover on a phone even though you don't need to just to show you can do it. And this became an international sensation. The world's focus was on this Columbian Exposition and this was the centerpiece of the lagoon that everything was happening around. So everybody who wrote anything about the Columbian Exposition, anybody who wanted to photograph anything, anybody who wanted to draw anything was drawing, photographing and talking about this and that made him an international superstar. So that's one way that this piece had a profound impact on the direction of Mack Money's life. The second one is that one of these, the woman who posed for one of the rowers of this barge. He had had an idea kicking around the back of his head of the sculpture he wanted to do. This was not a commission. This was not something that he was being paid to do and this is not necessarily business but he's a real artist and he also really wants to push things forward. So he had this idea that he wants to really capture a moment of joy and fluid motion. Just freeze that instant in bronze and he'd been toying with this idea but it wasn't until he met this model by the name of Eugenie Pasqua and saw the way that she moved and saw the way that she laughed and walked around and she said, that's the person that I need to sculpt for this. That's the perfect thing. I'm not gonna be thinking about this. I'm gonna immediately start working on this and almost immediately like, while he's working on the barge he starts grabbing a hunk of clay and starts doing what sculptors call sketches. Just, you know, he'll flatten it out afterwards but just maybe this shape, maybe that shape, maybe not this. And it really was all due to a drive to once again push things forward. He was a young guy. He did not learn 50 years of tradition of sculpting which means that he got his own neck out from the noose of neoclassicism. This is what we're looking at right here. This was sculpted in the 1850s by an American sculptor who was trying to make a figure of America. And okay, I guess there are stars on her Wonder Woman tiara, but this is Roman. It's Roman. There's nothing, again, it's pretty in its way certainly. It's certainly well executed but this is what sculptors have been doing for 100 years, 150 years earlier when archeologists had started digging up Greek ruins and Roman ruins and the entire world culturally got saturated with the ideals of the Roman cities and the Greek cities or at least the idealized versions of them saying, oh, we're gonna be artistic people and scientific people and we're gonna read poetry. And so all of their art needed to focus, needed to switch to this way which is why you will see like the Houdan statue of a bust of George Washington. And again, it looks like Washington you take out a dollar bill, say okay, I don't recognize that guy, that's the one officer, bring him in. But nonetheless, he could be a Roman senator. This is the mindset that people were stuck in. Again, it's pretty, and this isn't a race, we're not judging people and saying you scored higher than this score, this isn't Project Runway. But nonetheless, this is familiar, this is common, this is what everybody in the world is used to and he wanted to do things more like the Nathan Hale. So this is, just to give you another point of reference, this is the statue of Daniel Webster by an artist who's very nice, Thomas Ball. If you've ever been in the public garden he did the equestrian statue of George Washington and he also taught a lot of artists who's very, very influential. If you walk around Boston, around maybe a two mile radius of that, you can point to at least a dozen statues that were sculpted either by him or by one of his students. Also there's a public, his autobiography, My Four Score Years in Ten, is in the public domain, really great book. He was also a musician and he really liked the knife life, he liked the boogie. But once again, this he was a prisoner of the limitations of the skills that he had been trained in and his age in a little way. Because again, very nicely done, but I'm Daniel Webster. I'm posing for a bear, but bearing bonds. That's, again, it's good, but it doesn't really change things. Meanwhile, in France and even in the United States, other artists were shaking things up. Augusta St. Gaudens, a name that's probably familiar to you, she, he did the walking Liberty Dollar and was also one of these titans of sculpture and arts. He was not just a person who did influential art, not just a person who did popular art, but the sort of person who would find other artists like Mack Moniz and say, that guy's got it. I'm gonna promote him, I'm gonna introduce him to the right people because this is the guy who can bring things forward. So here is what Augusta St. Gaudens did when one of the founding families of Springfield said, I want you to create a sculpture of one of my ancestors who was a Puritan. Ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-bum. Again, he's not just simply standing there, I've got my walking stick, I've got my Bible. He's got purpose, he's a man of destiny. He's gonna set people on fire, they're gonna be setting people to hell. I was surprised, I've been familiar with the sculpture, not until I read about it, I realized that, no, no, this was somebody's great-great-grandfather and they wanted to please depict my great-great-grandfather. This guy looks scary. And it's a very, very powerful piece. Again, another half-sized version of this that's in the Art Institute of Chicago. So, Mack Moneys was working on all this sort of stuff. Before the other two pieces that I showed you, he did this piece, a Diana, and here you can sort of see where the tide is starting to shift. It's very much a classical figure, it's Diana, the goddess of the hunt. But this is not the same stuffy, stoic pose. It's the same sort of idealized shape. I don't have the art history experience to have the right terminology, but we all know what we're talking about when we talk about a Roman sort of figure, a Greek sort of figure, and Diana is that person. But you can see that goodness, the flow and the motion in this, that you would not see in the 1700s or even the late 1800s. And this was his first big splashy piece for the person. This is the one that got people to say, okay, Frederick, we're watching, now what are you gonna do next? And so, let me show you what he did next. But actually, before that, let me introduce you to Eugenie, or Nini as she was known. She was very, very well liked in the Paris art community of the early 1890s and also very well known among them. She was one of these people who were just friends to everybody. And so she turns up in a lot of different pieces of artwork. As a matter of fact, Charles Dana Gibson, who did The Gibson Girl, he got shamed out of New York for a year when critics kept saying, you know what, all your girls look like the same girl. You gotta go see new girls. And so, no joke, he went to Paris for a year to get new faces. And so, she drew, there is Nini right there. And who's that? That is Frederick MacMoneys, that is the sculptor. So, they were hanging out a little bit together. This is 1894, after that famous sculpture, the Becanti was sculpted. But here's another piece that he did that shows her a little bit better. It's said to be a very, very accurate drawing of her. You can, you have to either go on eBay and spend $80 for a page that was torn out of a beautiful book to get this. So, I suggest you just go to a rare books library and ask to see it and then take a good picture of it. But there's no mistaking, this is the same person. And also, I have to admit, I did not understand what this hair was about until I saw this drawing here. Now it makes perfect sense. There are a lot of really cool stories about her. Come on, man, good Lord. No, I don't want to see the manual to my Olympus camera. There you go, thank you. There was a, she was well known enough as the model of the Becanti. There was a big history as to who modeled for this figure. And there was enough of a mystery that she became a little bit better known because of it. And there were a couple of new stories about her. One writer in a, believe it or not a Kansas City paper, I think, do we have that right there? Yeah, in the Kansas City Journal of her said, her soul-flight figure was always darting from place to place. And she was always playing some prank. She had a funny little way of throwing her head back and sticking a finger in her cheek. She was the heart and soul of any studio feast to which she might happen to be invited. I happen to have found and read the unpublished memoirs of Frederick MacMoney's wife, who was also a very, very fine artist. But she tells a story of an artist's ball that might shed some light on that quote partly. It was a masked ball, masked costume ball for artists in Paris. And so she went as Marie Antoinette. She did not have an invitation. So she was seeing clear of her husband who did have an invitation and was walking around, no joke, in a full bronze diving uniform. And when a friend would recognize him, they'd open up and pour beer down the helmet. It was a fun, fun time. But so she sees this woman who is being in a beautiful silk-brocaded Japanese gown being lifted and carried around by laughing men and she's laughing, she's having a great time. And she recognized this person as Nini for a couple of reasons. She says she, first because of her laugh also, she noted as a parenthetically with admirable simplicity, Mary said. Nini wore nothing at all underneath the robe. Admirable simplicity. And she also recognized her because it was Mary's robe. I don't know what the story goes from there. I'm going to be looking into it. It's interesting, is it not? But her backstory is the backstory of a lot of different artists' models from back then. She had hard, her parents had financial straights. She started modeling at 15, 16, 17, became hugely popular and then hopefully got out of the modeling industry while her looks were still intact. But now let's get to the star of the show, the actual sculpture, Bakante and Infant Fawn. It took him about two years to do it. He started in 1893, finished in 1894, and it was said that while he was working on that barge, he was stealing as much time as he possibly could, even though he was traveling to Chicago to oversee the installation. This is how obsessed he was about it. And before we get there, why a Bakante? And what is a Bakante? Well, again, we're still in that transition point where you can do whatever you, you can do a lot of what you want to do, but instinctively and also so that your audience will appreciate it, you will sort of couch it in classical terms. So when he first started sculpting this, he had like a nose gale, a bouquet of flowers in the figure's hand. And then he said, okay, well, I'll make this a Bakante, a lot of artists will point Bakante. These are the temple priestesses of the goddess of Dionysus or Bacchus, noted for drinking also, if you read more of the stories, dancing themselves