Lions

Lions, 1893 (recast in bronze 1894)

Edward Kemeys

West entrance of the Art Institute of Chicago

111 South Michigan Avenue at Adams Street

            Part of more than thirty-five plaster models of native American wildlife produced by Edward Kemeys (1843-1907) and A. P. Proctor for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the plaster versions of these lions originally flanked the entrance to the Fine Arts Palace (now the Museum of Science and Industry). Bronze recastings of Kemeys’ two Bison from the Exposition are featured at the east entrance to the formal garden at Humboldt Park.

            After viewing the Lions at the 1893 Fair, Mrs. Henry Field donated funds to have them recast in bronze and installed at the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago building in Grant Park. Serving as both a sensitive portrayal of wild animals and an example of guardian figures, in the tradition of Assyrian lamassu and the Egyptian Sphinx, these lions are among the best-known and most-beloved sculptures in the city. Kemeys, as reported in the Chicago Tribune, explained that the south lion was “attracted by something in the distance which he is closely watching” and that the north lion was “ready for a roar and a spring.”

(They were cleaned up in 2022.)

Untitled (The Picasso)

Untitled (The Picasso), 1967

Pablo Picasso

Richard J. Daley Plaza

Washington Street between Dearborn and Clark Streets

            Representing a major step in bringing contemporary art into a civic space, The Picasso was unveiled on August 15, 1967 to equal amounts of fanfare and skepticism. Thousands attended the dedication, which began with the first-ever outdoor performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and included a reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Mayor Richard J. Daley pulled the white ribbon that removed the blue covering and presented the crowd with the 50-foot tall, 162-ton steel work by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), an artist who had never visited Chicago. The sculpture would go on to become the most recognizable icon of the city.

            Some observers, however, were not immediately receptive. Col. Jack Reilly, then-director of special events, remarked, “If it is a bird or an animal, they ought to put it in the zoo. If it is art, they ought to put it in the Art Institute.” 47^th Ward Alderman John J. Hoellen argued that such an abstract work was “out of place in Chicago” and suggested it be replaced with a monument to Mr. Ernie Banks. Described by some viewers as an “Afghan hound,” “baboon,” “butterfly wings,” and even “a cow sticking out its tongue at Chicago,” the sculpture is most likely based upon a female head that Picasso was working on from 1962. Its simplified forms, use of industrial materials, interplay of solid form and shaped spaces, and its stubborn ambiguity are hallmarks of modernist art.

            In the early stages of the project, William E. Hartmann, senior partner in the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, traveled with two colleagues, C. F. Murphy and Norman Schlossman, to Picasso’s home in southern France in an attempt to persuade “the greatest artist alive” to design and build a model for the work. The 42-inch miniature was completed in May 1965 and the American Bridge Division of the U.S. Steel Company in Gary, Indiana fabricated the sculpture. The $300,000 cost of construction was provided by the Woods Charitable Fund, the Field Foundation of Illinois and the Chauncy and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation.

Cloud Gate (“The Bean”)

Cloud Gate (“The Bean”), 2004

Anish Kapoor

Millennium Park

East of North Michigan Avenue, on axis with East Washington Street

            Often it is difficult to predict how the public will respond to an innovative, large-scale work of art. It is even more difficult to imagine which work of public art, among the many located in a place like Chicago, might emerge as the “icon” of the city. Following the opening of Millennium Park, the one thing about which most Chicagoans would agree is that Cloud Gate, better known locally as “The Bean,” has replaced “The Picasso” as the unofficial symbol of Chicago. Even architect Frank Gehry, who designed the nearby Pritzker Pavilion, declared of Cloud Gate: “That’s the star of the show.”

            Artist Anish Kapoor was born in India in 1954 and has worked in London since the 1970s. Remarkably, Cloud Gate is his first outdoor permanent installation in the United States. Inspired, in part, by liquid mercury, the massive stainless steel structure is affectionately called “The Bean” due to its elliptical, kidney-bean shape. Deceptively simple in concept and form, Cloud Gate plays with the notion of a “triumphal arch” or “gateway” to a city in a manner that corresponds to the whimsical approach to a “fountain” demonstrated in Jaume Plensa’s nearby Crown Fountain. Abandoning any militaristic or nationalistic sentiment, Kapoor’s 33-foot high, 66-foot long sculpture features a twelve-foot high arch that invites viewers to pass through, gaze upward and encounter images of themselves rather than heroic figures from history. The artist has stated that he is “interested in how sculpture activates space” and believes that “big objects can do something poetically wondrous.” The reflective surfaces offer a variety of experiences, depending upon one’s perspective, the weather and the time of day. The sculpture does, in fact, allow for contemplation of clouds, as well as an incredible panorama of the architecture along Michigan Avenue. Nighttime viewing offers different rewards, in terms of color and light. The 110-ton structure manages to appear almost weightless, in part because it only touches the ground in two places.

