There are also children’s book illustrations, photographs, a pair of very shiny pennies, two five-dollar bills, Lincoln stamps, and four comic book covers. The range of works so far cited gives some sense of how varied “The Lincoln Memorial Illustrated” is, but only some. That seems a bit odd, though not as odd as there being two French hand castings and just one of Lincoln’s. Also in the show are several maquettes and French’s account book. As for French, at the top of the stairs, outside the show proper, what greets museum-goers is a small 1927 cast of the French statue. There are six works by Rockwell on display. The show has been jointly organized by two Stockbridge institutions, the Norman Rockwell Museum and Chesterwood, the studio of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the Lincoln statue. The painter Anthony Benedetto is likely better known to you by the name he uses in his day job, Tony Bennett.
The painting was the artist’s response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush v.
In Anthony Benedetto’s painting “Why Lincoln Matters,” the president’s statue gazes at a mud-spattered American flag. Among the nine political cartoons on display is Bill Mauldin’s famous drawing of Lincoln’s statue, head in hands, weeping, after the assassination of John F. Two other examples, both in the show, speak to the Memorial’s unique place as an expression of national emotion or conscience. Bob Staake’s truly inspired “O” cover for The New Yorker, which is in the show, used the Memorial to celebrate Barack Obama’s election in 2008.Īnthony Benedetto, "Why Lincoln Matters," 2001 ©2001 Benedetto Arts/Anthony Benedetto Jimmy Stewart’s title character goes there to commune with Lincoln’s spirit, in “Mr. So even as neoclassical grandeur makes the Memorial look eternal, it retains a contemporaneity and relevance that only the Vietnam Veterans Memorial can begin to approach among civic monuments. And the shedding of that blood relates to what remains, still, all these decades later, the fundamental challenge to American society posed at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence: to abide by the “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. All that marble and granite looks pristine and unyielding, but it’s blood they rest on. Abraham Lincoln, the supreme American martyr, led the nation through its supreme, deadliest trial. That’s because of the man it commemorates. In one, the Memorial takes the form of a ziggurat in the other, a pyramid with a neoclassical portico on each side.Įven as ziggurat or pyramid, the Memorial would still partake of the sacred. He’s best known as the architect of the Jefferson Memorial and the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, but their designs look nothing like these - or Bacon’s. 26, includes among its 80 or so items two proposals for the Memorial from John Russell Pope. But “The Lincoln Memorial Illustrated,” which runs at the Concord Museum through Feb. Henry Bacon’s design takes the form of a Greek temple. Yet does any building hold a comparable place in the American imagination? That hold has a sacral aspect, as the White House and Mount Vernon, the US Capitol and Independence Hall, do not. A hundred years is a long time, but it’s well less than half as long as the Republic has existed. Underwood and Underwood, Statue of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Memorial Library of CongressĬONCORD - Dedicated on May 30, 1922, the Lincoln Memorial is celebrating its centennial this year.
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