into a total frenzy, occasionally slaying the sons of gods because they are so drunk and so in a frenzy of ecstasy. But again, this is not necessarily something he really believed in as part of the subject. But again, that's the frame you have to put it in or at least that's the frame he would think about putting it in. But here's what we're talking about. Bakante and Yves-en-Fawn. And just look at the life in this figure. And if you have a chance to see this in person, you will walk around it and around it just looking at it because the more you look at it, the more you see that he really did achieve his goal. This is an instant frozen in time. This character completely off balance, but of course completely prepared to continue her dance. And you try to look for a bad angle on this and there is not a single bad angle on this. That's why it's kind of a shame, like at the Chicago Art Institute, that this smaller copy of it is against the wall because you really want to walk around it. The full-sized version is 84 inches tall, so it's a little bit larger than life-size. And when you have the chance to walk around it, you find yourself continuing to walk around it because the more you see it, the more you experience it, or at least my experience is that the more enchanted you get by this piece of work. I imagine there was a lot like the first time you saw a Jurassic Park and the first time you saw real dinosaurs walking around or the camera can move too and people are interacting with it. It really did blow everybody's minds and it made a huge impression. This skyrocket mech money's from a very well-known and popular and respected artist to an international superstar. They couldn't get enough of this. This was accepted by the Parasilon of 1894, which is the biggest exhibition certainly in Europe, maybe even internationally of new art. And it was such a sensation that France, the nation, did something they'd never done before. They wanted to buy it. They wanted to keep it in the country and they wanted to buy it from McMoneys and put it in the Luxembourg Museum, which was a museum of contemporary art. This also helps us to understand the big deal this was because it's a contemporary art museum. 10 years earlier in 1883 or four, they were the first national gallery to host an exhibition of Impressionists, you know, Monet, Monet, Degas. They, the fact that they wanted to buy this and make it part of their permanent collection meant that they saw this not just as a very pretty thing, not just as a popular thing, not just as technically well done, but this is important. This is an inflection point for the future of sculpture and we gotta have it. And McMoneys said, wow, what an honor. Sorry, can't give it to you. Sorry, I promised to somebody else I've actually given it to a friend of mine. And let me show you who that friend is. The architect of the Boston Public Library. Man by the name of Charles Fallon McKim, who was also a legend in his own right. He was one of the leading proponents of this bow arts movement. This was a style where you don't just build a building and then say, okay, there's a blank space there. Let's buy a painting for that spot. You design the entire building to accommodate murals and not just murals there, but specifically from this one artist that you have your eye on. You design an area for sculpture. But again, maybe even specifically a sculpture designed specifically for that area. And as one of the leading bow arts and most respected bow arts architects, he had a very, very long list of artists he liked to work with. And Frederick McMoneys was one of those people. As a matter of fact, here's the Boston Public Library as it is today. It is a jewel box. The intention was to build a temple for the people. Seriously. This was almost unprecedented. The Boston Public Library was the first, what's usually acknowledged as the first public library that was free for everybody. And as you can see, it's just full of art. Every square inch has different artworks in it. I'm not even giving you the full tour here, but there is not a square inch that is not filled with something charming and delightful. And this is why people know I'm from the Boston area. And so they, they'll tweet at me saying, hey, I'm gonna be in Boston for a few days. So what do you like to, what do you recommend? Boston Public Library, it's free, it's open all day. It'll take you two hours to get through it, but just wander around and just be impressed by being in all these wonderful places. So, hello. So, McMoneys was one of McKim's favorite artists. And he approached McMoneys to do this statue of Sir Henry Vane, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony. And even though he did this at the same time he was doing Baconté. So this is a commissioned work, so he has to make sure that it's palatable to the person he's making it for. Baconté was, I'm just wanted to experiment, I wanna do this and do this great. But even when he's doing something more mundane, look at it, it's just a beautiful piece of artwork. At the same time though, he's talking to his friend about this work he's doing and he decides that, you know what, I'm gonna give you the Baconté. I just want you to have it. Because you know that person who loaned him $50 when he was a kid to go to Paris? That was McKim. And he was also responsible through his firm for putting $300,000 worth of contracts in his hands over the years. So there was another reason for him to be very, very, very, very welcoming to him and also appreciative. And