            Acclaimed as both an aesthetic achievement and an engineering feat, the 168 stainless steel plates used to construct the surface required 2200 lineal feet of continuous welding. Not surprisingly, Cloud Gate received “The Extraordinary Welding Award” from the American Welding Society. The realization of this piece required an extraordinary collaborative effort, including the contributions of engineer Christopher Hornzee-Jones, Ethan Silva of Performance Structures, the company that fabricated the plates, Roark Frankel, supervisor of the project, and MTH industries, which assembled the piece. Additionally, the final price tag for the project was nearly four times the initial estimate of $6 million, but the entire cost of the work was covered by corporate and private donations. 

Abraham Lincoln, the Head of State (Seated Lincoln)

Abraham Lincoln, the Head of State (Seated Lincoln), 1908 (installed 1926)

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Grant Park
Court of Presidents

North of Congress Parkway near Columbus Drive

            Depicting a deeply thoughtful and isolated leader, the work commonly described as the “Seated Lincoln” is the second portrait of the sixteenth president located in Chicago completed by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Although the “Standing Lincoln” in Lincoln Park is better known and more critically acclaimed, the sculptor believed this one more successful, as it worked on the level of official portrait (and is sometimes confused with the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C. by Daniel Chester French) as well as expression of personality.

            The statue was funded by a generous $100,000 bequest from wealthy railroad manufacturer John Crerar. His will set aside money for a free public reference library and a colossal statue of Lincoln to be placed in front of the building. The site chosen for the library, at Michigan and Randolph, did not allow enough space for the statue. Upon its completion, the statue was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then stored for years, displayed at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and, subsequently, shipped to Chicago and stored in a Washington Park warehouse until the location in Grant Park was completed in 1926.

            The bronze figure and chair sit atop a granite pedestal in the center of a 150-foot wide exedra flanked by two 50-foot tall fluted columns with carved torches as finials. Stanford White, the architect who collaborated with Saint-Gaudens on his “Standing Lincoln,” designed this setting. Although the South Park Commissioners in charge of the project hoped to add a George Washington monument to mirror the Lincoln in the so-called “Court of Presidents,” the plan was never realized.

Other statues of Lincoln in Chicago: 

• The Young Lincoln 
• Lincoln, the Railsplitter 
• Abraham Lincoln (The Chicago Lincoln)

Related articles:

• Chicago Sun-Times (Feb. 23, 2021) Yes, Lincoln and Grant are on our list of questioned Chicago monuments — and we want to hear your views on that

Chicago Tribune (Feb. 23, 2021) Op-ed: Take down Chicago’s Lincoln statues? It’s iconoclasm gone mad 

Batcolumn

Batcolumn, 1977

Claes Oldenburg

Plaza of Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building

600 West Madison Street

             In 1965, Pop artist Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022) began making drawings for colossal monuments consisting of everyday objects enlarged to gargantuan proportions. Some of his proposals included a giant electric fan to replace the Statue of Liberty, a pair of giant scissors to replace the Washington Monument, a Good Humor ice cream bar for Park Avenue, New York, and a railroad station in the form of a wristwatch for Florence, Italy. Many, of course, remain unrealized but Chicago is home to one structure that made it off of the paper: Batcolumn.

            Commissioned by the U. S. General Services Administration’s Art-in-Architecture program, the metal latticework piece generated a great deal of disapproval in the press, with one citizen complaining that the artist “ripped off the taxpayers for a $100,000 baseball bat.” For the project, Oldenburg sought an appropriate symbol for the city and one that would make formal references to the surrounding environment. When a nearby chimney reminded him of a baseball bat, he took the outline and soon decided to open the surface in order to relieve the solid mass and echo the cross-bracing of Chicago’s many steel bridges.

            The realized structure is nearly 100 feet tall, formed from a network of 24 vertical and 1608 connecting struts of Cor-Ten steel and aluminum painted with gray enamel.  Placed atop a four-foot high, ten-foot diameter pedestal, Oldenburg’s monument may be read as a paean to baseball, a tribute to the steel industry, or simply an irreverent poke at our expectation that a monument necessarily be “heroic.”