Charles Sargeant Jagger I: war and sex

Charles Jagger 1885-1934 was born in Yorkshire and studied art in Sheffield before moving to London to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art for some years. He was just starting to develop his career when World War One broke out in 1914. So Jagger joined a regiment that was made up of performing and visual artists. The following year he was commissioned and quickly served in horrendous battle fronts. Jagger survived, but was damaged physically and probably psychologically.

The first work that Jagger did, after returning to civilian life, was a series of war memorials. I am not sure if that was a good idea (because only a soldier would understand the true meaning of war memorials) or a bad idea (because he'd be forced to relive the tragedies he saw in the trenches). However some of his works from this period went on to be treasured by bereaved parents and communities in post-Armistice Britain. First Battle of Ypres at Horse Guards Parade was completed in 1918 and Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner was completed in c1923.

Royal Artillery Memorial London, c1923

Jagger’s Artillery Memorial in the blog Great War Fiction showed the enormous impact he had on British memorial sculpture after WW1. This giant stone howitzer was covered in low reliefs, capturing the night­mare of war. The soldiers on the memorial were so realistic, they could have been the neighbour’s boy or the lad who delivered news­papers. Jagger’s dead soldier was particularly realistic and particularly harrowing.

And there is even a Jagger connection to Melbourne, as the blog Airminded · London noted. The Drivers and Wipers statue, located in Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance reserve, commemorated the many thousands of Australian lives lost during the fighting at Ypres. The bronze sold­iers were recast by Jagger from the London figures, and shipped to Australia for a location outside the Museum of Victoria.

Drivers and Wipers Memorial Melbourne

By 1930, Jagger was accepting commissions for works not related to war and loss. And perhaps the mood of the nation had changed to some­thing altogether more Deco and frivolous. But I don’t think anyone expected an object as racy as Scandal Relief 1930, now in V&A South Kensing­ton.
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The scand­al that the Monds commissioned was a threesome in­volving the two of them and another man who shared a studio with Gwen. Scandal Relief clearly showed a naked couple embracing, surrounded by shocked viewers in the background. No doubt the Deco angularity of the work only served to heighten the emotion of the couple and the gossipers.

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Jagger created Scandal Relief for Mulberry House Westminster, home of Henry, 2nd Baron Melchett, and his wife Gwen Mond. In the drawing-room of the Mond home, in the centre of the end wall, was a large marble fireplace. Over the fireplace, there was a panel left specifically (161 x 149 cm) by the architect Darcy Brad­dell, to be filled by Jag­g­er’s fine bronze relief.
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I have no doubt it was meant to scandalise polite society and sat­irise their hypoc­risy, but how would polite society have got itself into the Mond drawing room? Therefore we have to assume that the Monds were having a great laugh about the gossip that had surrounded them, laughing at their own expense and laughing at “decent people”.

Scandal Relief, 1930, now in the V & A

It may seem bizarre that Jagger was best known for his ultra-sombre, ultra-respectful war memorials. Perhaps he would have moved on to more decorative works in the 1930s, had he lived long enough, and may have pushed his oeuvre in new directions. We’ll never know; he died in 1934. Undoubtedly Jagger’s racy work will now bring people to the museum – Scandal Relief was bought this year, specifically for the V & A and funded by National Heritage and another fund.

Charles Sargeant Jagger II: low reliefs

All the works of Jagger that I had previously seen were monumental sculptures, at least until the V & A accepted Scandal 1930. Had Jagger created low reliefs before 1930?

It seems that Charles Jagger really was apprenticed as a metal engraver with the Sheffield firm of Mappin & Webb, when he was a young teen­ag­er. That might explain his interest in British New Sculpture and his concentration on naturalistic surface detail.

It also might explain why Scandal 1930 was far from the first low relief work that Jagger had done in his career. He honed his tech­nical skills on reliefs as early as 1918, just as World War One was finishing. His early reliefs, therefore, had focused on military themes.

The First Battle of Ypres at Horse Guards Parade was completed in 1918. Here Jagger created a view of combat where soldiers of both sides lunged at each other with grim, fixed expressions. The Deco expressiveness in the relief has almost a Soviet poster feel to it. The German helmets and the Tommy uniforms were realistically distinguished but the space was unrealistic – perhaps a dozen soldiers crushed together.