he knew very well that this was an important sculpture he was giving to him, not to the library, but to McKim personally. Now McKim almost immediately, there's some, this is something I wanna look into. There's some ficeness about what his intentions were. But almost immediately he decided that, oh, that'd be perfect for the center fountain that we're building in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library. He, as a matter of fact, was himself donating this fountain. Of course he's an architect, he's paid very, very well. This library was budgeted at $430,000. It came in finally at about 2.2 million, oh well. But he wanted to make this a gift to the library from him personally for reasons that hopefully we'll have time to get into later. And when he found out that McMoneys had gotten all this acclaimed for the sculpture when it finally was exhibited, he said, no, no, look, just make me a copy of it. That's fine, give the original to France and cause that's important to them. It's a $30,000 contract they're gonna give you and he said, nope, I will not hear of it. That belongs to you, you're gonna get it. Could we please hold on to it for about a year or two because I need to, I need it for reference when I make the copy. I have the plaster mold, but there's some squinkies going on with the mold so I'm gonna need to hold this on. This is the letter that McM sent to the trustees of the Boston Public Library to explain what was happening. And here he is in his studio. You can see that he's already cutting the, it's a brutal process. There's a story about when his Diana was the first sculpture that he had cast and he had to leave the room because professionals make the cast and they start by cutting off all the fingers and then cutting off the arms and separating it so they can cast it and then walling it up in plaster and he like almost fainted to watch this happen to his Diana. So that's great. The Boston Public Library is getting this immensely, not this beautiful piece of art, but also this important piece of art and this world famous piece of art. Yet another coup for the art collection of the Boston Public Library became it and going after the best artists in the entire world. And man, what a coup this was. So first it has to be approved by the trustees. Trustees said, hell yeah, absolutely. And then there was the small matter of the Boston Arts Council, Arts Committee. A panel of five people from the senior staff of, I believe it was, Harvard, MIT, the Museum of Fine Arts Society of Architects and Engineers and one, I think even the Boston Public Library that for every public sculpture it has to be approved because it's gonna be put on public display and it's gonna become property of the city so they have to do it. And so here's the trustees room. And now it's time for them to go off against the Boston Arts Committee. And so it took two months, they got lots of opinions and then they said, that's a great sculpture. We can't let you do that. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. They said, no, we don't think it's suitable for a public library. It was a five person vote. They voted four to one against. The only person who voted for it was the member of the Board of Trustees of the Boston Public Library. And as you can guess, McKim did not think favorably about this. So he said, look, you've been spending two or three months. You're beginning a picture. All you've been looking at is a photograph from Paris and a little 14 inch table model that I borrowed from a friend so that you can have something to look at. Even at this point, even, this is in 1896. Even at this point, it was so famous that McMunnys was making a lot of money on reproductions of this. But this was still the original. McKim said, you can't just... It's intended to be inside this area, seen with water spraying around it, not like looked straight up ahead, but actually from 10 feet away, unless you're gonna get your feet wet inside that fountain. They didn't think that it would fit in. But McKim's, one of his thoughts was, this entire courtyard and the entire library is very, very traditional and very, very austere. I want people, when they're walking through the library, and they finally see daylight for the first time to see joy, to see something that doesn't fit in. I believe that that will be a wonderful experience for these people. So, under the proviso, they would not do this while the library was open to the public. They had the statue shipped at McKim's own expense, set up with temporary fountaining around it. And the board and the trustees, the arts commission and 100 invited guests on Sunday morning with the library closed got to see it. And the commissioner said, huh, he said, leave it up for a week. And they threw open the doors on that Sunday, people came in, they've been reading about this, God knows for about a year. And they said, huh, that's beautiful. There have been people, even before the thing arrived, who said that this is a baccante. She's just here to lure people into drinking. It's a celebration of alcohol and debauchery and frolicking and nudity. We can't have that in the library. And a lot of people were thinking, really? My God, maybe we shouldn't have in the library. But then, no, that's beautiful. Go away, be stupid someplace else. They kept it up for the entire month of November. They opened it up on November 8th. They finally took her down the very end of the month. And two days late in November 18th, the committee sent a very nice letter. I