Literary Digest 22 (June 22, 1901)

Not since the World's Fair at Chicago has there been an American enterprise which has called forth more praise from the art critics than that elicited by the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. In architecture, sculpture, and painting, artists find much to praise. The Critic (June) contains a paper on this subject by Mr. Christian Brinton. As to the architectural side of the Exposition he says:

"Felicity of arrangement and fantasy in construction are the Exposition's cardinal merits. There have been displays more pompous and more monumental, but none so well devised, and none more bijou or more captivating. Although the area at disposal was restricted, it has been utilized to ultimate advantage in respect to convenience and scenic effect. The undiscriminating will probably pronounce the color scheme the most engaging feature, but it is solely because of a carefully considered ground-plan and much forethought regarding problems of scale, distribution, and ensemble that this coloration counts for its best. Architect has played into the hands of colorist, while colorist has simply heightened a beauty which is primarily architectural -- has merely added the after-glow. All the fancy and daring, the bizarrerie, and even the iridescence of this panorama derive from the scrupulous, almost academic precision of its diagram, and the fertile manner in which that diagram has been elaborated.

"Broadly speaking, the architects have adopted the urban or Roman, rather than the sylvan or Columbian plan used at Chicago. Conforming with lines employed in the construction of various flora, the chief buildings have been massed about a central space, with, as usual, a tower marking the extremity of the major axis. It will be difficult ever to evolve any distribution superior to the inverted T, and in selecting it the architects have displayed welcome sagacity. We have passed the stage of docile faith in purely natural or landscape vantages -- these we subjugate rather than submit to. With all their majesty there was a certain guilelessness in the disposition of the buildings at Chicago, a lack of definite concert quite out of harmony with the classic severity of the structures themselves.

"Equally inspirational has been the selection of Spanish Renaissance architecture as a general type with which to accord. Several points converged toward this choice -- historic reasons, a recollection of certain buildings at Chicago, and, beyond all, that unmistakable sense of fitness which has proven the informing spirit of the Exposition as a whole. No style of architecture is better adapted to the purposes of an Exposition than this, which emphasizes lightness and gaiety rather than massiveness or forbidding grandeur, which so lends itself to nuances whether plastic or chromatic. The vivid, animated aspect of the Rainbow City, with its clusters of dome and campanile, its long arcades and luxuriance of ornament, is entirely due to the adoption of a style which escapes on one side the chastity of the Classic and on the other the intricacy of the Gothic -- a style which is frankly festal."

On the side of sculpture, Mr. Brinton finds pleasing indications at Buffalo of the great advance made in American art of late years:

"Only within the past decade has American sculpture proven its validity. At Chicago the first hopeful step was taken. The interval has been fecund, and now Buffalo witnesses the vigorous sweep and scope of an art long confined to grewsome portrait busts and hideous soldiers' monuments. For a dreary period the native sculptor had nothing to say and said it with persistence. The vitality displayed by the provisional sculpture at Chicago and at Buffalo is due to the fact that foreign trained men have here encountered expansive conditions and have developed through meeting those conditions. Such issues as these two expositions and such occasions as the late Dewey Arch give concise impetus to national expression in sculpture. The immediacy of these circumstances favors freedom and offers full play to creative imagination. While the results have been the reverse of academic and have rarely merited marble, they embody qualities which academism often lacks. The work has been hurried in conception and in execution, broad, almost loose in treatment, but there has been manifest that sense of movement and action which is a particular heritage -- the heritage of the unrestful.

"Those special factors which contribute most to the quickening of local sculpture are the going to Europe of Americans and the coming to America of men from over seas. The best things in contemporary sculpture -- the thing itself, almost -- can be traced through these channels. That superior feeling for form which seems to be acquired only in Paris, and that inimitable Viennese flott have become, in a sense, naturalized and characteristic. Whether they are native or not matters little.

"At Buffalo the sculpture program, like the administering of color, has been scrupulously elaborated. In both cases preconcertion is manifest. If Mr. Turner in his color-scheme has tried to depict the struggle of man to overcome the elements, Mr. Bitter has attempted in his scenario to give a complete allegory of man and his development. The touch of platitude is here, and many specific instances are more humorous than profound, but ideas have in the main been expressed with conviction and appositeness; though simple beauty is, however, preferable to obscure and clumsy symbolism.

"Following architectural leads, the Director of Sculpture has aimed at giving plastic and ideal substance to the realities represented under each roof. The psychology of this is about as subtle as that of the sign-post. It will not dishearten the most irrelevant sightseer. In accordance with this scheme Mr. Bitter has divided his forces into three parts -- left, right, and center, those on the left typifying Nature, those on the right Man, and those in the center the Genius of Man and his contributions to art, science, and industry. There is of course occasional sculpture, but the chief effort has been concentrated on these groups....

"If in general the sculpture at the Exposition fails to advance materially upon the average of merit sustained by the architecture, it must be recalled that much is lost through the enlargement of groups which may have been modeled with lingering finesse. In any event the undisputed impulse of the moment and the setting -- the green of foliage and glistening water -- do much toward equalizing values. One priceless legacy remains, which is, that the free use of plastic form has here attained new significance, that an art has here been widened in scope and broadened in application. And this, after all, is more than the relative finality of any chance bit of plaster or marble."

[Thanks to the late Jim Zwick for originally posting this on his now-defunct Boondocks web.]