The Fine Art Society said that the reliefs were a testament to Jagger’s ability to create an image simultaneously heroic and harrowing.
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Jagger, First Battle of Ypres, 1918

No Man’s Land 1919 was low relief in bronze of a soldier hiding among the dead bodies, broken stretchers and barbed wire of No Man's Land. Presumably he was staying in that horrible location in order to hear the enemy's conversation. No Man's Land relief is in the Tate.

Jagger, No Man's Land, 1919

Cambrai Memorial 1928 in the Louverval Military Cemetery, France was erected to the memory of 7,000 British and South African soldiers who died without a grave. Jagger created two low reliefs in stone. In one, a wounded soldier was lifted from a trench and in the other a soldier looked through a periscope. The memorial was unveiled in August 1930, in front of British military dignitaries.

Jagger, Cambrai Monument in Louverval, 1928

Clearly Jagger had honed his technical skills in low reliefs long before Scandal. The only surprise that Scandal created for the viewer was Jagger's content, not his technique.

Sir Nicholas Winton: ordinary man, extraordinary story

My husband was born in 1947 in Czechoslovakia. My father-in-law lost every single member of the family during the war; my mother-in-law’s family survived marginally better. Clearly I have a vested interest in this story.

Czech children leaving Prague, 1939

In 1938 Nicholas Winton (1909-), then a young office worker in Britain, was asked by a friend to travel to Prague where he would find an exciting and worthwhile project to get involved in. The BBC said his friend was Martin Blake, a master at Westminster School and an ambassador for the British Committee for Czech Refugees, which was helping adults escape. War was imminent. Only two months earlier, Hitler's troops had occupied the disputed territory of Sudetenland, on Czechoslovakia's border with Germany.

Nicholas Winton, 1940

In other countries, refugee organisations had begun organising the Kindertransports, long trains that could carry thousands of Jewish children out of central Europe. It was not clear why Czech­os­lovakian children weren’t being rescued, but once Winton visited refugee camps outside Prague, he quickly realised that there was a mission with his name on it.

People had warned him that the British government would never allow refugee children to flood into Britain, especially since there were no organisations in London and in Prague to deal with virtually orphaned children. People also warned him that Jewish parents in Czechoslovakia were unlikely to send their precious children away. But in both cases, people were wrong.

BBC map of the trip from Prague to London

Winton immediately started raising money to save the children, and on his return to Britain, began finding homes and organising visas for them. This was not an easy task since Londoners, especially children and new mothers, were being evacuated OUT of the city, into the safety of the countryside in 1939.

After recruiting a team to organise the train trips, Winton returned to the UK to obtain permits for the children and to find foster homes for them. Nicholas raised enough money to give each foster family £50, hardly enough to look after the children until the age of 17. But decent families did respond. Winton found homes for all 669 Jewish children.

Nosey Parker and Make A Difference In The World – Be The Change! blogs noted that the only other country that would take these children, apart from Britain, was Sweden. Some of the children were indeed sent to foster homes in Sweden.

Throughout early 1939, Winton trains carried 669 children to safety. Parents stood at the railway station in Prague, bravely waving goodbye to their babies, presumably for the last time. Only one planned trip failed. The last train, with 250 children on board, was due to leave on 1st of September 1939, the day war broke out. At the last minute German troops intervened; the children were taken off the train and never seen again. They, and most of the families left behind, were eventually exterminated.

Sir Nicholas Winton’s heroic acts were unknown, until his wife Grete found an old scrapbook in an attic, detailing his mission forty years after WW2 ended. I find it incredible that he had never told his beloved wife the story!

Lancaster Unity blog showed how Survivors gathered to pay tribute to 'British Schindler' (although the comparison between Schindler and Winton seems to be unfair to Winton). The Czech Railways ran a train so that the Winton children could retrace their 1938 journey. 100 people travelled between Prague and London; among them 20 of Winton's Children, now with children and grandchildren of their own. These now-elderly Winton Children were determined that their own grandchildren should under­stand how much they owe to an otherwise ordinary man. What is even more amazing is that Winton, now 100, stood at the platform at Liverpool St station to welcome them.. again.