don't know why it's torn to bits. But a second letter saying, we had a meeting yesterday. We decided, yes, we approve this statue. Hooray, hozah. You did not do something stupid. And so they took the statue down because it's winter in New England. All that stuff was temporary. They had ordered some blocks from Ireland for the pedestal. All right, great, the good people won. And so you would think and hope that the story would end there. Unfortunately, that gave the months and months and months between the end of November when this was taken down and the spring when it was supposed to be put back up again gave her enemies time to entrench. And hopefully I'll have time to sort of go through the highlights of what the controversy about this statue was. Number one, obviously, this is when the temperance movement was really finding its spurs, finding the ability to impact power upon society. They felt like it was truly a religious and moral crusade. And the mere fact that you had this statue of a woman holding up a bunch of grapes and also looking like maybe she's drunk. Newspapers had a field day with this. It sold a lot of papers with morning and afternoon editions of four different daily papers in Boston. If you wanted to get another goose for page three, find another story to write about that drunk and naked dancing woman that's in the Boston Public Library. So that was problem number one. The nudity was also kind of a problem but not really, we'll get into that surprisingly enough, not really a problem. But the other problem was that this was not the first battle that the Boston Public Library had had to fight with some of these Puritan technical conservatives. This is the seal of the Boston Public Library as designed personally by Augustus St. Gaudens. It is above the doorway of the main entrance of the library. See if you can guess the two problems that or maybe six problems that the Puritans would have against that. And they were told, look, it's their cherubs, they're asexual, just go away. There was, they had some, this is the great hallway that sort of sort of rushed you through before. It is completely covered with murals from Pierre Puevas de Chévan. I might pronounce that correctly. He is very French, I'm very not French. But is one of the last major works he did in his old age. It is essentially this figure here is kind of like a Prometheus figure genius being attended by spirits. And he is basically imparting wisdom to the world from his celestial hands. Let me go a little bit closer so you can see it a little bit better and see if you can guess the little addition that was made to this mural after some people raised a stink about, yes, once again, reproductive organs on a mythical figure that was going to cause big problems for everybody. They said, you know what, fine, we'll put them in a veil, we'll put them in a merkin veil or whatever it is we're gonna do that. Fine, you won that one. But that's the environment that they've fell into. The people who were felt as though they are the people who are protecting the moral fiber of their community. The BPL was a battleground. They had won one, they had lost one and they were paying close attention to what's happening and they are not gonna let them get away with any nonsense. The other problem is that we forget how new this was. They'd almost never seen anything like this. The average person certainly had never seen sculpture like this before. So they really didn't, it's like getting a computer or phone with a new user interface. You don't know whether you just don't understand it, whether it's a bad thing, it's a terrible thing, badly made, poorly thought out, or whether it's so new that your brain just isn't wired up to deal with it yet and in time you will come to appreciate how incredible this is. Of course, in this case, it is the latter, but try telling everybody else that. So just to give you an idea of how bad this problem was, is there a problem with this lion? This is one of the two lions that guard the staircase. An architecture critic came in when the building was open but not filled with art yet and praised the entire building but dinged the lions because the lions were undignified. They thought they did not have the dignity of the Sphinx. He's just sort of a casual, how's it going? I'm the lion. Cool marble, hot day outside, just thought I'd sit there. Don't mind me, I've eaten. Joking, look at the straight scope, God. Sculpted by Augustus St. Godin's brother, Louis, who took such pains with it that he refused to release the master sculptor until he got his brother to come in and sign off on his work. But that's what we're dealing with. People who are not ready to accept this level of realism and take it for what it actually is. Again, I think this is funny. This is one of the murals that was put into the gallery. Each mural reflects a different branch of science, literature, history. This one represents physics. And exactly, let me explain this to you. This is physics. There's panels for chemistry, epic poetry, lyric poetry, history, archeology. The one for astronomy is a shepherd in a field in a toga looking like this. I kid you not. So I'll unwind this one for you. For physics, Peeva St. Siobhan decided that, okay, how about electricity? Because that's physics, something like that. And we'll, I'll do something about this miraculous new telegraph wire. But of course, because he was 73, 74 years old, he always thinks in classical terms, he can't be abstract. He says, here are two telegraph wires, right