Out of the Bronze Age

BOSTON'S STATUES LIKE THOSE of most modern cities in the United States, go pretty much unnoticed these days, except for the sporadic attention of a few graffiti artists and the ever-present urban pigeon. The Bicentennial celebrations of the mid 1970s, a high-water mark for statuesque snapshots of Paul Revere and the Minutemen, attracted a mob of patriotic Americans who looked for history etched in stone, but since then Bostonian public sculpture had faded into the surrounding landscape once again. Now, though, controversy over one such artistic conception of the past may result in the removal of a well-known Park Square landmark later this month.

The monument in question is Thomas Ball's Emancipation. a bronze statue created in 1874. The huge artwork depicts a majestic President Abraham Lincoln, armed with his famous Proclamation, benevolent hand outstretched, in the act of liberating a barely clothed Black salve. The bondsman who humbly kneels before the Great Emancipator, his manacles finally broken, seems unable to comprehend his new found freedom and elevated social status. Local Black groups, offended by the paternalistic relationship implied by the statue, have asked that it be moved to an out-of-sight location.

Ball, a fairly well-known sculptor in his day, and a contemporary of Daniel Chester French (of John Harvard fame), was born in Charlestown. Mass. in 1819. At the age of 35 he joined the growing circle of expatriated American artists studying and working in Florence. Ball specialized in portrait statuary and commissioned monuments on a grand scale, "few of which are aesthetically interesting," notes art historian Milton Brown. Ball's most famous works proved to be the two copies of the Emancipation group: the other one is in Washington. D.C. "More than any Lincoln memorial of the time it captured the imagination of the public in its mixture of naturalism and sentimentality," writes Brown.

BUT TIMES AND TASTES have changes and public monuments, unlike most other art forms, must remain accountable to the moods and preferences of the entire community. As official landmarks in our greatest cities, they supposedly represent the value and attitudes held in common by the society at large. Thus bronze statues may come and go like Prohibition and Victorian morality: Emancipation, though originally made with the best of intention', cannot command public acceptance forever.

No one, on the other hand, now suggests that we begin a campaign of cultural revisionism, that we establish a gallery of "Degenerate Art" as the Nazis did in 1937 to express their dissatisfaction with the abstract artistic messages of the early Twentieth Century. Nor should we expose our monuments, in humorist Walt Kelly's words, to anything like the Parisian School of underground poster artists and their credo of "Vive le moustache" or the alterationist defacers of New York's Subway School who have taken it upon themselves to redo Grant's Tomb, for example, with all the skill of "a messy monkey armed with a melting chocolate bar."

Surely Thomas Ball deserves better, and it is up to the Boston Art Commission, Which will rule on the controversy later this month, to either leave the statue in Park Square or select a new location. Emancipation, along with other artistic anachronisms, like the blackface minstrel movies of the 1920s, best belong safely tucked away in the dusty halls of a museum, carefully preserved as a record of the past. And Mr. Lincoln, were he still around today, certainly would take no offense; as he admitted back in 1863, "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it. "Now Lincoln, and his metallic likeness, belong to the ages.