Christina’s This and That found a powerful film detailing the story of Winton's Children called “All My Loved Ones” by David Silberstein. And schoolchildren in the Czech Republic will see Matej Minac's film called "Nicholas Winton - The Power of Good."

Statue on platform of Prague's Central Railway station

In retirement, Winton continued to live in Maidenhead and to raise money for worthy causes; the Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is 42 ks to the west of central London. In 1983 he won an MBE for his work with the Abbeyfield Housing Association, whose retirement village in Windsor was appropriately named Winton House.

There is even an art connection or two. Since 2003, there has been a bronze statue outside Liverpool St station, perfectly depicting the children who were rescued. A thousand ks away, the new Statue of Sir Nicholas Winton in Prague shows a bronze statue holding two of the children he helped escape. The two sculpture pieces rightly stand in the two railways stations where the epic rescue project started and ended. And in 2010, a bronze life sized statue was placed on the platform at Maidenhead railway station. The sculpture showed Sir Nicholas reading a book that contained images of the Jewish children he saved. And it showed the trains he used to transport them from Czechosl­ovakia to Britain in 1939.

Statue outside Liverpool St Railway Station, London

History Today magazine (March 2004) has a wonderful review of the rescue programme called Kindertransport: terror, trauma and triumph. Written by Caroline Sharples, the article mentioned Sir Nicholas Winton but focused largely on what happened to the children once they found foster families in the UK.

Karl Duldig: Mitteleuropa in Australia

In earlier blogs, I was very impressed with the enormous contribution middle Europeans made to the art scene in Australia, starting in the 1930s and continuing throughout the 1940s and 50s. A few examples will do. Yosl Bergner left Vienna and Warsaw in the late 1930s; Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007) left Germany in 1938; Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack fled from Berlin to Britain in 1938 but was deported to Australia as an enemy alien in 1940; and Mark Strizic (b1928) left Germany via Croatia in 1950.

In pursuing the story of Karl Duldig, three coincidences occurred. Firstly one of my four grandparents and Slawa Duldig's father were both called Horowitz. Secondly on the very day I started at Mount Scopus College in 1960, I met Eva Duldig who became my teacher. Thirdly this week I heard a symposium paper* on Karl Duldig, as planned, and found the book The Duldig Studio: A History by Helen Kiddell, totally unplanned.

Kunstgewerbeschule/University of Applied Arts taught by Anton Hanak, 1921-5.

Karl Duldig (1902-1986) was born in the Polish part of the old Austrian Empire. In 1914 the family moved to Vienna, where he discovered his interest in sculpture, leading to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule (1921-25) under Anton Hanak. Duldig acknowledged Hanak’s teachings in Crouching Figure 1923, a work carved from soapstone with a knife, rather than the traditional hammer and chisels used for harder materials like marble. Duldig had followed Anton Hanak’s method of carving directly into the stone, without preliminary drawings or models.

Crouching Figure, 1923, sandstone

Later he continued studying at the Akademie der Bildenen Künste (1925-29). In 1931 in Vienna Duldig married fellow student Slawa Horowitz (1902-75), herself an artist. Sigmund Jaray, a distinguished Austrian firm of furniture designers and craftsmen, was commissioned by Slawa to design the furniture for the flat she and Karl had set up in Engzingergasse Vienna.

Their daughter Eva was born shortly before the 1938 anschluss when German troops entered Austria. At that very moment, Duldig was sending his sculptures to a Paris exhibition. Unbelievably Karl's artworks lay hidden throughout the war, in the cellar beneath the Laisnés’ apartment building (Slawa's sister and brother in law). Like others in 1938 and 1939, the very Jewish Duldigs had to hand their surviving assets over to Nazis and flee, as quickly as possible. Karl and Slawa moved to Switzerland, then Singapore in May 1939 and finally Australia. Slawa's sister Aurelie Laisné survived the Holocaust by living in Paris.

Mother and Child, 1942, now in bronze

The move to Australia was not exactly voluntary; in Sep 1940 the family was deported from Singapore as enemy aliens and interned at Tatura camp in rural Victoria. Mother and Child 1942 was carved from potatoes with a pocket knife while Karl Duldig was on kitchen duty in the 2nd AIF 8th Employment Company. He cast them into plaster and they were later cast in bronze at a foundry by The Duldig Studio.