here and here. And here is good news and bad news, both gliding along instantaneously on this miraculous telegraph wire. This is what people were used to in dealing with. If you give them something a little bit abstract where it is not gonna be spelled out for you what this means, misunderstandings can happen. What I feel it's like, it's like when Richard Pryor and George Carlin came on the scene, where for decades, if you saw a standup comedian who is, looks shabby and is talking in vulgarities and talking about what they're doing with parts of their bodies that do not belong to be talked about on a comic stage. You know, all the people who fit that description before were hacks who were just trying to get attention and just trying to startle people. When you finally see somebody who's actually using this to advance the art, it's very, very difficult to see this as something new and as an advancement of that art. So really, the Bacante was very much in these two molds, I think. But the other problem was he called it Bacante. He put a sticker on it saying this is Bacante. And well, I thought Bacante is women who get drunk and go into a frenzy, but I'm probably wrong. What's, let me go into the encyclopedia. No, that's exactly what it is, a mythology. They killed Odysseus, I think. They were known for all kinds of naughty and nasty behavior. And that's the, he had the Dymo labor maker, B-A-C-C-A-N-T-Y, and stuck it on there. That's the name he chose to put on there. And of course, that's what a lot of people thought his intention was and the subject matter. So people can't really be blamed for this. As a matter of fact, Edward Robinson was the curator of antiquities at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. After the sculpture was finally accepted, he wrote this letter to his friends, McKim and St. Godin, saying look, I'm an expert on classical literature. This has nothing to do with the baccante. There's no reference to it. What if we were to, could you get mech monies to rename it to something like Nymph and Infant Bacchus? Because she's in a fountain, so she's surrounded by water. The water nymphs raised the infant Bacchus. They were known to be very kind, very loving, very fun, free-spirited individuals. Now the context of the great bunch is that this represents what the infant is going to be associated with. It takes totally the curse off of it. It costs us nothing. St. Godin's and that was a great idea. They also, Daniel Chester French, another titan of a sculpture was advised. Oh, that's a great idea. Let's get that idea to Mac Moniz immediately. I don't know what his response was. Unfortunately, he never had a chance to use that problem. Now, the language that the committee used, but we don't feel it's appropriate, that's another thing. You think that they might have meant about the drinking part or the nudity part, and they certainly did address that outside of their comments there. Another part of it, though, was that they were wondering if this was really, did it fit in with the library? The courtyard of the Boston Public Library in 1925 and three days ago, as a matter of fact. And it is not for art lovers. It is for people coming in, not even necessarily to check out books, but to enjoy the day and sit down and socialize and read and improve themselves. And if you give them something, are they there to be challenged by a new piece of art that they're not gonna understand, maybe not. And also remember that video tour I showed you earlier. Here is the third floor. John Singer Sargent did this huge mural sequence on the top floor about the, technically called the triumph of religion, but he basically goes to the entire history of religion, starting from pagan ages, the pagan times, and going into the modern times. He spent 30 years on it, and he died before he finished the very last piece of it. And so this is the character of the art that's in that building. It's very dignified. Even though this is very fresh and this is very modern, this is not the same stultifying sort of forms we see with Mrs. Telegraph wire there, but it's still solemn and dignified, and you're meant to wipe a single tear about the beauty of it. You're not meant to say, oh, isn't that charming and delightful? So there were a lot of people, the community included thought that, well, in an art gallery, this would be perfect. In the Museum of Fine Arts, I'd love it. In the library, maybe it's not the right thing to do. Here's another painting, request an achievement of the holy grail. I'll skip right past that. Please go to the Boston Public Library to see all this sort of stuff. Sorry if I'm talking fast, but I'm excited and I wanna make sure I get through all this. So that's the situation that was festering when Bacante was put into storage. The fight against it was almost immediate. The sensation was national, almost immediate. And the influence that Bacante had, the culture was insane. It's, here's how big it was. Political cartoons all across the nation incorporating the Bacante, eventually it got so popular and so well known and also the controversy that, if you were a political cartoonist in Chicago and there's an alderman who's kind of a drunken lout, you might draw him going like this and everybody would understand you're saying he's drunk and he's in a frenzy. That's how well known this sculpture was. There was a silverware pattern in 1895 with a Bacante on it. A silverware pattern. This came a little bit after the controversy but a beer company, oddly enough, decided to