County of Statue: Pennington County.
Location of Site: SD-244, 2 miles W. of US-16A, 2 miles SW of Keystone.
Bust:
GUZTON BORGLUM
Sculpted by His Son
LINCOLN BORGLUMText on Gutzon Borglum from Wikipedia:
Gutzon Borglum was born in St. Charles, Idaho. At the age of seven, he moved to Nebraska, and later graduated from Creighton Preparatory School. He was trained in Paris at the Académie Julian, where he came to know Auguste Rodin and was influenced by Rodin's impressionistic light-catching surfaces. Back in the U.S. in New York City he sculpted saints and apostles for the new Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in 1901, got a sculpture accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art— the first sculpture by a living American the museum had ever purchased—and made his presence further felt with some portraits. He also won the Logan Medal of the arts.
After graduation from Harvard Technical College, his reputation surpassed that of his younger brother, Solon Borglum, already an established sculptor.
Mount Rushmore, Black Hills, South Dakota
A fascination with gigantic scale and themes of heroic nationalism suited his extroverted personality. His head of Abraham Lincoln, carved from a six-ton block of marble, was exhibited in Theodore Roosevelt's White House and can be found in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. A bully patriot, believing that the "monuments we have built are not our own," he looked to create art that was "American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement" according to a 1908 interview article. His equation of being "American" with being born of American parents—"flesh of our flesh"—was characteristic of nativist beliefs in the early 20th century. Borglum was highly suited to the competitive environment surrounding the contracts for public buildings and monuments, and his public sculpture is sited all around the United States.
General Philip Sheridan, Chicago, Illinois
In 1908 Borglum won a competition for a statue of the Civil War General Philip Sheridan to be placed in Sheridan Circle in Washington D.C. A second version was erected in Chicago in 1923 Winning this competition was a personal triumph for him because he won out over sculptor J.Q.A. Ward, a much older and more established artist, and one whom Borglum had clashed with earlier in regard to the National Sculpture Society. At the unveiling of the Sheridan one critic, President Theodore Roosevelt (whom Borglum was later to put on Mount Rushmore) declared that it was "first rate," and another critic was to state that, "as a sculptor Gutzon Borglum was no longer a rumor, he was a fact."
Statue of General Sheridan in Washington, D.C.
Borglum was active in the committee that organized the New York Armory Show of 1913, the birthplace of modernism in American art. But by the time the show was ready to open, Borglum resigned from the committee, feeling that the emphasis on avant-garde works had co-opted the original premise of the show and made traditional artists like himself look provincial. He lived in Stamford, Connecticut for 10 years.
Text of Lincoln Borglum from Wikipedia:
James Lincoln de la Mothe Borglum (April 9, 1912 – January 27, 1986) was an American sculptor, photographer, author and engineer; he was best known for overseeing the completion of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial after the death in 1941 of the projects leader, his father Gutzon Borglum.
Named after his father's favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, and called by his middle name, Lincoln Borglum was the first child of Gutzon Borglum and his second wife, Mary. During his youth, Lincoln accompanied his father to the Black Hills of South Dakota and was present when the site for the Mt. Rushmore monument was selected. Although he had originally planned to study engineering at the University of Virginia, Lincoln Borglum began work on the monument in 1933 at the age of 21 as an unpaid pointer. Lincoln Borglum quickly moved into a series of more important jobs: he was put on the payroll in 1934, promoted to assistant sculptor in 1937, and promoted to superintendent in 1938 with an annual salary of $4,800.
Gutzon Borglum had nearly completed the 60-foot heads of the four presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and T. Roosevelt) when he died on March 6, 1941. Lincoln Borglum had to abandon his fathers ambitious plans to carry the work down to include the torsos of the presidents and an entablature due to a lack of funding; he left the monument largely in the state of completion it had reached under his fathers direction.
Borglum was appointed Mount Rushmore National Memorial's first superintendent and began serving on October 1, 1941. The work on the monument officially stopped on October 31, 1941. He served in that capacity until May 15, 1944.
Borglum continued to work as a sculptor after leaving Mt. Rushmore. He created several religious works for churches in Texas including the well-known shrine Our Lady of Loreto in Goliad, and wrote three books.
Like many men who worked on the Rushmore project, Borglum's lungs were permanently scarred from breathing in granite dust associated with the blasting. Borglum died in Corpus Christi, Texas at the age of 73. One of his best known works, a bust of his father, is on display outside the Lincoln Borglum Visitors Center at Mount Rushmore.