Released in April 1942 to enlist in the Militia, the family eventually settled in their favoured urban environment and formally became Australian citizens after the war. Karl was appointed art master (1945-67) at a prestigious grammar school in Melbourne, while simultaneously establishing a small ceramics business with Slawa. He exhibited regularly with the Victorian Sculptors’ Society and in the all-important Adelaide Festival of Arts (from 1960).

Commissioned glazed ceramic relief murals were a second string to his art bow. Karl made a special contribution to contemporary taste in Melbourne with modernist statements like the Progress of Man mural St Kilda Road 1960, and the Kadimah relief Elsternwick 1972.

Karl Duldig in his Melbourne studio, now a museum

Among the generation of talented European-trained sculptors who found themselves living 12,000 ks from home and speaking little English, Duldig had to help define the place of sculptural practice in Australian culture. He was very supportive of younger artists and became foundation president (1962) of the Ben Uri Society for the Arts, later called the Bezalel Fellowship of Arts. He was president (1977) of the Association of Sculptors of Victoria.

His last and most poignant work was the Raoul Wallenberg monument (1985) at Kew Junction.

In 1977, some of Slawa’s sculptures were included in a retrospective exhibition of her work at the McClelland Gallery in Langwarrin. Her work also appeared in the major exhibition, Vienna and the Early 20th Century, held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1990.

Before Karl died in 1986, he and his daughter had already discussed what would happen to the house and collection going into the future. In 1996, the The Duldig Studio opened to the public - the residence, sculpture garden and art studio. The house museum in Malvern East holds an extensive collection of sculptures in terracotta, marble and bronze, paintings, drawings and decorative arts presented in the artists` original home setting.

Their custom-designed Viennese furniture, as seen in the photo below, as well as the prototypes of the first foldable umbrella invented by Slawa in 1929, are in the house-museum. Duldig’s work is also represented in the National Gallery of Victoria, and since 1986, the National Gallery of Victoria has held an annual lecture on sculpture in his name.

Sigmund Jaray Furniture, 1930 in the collection of The Duldig Studio

During 2003, a major programme called Karl Duldig Sculptures and Drawings celebrated the centenary of the artist’s birth. The exhibition featured 80 works from the museum’s permanent collection and travelled to the cities of Vienna, Krakow etc. The Viennese-Melbourne sculpture had “gone home”.

*Alison Inglis' paper was called Karl Duldig and Vienna. The Vienna Art and Design symposium was held at the National Gallery of Victoria in August 2011. Inglis showed that Karl's experience as an art student and his work in Vienna before 1939 were replete with Secessionist and Workshop values. Presumably the furniture in the Duldig home in Melbourne also provided a strong link to Viennese cultural history.

Capt Dreyfus, Emile Zola and Major Picquard vindicated 1906-2006

Earlier this year, I gave a conference paper called Captain Dreyfus, The Impressionists and the Politics of Anti Semitism, largely using the images from my blog article, Pissarro, Degas, Zola and Capt Dreyfus, France's ugliest moment. There were at least three heroes whose careers had been destroyed during the affair between 1894-1906, Alfred Dreyfus and Émile Zola of course, and also the heroic Major Georges Picquart who provided the evidence to the court about the real traitor. Major Picquart was later court-martialled for his revelations, proving once again that the French army was going to severely punish whistle blowers.

In both the blog post and the conference paper I left the story at the point where Captain Dreyfus was fully vindicated in 1906, three years after Pissarro was buried in Paris’ Père Lachaise cemetery. It was clear that the bitterness from this case remained in France for a very long time, on both sides of the affair.

One conference goer who heard my paper asked if I had ever seen a statue created by Louis Mitelberg called Hommage au capitaine Dreyfus. I had not. Apparently in the 1980s President François Mitterrand had ordered and paid for this statue of Dreyfus, planned to be located at the École Militaire in Paris. Even after almost 100 years, the French Minister of Defence was bitter about losing the Dreyfus treason case and refused to allow the statue in, or in front of their building. The reader should once again note that the courts had fully exonerated Capt Dreyfus in 1906 and returned him to his army rank with full honours and pay!!

Hommage au capitaine Dreyfus, by Louis Mitelberg, 1985 

Today the statue can be found at the exit of the Notre-Dame-des-Champs metro station and a second version of the statue has been placed at the entrance of the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris. Quite separately, in 1999 the City of Paris agreed to name a square in the 15th Arrondissement after Alfred Dreyfus; it is at the corner of the Avenue Emile-Zola.