appropriate that image in trade market. Why is that low resolution? And trade market as the mark of their company. So there are tens of hundreds of thousands of beer bottles with the Bacante on it. So, needless to say, the fact that this had become a national sensation did not please the Puritans who were opposed to it to begin with. They were very, very pleased when the committee said no. They were very not pleased when they reversed themselves. And so they start mobilizing. These are preachers, not only preachers but committees of preachers mobilizing their congregations. Here is a petition that arrived at the Boston Public Library and gosh, that's kind of unfortunate that so many people, one, two, three, four, 18 people, probably after church went around and passed this around. Yeah, the bad news is that's just the very top edge of it. It's five and a half feet long and it's double-sided. About 280 people signed this petition and that's only one of the petitions that they received saying please reverse your decision. We will not have Bacante in our public library. Here's a letter from the Baptist Ministers Conference. I single this out because if you notice, it's so glad to know that there's our constants in culture that transfer currents across all generations. Everybody who feels as though they are, the moral character that needs to be inflicted upon the rule, none of them can spell worth a damn. They misspelled statue every damn time. At least they're consistent, right? They're categorically wrong. I probably don't have time to read this whole thing to you but this one piece really does show off. I've read dozens and dozens of letters and a couple of sermons. This one newspaper piece that the Congressional Club of clergymen and laymen of Boston vicinity, sort of a brotherhood of preachers basically said here's the reasons why we are opposed to this because people think we're just no fun puritans but look, we have real reasons. The statue is not simply nude, it is glaring and obtrusively naked. It is an offense to the temperance sentiment of the community that it should be placed in the public library and any status intended to glorify intoxication. I'll read just this one part or one more after this. The consideration which is urged against this only increases the force of the objection namely that the eyes are not bloodshot nor the hair disheveled but that the joyousness of alcoholic exhilaration is set forth. This mask, this beautiful mask upon the hideous features of the drink fiend but adds one more reason against it. They're also upset because of the person that they think posed for it. Let me see if I can skip ahead and find it because it's really, I chose this one because it's rather tame and some of these are and now Boston is to accept for such a place in its library a statue which has been vulgarly advertised to the world as the effigy of a Paris prostitute and the papers rake the brothels of Paris to find and publish to the world incidents of her disreputable career which has dragged her unsavory name for the untimely grave that had covered her dishonor. Actually, Mack Moneys himself said, you know, Nini, you're 20, you're 21, you still look good, you're gonna be 28, 29 and people will have moved on from you. Let me start introducing you to Proper Society and High Society Tease and he actually set her up on a blind date with a rather well-to-do businessman from Brooklyn whom she married and then she left the modeling business so she did okay. So all this is going on to the consternation of these people involved. What did Mack Moneys think about this? This is a card that is in the Boston Public Libraries and archives that I was very, very touched to see because I'm wondering, he didn't design it for the library, he didn't donate it to the library, he didn't know what was going to happen to it. Did he, what did he feel about it? And he said in his own handwriting, if I did not consider the statue appropriate for the public library, it would not be there and there's my signature, drop the mic. McKim, however, was flabbergasted that this thing was going on for so long. He felt the need in the spring as this thing was not dying down to quietly tell the trustees, look, if you really want this to be over with, I'm sorry you've got so much trouble, let me know and I will withdraw it and you don't have to have responsibility for turning it down. All I ask for the love of heaven is that this matter finally be determined. So I'm gonna end with two things that I've got maybe a few minutes left. Quick lessons that we're learned from this. I hope I get to the very end because this is gonna be cool. First, be ready to defend your work with blissful arrogance. This is something I do when I write. I work so hard and I second guess everything I do when I write because when I publish it, everything I put there has to mean what I want it to mean. So I don't want it to say baccante when I actually mean something else. Another thing, unless you never show your work to others you have a duty to communicate your work clearly. People don't know what you're thinking. So don't get all upset when people misunderstand what your intentions are because pure idiots are indeed quite rare. They're making the best choices they can with the information and the experiences they have. Maybe the fact that you can't see your work and see your projects from the outside is the thing that's causing so many problems for you. And then do things that are great and enduring regardless of the struggle