In 2006, President Jacques Chirac must have been sick and tired of Ministry of Defence’s attitudes and decided to mark the centenary of Dreyfus' return to the army, via a state ceremony. The great grandchildren of these three French heroes, Alfred Dreyfus, Émile Zola and Major Georges Picquart, were present at the 2006 ceremony; it was held, very appropriately, in the same cobblestone courtyard of Paris' École Militaire where Captain Dreyfus had been officially disgraced (see below). In his speech, President Chirac wisely noted that "the combat against the dark forces of intolerance and hate is never definitively won".

Capt Dreyfus was disgraced in École Militaire, Paris. Published in Le Petit Journal of Jan 1895. 

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At the same conference, I was referred to the book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, written by Edmund de Waal and published by Farrar Straus Giroux in 2010. de Waal, curator of ceramics at the Victoria & Albert Museum, described the experiences of his family over decades, as I analysed in a previous post. Now I want to return to the book and focus on the Dreyfus trial.

In 1870 the sons of the Ephrussi family were sent out of Odessa to establish the family banking business in Vienna and Paris. Charles Ephrussi became a serious connoisseur and art collector who flourished during France’s Belle Epoque. He was a collector of paintings in general, and a patron and friend of Impressionists in particular, including Degas, Renoir, Monet and Manet. He bought Une botte d’asperges from Manet and was included in Renoir’s Luncheon at the Boating Party as the out-of-place chap in the top hat and suit at the back of the party, talking to his secretary.

Renoir, Luncheon at the Boating Party, 1881, Phillips Collection Wash DC

Important patron and friend of the arts though he was, Charles Ephrussi did not escape the anger of the anti-Semitic artists. Degas bitterly criticised Renoir for accepting too many commissions from so-called Jewish financiers.

Renoir was even nastier. He complained when Ephrussi began buying works of “Jew art” by (the non-Jew) Gustave Moreau: “It was clever of him to take in the Jews, to have thought of painting with gold colours… Even Ephrussi fell for it, who I really thought had some sense! I go and call on him one day, and I come face to face with a Gustave Moreau!” When the Dreyfus case broke, Charles Ephrussi found himself excluded from the company and friendship of the worst anti-Dreyfusards Renoir and Degas, the very artists he had so handsomely supported.

From "Anna Maria Grosholtz" to the mighty "Madame Tussaud"

Joe and I had been to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum in London with our sons (before they were too independent and stroppy to travel with us). But at that stage I had no idea if Madame Tussaud was a real person or not.

Anna Maria Grosholtz (1761–1850) was born in France, but as her father died when she was still a neonate, her mother had to take work wherever it was offered - Switzerland. Mrs Grosholtz worked for one Dr Philippe Curtius, a physician who used wax modelling to illustrate anatomy lessons for young students.

Dr Curtius moved to Paris in 1765, starting work by setting up a wax exhibition. In that year he made a waxwork of Louis XV's last mistress, Madame du Barry, a cast of which is the oldest work currently on display. In 1767 Mrs Grosholtz took her daughter and joined Dr Curtius in Paris. The first exhibition of Curtius' waxworks was shown in 1770 and seemed to be very popular. In 1776, the exhibition moved to the Palais Royal.

Wax model of a young Maria making a wax model, in the Berlin museum 

Dr Curtius taught young Maria Grosholtz the art of wax modelling and found that she was a very interested pupil. In 1778, she created her first wax figures, mostly famous people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. Apparently she lived at Versailles from 1780 to the Revolution a decade later, which might explain how she knew royals so well.

But knowing the royals was not a good thing, once The Revolution started. It could have been a very dangerous time for Maria, but fortunately she was called back to Paris and met many of the people who played a significant role in French life then, including Napoleon Bonaparte.

Maria Grosholtz was arrested during the Reign of Terror (1793-4) and was at great risk of execution by guillotine. But due to the intervention of a member of the Committee of Public Safety, Maria, Dr Curtius and his family were saved  and released. When the mob stormed the Bastille, Maria had to make wax death masks of the victims of the guillotine, particularly King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, Marat and Robespierre. These death masks were hugely popular and guaranteed her a steady career.

On his deathbed in 1794, Dr Curtius left his collection of waxworks to his protégé. In 1795, she married François Tussaud, an engineer from Mâcon, and became Madame Tussaud.

Chamber of Horrors, in the London Museum

Life improved in the new century (1802) when Madame Tussaud and the children travelled to London, but I have no idea what happened to the husband. Due to the ongoing Napoleonic Wars, she was unable to return to France, so she exhibited her collection across the major cities of Great Britain and Ireland for 33 years. 

I wonder if Madame Tussaud herself was aware of the newsworthiness of her travelling exhibitions. At a time when news was communicated largely by word of mouth, Madame Tussauds’ exhibition was a kind of travelling news service, providing insight into global events and bringing the ordinary public face-to-face with the movers and shakers of the era.

Thus it took decades before she could open her first permanent exhibition in Baker St in London, a salon richly decorated with mirrors in the old French taste. However as anyone who has visited will know, the main attraction of her museum was rather macabre: the Chamber of Horrors. This part of the exhibition included victims of the French Revolution that she made with her own hands, plus more recently created figures of murderers and other low lifes.

After living through the most hideous and dangerous era in French history, Madame Tussaud would have initially considered herself lucky to survive to 35 years of age! She must have truly been blessed, since she actually died in comfortable old age, at 88. Long after her death, the museum moved from the Baker St Bazaar to its present site in Marylebone Road (in 1884).

Demetre Chiparus, jazzy art deco sculptor

Demetre Chiparus (1886-1947) was born in Romania. Perhaps as a young man he didn’t see a future for himself in Romania so he took himself off to Italy in 1909 to learn with an Italian sculptor. Three years later he was off again, this time to Paris to attend the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts.

Chiparus, Thais, undated

While still only in his 20s, Chiparus started having his name noticed. Undoubtedly the viewers would have been attracted to the exquisite flesh tones, alongside the muted but rich metallics. I would love to have seen these early work in bronze and ivory, the sculptures that Chiparus exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1914, but my books don't have any on display.

The first works of Chiparus that I have seen with my own eyes were made in the 1920s. Like in all Art Deco art forms, the influences came from a number of sources, including Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes which opened in Paris just before WW1 started. A second influence arrived in France after Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb was explored in 1922 by the British Egyptologist Howard Carter - the art of ancient Egypt. Chiparus was never in Egypt and wasn’t bothered by historical accuracy, so he felt free to imagine what Queen Cleopatra and her Egyptian dancers might have looked like.

Chiparus, Friends Always, 1925

Canterbury Antiques noted that another great influence was the French theatre, opera and films (eg Thais, from the opera) where he saw women with long, slender, stylised shapes. His women were idealised of course, but idealised according to a 1920s model: slim, very athletic, dressed in oriental costumes, involved in running, dancing or dog handling. Did Chiparus use the photos of dancers, taken from fashion magazines of his time? Chiparus watchers seemed to think so. Apparently the faces on some sculptures closely resembled known Russian personalities eg Nijinsky and Ring Dancer c1928 may have been modelled on the Folies Bergere dancer Zoula de Boncza.

In short, Chiparus’ women were no shrinking violets with books in their hands; rather his sculptures were definitely bright, energetic and decorative. Whether you have ever heard of Chiparus before, or not, his works combined the elegance and luxury that still sum up the spirit of the Art Deco for us.

Preiss, Flame Dancer, c1925

Chryselephantine was the process Chiparus used, a process that involved an amalgam of bronze and ivory that was carved into a sculpture, then gilded. While the ivory on most figures in this process was normally tinted, the bronze was either patinated using acids, metallic oxides and applied heat, or cold-painted and lacquered.

This technique was apparently popular with many Art Deco sculptors with studios in Paris and Berlin in the 1920s, focusing on the same stylish young women with elongated limbs. Of the other artists using this technique, the only name that was familiar to me was the German sculptor Ferdinand Preiss (1882-1943) whose dates coincide closely with Chiparus’ dates.

Chiparus' work was fired by the Edmond Etling and Cie Foundry in Paris, under the directorship of Julien Dreyfus, and by the Les Neveux de J. Lehmann foundry. But both these foundaries were Jewish businesses that came to grief once the Nazis took over. Chiparus was not himself Jewish, but I haven’t seen any more of his works after that period. He died soon after the war in 1947 and was buried in Bagneux cemetery near Paris.