because it's worth it. Here are two different statues. A very curious photo, a Photoshop job in 1897. A sculptor who I think, I'm researching this right now, I think he was just trying to piggyback on the attention of baccante because he got this interview with a magazine saying, oh yes, well, now the baccante has been, the baccante was finally turned out, sorry, McKim finally, the trustees finally said, yeah, this is going on too long. This is taking too much effort. This is too much of a stain. And so McKim withdrew the statue, offers the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who snapped it up in one second. And so this sculptor said that, hey, I've got this, they've already accepted my next statue, I'm calling the spirit of research, which is another one of these dumpy neoclassic stuff that you would walk past three times and not even notice once. Isn't it better to have created something like this and gone through all the trouble of creating something like this? But, and this is one minute I think, this is a cool post-grip. What is the baccante doing here if the one that we've got so much acclaim in New York and so much ire in Boston is on display today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Well, here's what happened. It is in fact there. This is the actual version we've been talked about at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are actually four of these 84-inch versions of it that have been done specifically by Mack Money's studio. This one done specifically by Mack Money's hands. This is a photograph of the version that was made for the Luxembourg Museum. It's still in France right now. It's now in a French-American museum because the Luxembourg is just for a living artist and he passed away in 1930-something. Then, however, in 1901, Mack Money's made two copies as commissions for very well-to-do, very, very well-to-do collectors. One of these went to England. We don't know where it is. It was either melted down, bombed out, or someone has it and is not showing anybody. We have no idea where this multimillion-dollar statue is. The fourth version of it was made for a New York City collector who died. It went to auction in 1910, an amazing benefactor who was legendary in the city of Boston, who was still upset that Boston had refused this statue, bought this statue at auction, and donated it to the Museum of Fine Arts so that the city would have its baccante finally. I should point out, I'm gonna go one more minute over. I'm sorry, this is gonna be so good. Because who's here from New York and who's from, consider themselves from the Boston area, Boston area people? Okay, good, we'll stick it to New York. So you could sort of say, you're gonna like this. There is, it shows you how deep the rivalry between Boston and New York goes. So yes, Boston was a national laughing stock for having refused this statue, and New York was quite right to have accepted it. They got a little bit of pushback from their own puritanical groups, but they said, no, go away. However, you notice there are differences between these two. When Mack Money's studio made this copy in 1901, Mack Money's did something very, very unusual. Normally, his job is to be sculpting brand new commissions, brand new park sculptures, brand new monuments. He would basically, he has assistants who would do most of the work of pouring the mold, getting it ready for, then he would go and make sure it was all right, sign off of it, and then go back to creating brand new things. He did something very interesting. One of his assistants wrote in a letter to her friend about how Mack Money's ordered that this statue not be cast in this normal casting compound, but cast it in plasticine, and he himself personally spent a day and a half, two full days working on one tiny section of this statue, changing the surface of it, because he was never happy with the final surface of this thing. He did not even have the same foundry cast this copy. He took them two whole days on this tiny, tiny section. Then he called this very, very trusted assistant over and said, look, see this section here? Here's the steps that I did to get this sort of beautiful, luminous service. I mean, taught her all the steps and all the chemicals and all the bleach and all the treatment. He said, your job is to make the entire figure look like that. Take the entire rest of the year if you have to, but make the entire figure look like that. And that's the version that we got. So we can say that yes, you got the one that was exhibited in Paris. Yes, you got the one that we sent away. And yes, you got the one that is historically more significant, but we got the better one. You got the beta copy, ha, ha, ha, ha. That is a very rushed version of the sort of fun that I've been having over the past year or so looking into this. But as I say, if I leave you with one thing, please check out the Boston Public Library. It really is an undiscovered gem for so many people. If you are in your 40s and you haven't seen it, you walk past it a million times. You, right before my talk, someone came up and thanked me for recommending the comic book font sale that's every year. And I tell them that there's no, no one, I never get any more positive feedback and when I talk about this sale, this really is the best recommendation I can give you because people come in from out of town, they see it, they say, my God, there's one nice experience I had in my life. Thank you so much for your patience. I'm sorry for going a few minutes over. Cheers.