The most comprehensive collection of exquisite Chiparus sculpture is shown in Blog of an Art Admirer and History Lover and in JessicaNessica's Gallery.

Chiparus, Finale figural group, 1928

In case readers are interested in today's values, a 1999 Antique Road Show appraisal of a large Chiparus sculpture called Starfish was given as USA $100,000 to $150,000.  People were stunned and amazed! But then, at the Sotheby's Chiparus auction of April 2010, the highest priced object went for USA $936,000. The version of Les Girls sold at the 2010 auction was the only sculpture by Chiparus to feature five figures on a single base.

Chiparus experts offer a warning - 95% of so-called Chiparus works on sale these days are fakes.

Canada’s Golgotha sculpture: why was it hidden away?

In England in 1887 British artist Francis Derwent Wood entered art school and worked as a modeller. In 1890 he joined the National Art Training School where he studied under Edouard Lanteri, the man who also taught Charles Sargeant Jagger. Quite independently of this particular post, I have written several times about Jagger in the past: Low Reliefs and War and Sex.

From 1918 on, Wood was professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art and one of his commissions was to model the wreaths for Sir Edwin Lutyens' Centotaph.  Lord Beaverbrook decided to document Canada's huge contribution to WW1 by commissioning 116 English and Canadian artists to produce 800 art objects. One of 116 artists was Francis Dervent Wood.

This post is going to concentrate on Canada's Golgotha, a half life-size bronze sculpture by Wood that depicted a crucified WW1 soldier. It illustrated the story of an unknown man from the Battle of Ypres in April 1915. We know only that he was a Canadian (from the maple leaf insignias) and that he was surrounded by jeering Germans as he died on the makeshift cross. You can see the tatty barn door in the background. Appropriately for a war casualty, this young man had baynets in each wrist and ankle, not nails. And he was in heavy army clothing: a great coat and boots, rather than a mere loin cloth.

The sculpture was first displayed in an exhibition for the Canadian War Memorials Fund 1919, at Burlington House in London. But the sculpture was withdrawn from the exhibit after protest. The Allies were disgusted at German barbarity and they were particularly horrified that a Christian symbol be used to kill a young Canadian soldier. The Germans, on the other hand, were outraged that an atrocity story could be publicised without any evidence of it having been historically accurate. They assumed it was more Allied propaganda.

But why was the sculpture, controversial though it might have been in 1919, hidden away for the rest of the century? Whose interests were being served?
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Wood, Canadian Golgotha, 1919, 83 cm high x 64 cm wide

After the end of the war, the Germans formally requested the Canadian government provide proof of a crucifixion. But there were two insurmountable problems: the written eyewitness accounts were unclear and contradictory, and no crucified body was ever found.

BEST FREE DOCUMENTARIES described new historical evidence which identified the crucified soldier as Sergeant Harry Band. He was from the Central Ontario Regiment of the Canadian Infantry. Based on letters from other soldiers in Band’s unit to Band's sister Elizabeth Petrie, and her letters back, the family in Canada eventually discovered that the horror stories about a crucified Canadian soldier were true. Like other soldiers without a proper grave, Band was commemorated only on the Menin Gate memorial.

It is interesting to me that when the sculpture was displayed in 2000 at the Canadian Museum of Civilisation, it again provoked controversy. People are still very angry about German atrocities, assuming that crucifixion of the old Canadia soldier was the most barbaric of all atrocities. I, a non-Christian, personally think the massacre of thousands of French and Canadian soldiers in Belgium by poisonous gas to be far more barbaric. But I might be missing the critical symbolism here. In any case, note the name of the 2000 exhibition: "Under the Sign of the Cross: Creative Expressions of Christianity in Canada".

In 1921 the entire War Memorials Collection was donated to the National Gallery in Ottawa, but the Gallery was not in a hurry to display any of these precious art objects. Particularly Canada's Golgotha.

Canadian War Museum, Ottawa

Now at least the sculpture is in its rightful home, the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Perhaps the 1984 book Art in The Service of War: Canada, Art and The Great War by Maria Tippett will provide some answers.