Correction Appended
NOWHERE are the tensions between art and politics drawn more sharply than in the strange case of the Heine Memorial, intended in 1899 for one of the most prominent sites in Manhattan but finally unveiled in the Bronx, where it stands at 161st Street and the Grand Concourse.
It now stands at 161st Street and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
In 1893 the Arion Society of New York, a German singing group, began raising money for a large marble statue in memory of the German poet, critic and essayist Heinrich Heine, who had died in 1856. Heine had been bitter in his criticism of the officious close-mindedness of German society and spent much of his life in France, delivering his sarcastic barbs from exile.
A monument had already been commissioned by Heine’s admirers for his birthplace, Düsseldorf, but the city had refused it — in part because of anti-Semitism, The New York Times said.
Prominent German-Americans, including the editor and politician Carl Schurz and George Ehret of the Hell-Gate Brewery, backed the effort to bring the monument to the United States, in part as a rebuke to Germany. They felt confident that their trans-Atlantic riposte would be well sited at the plaza at 59th and Fifth, and their ambition encouraged a franker discussion than would have occurred if the intended location had been less prominent.
In 1895, The Times, until then a supporter of the monument, described it as “an example of academic mediocrity, worthy of erection, but not worthy of erection as our chief municipal ornament.” Designed by Ernst Herter, a well-known Berlin sculptor, it was a writhing composition in white Tyrolean marble depicting Lorelei, the mythical German figure, surrounded by mermaids, dolphins and seashells.
In 1893, parks officials had rejected a statue of President Chester A. Arthur, who had died seven years before, after the incautious donors had already had the bronze cast. So just as the Heine monument project was gaining steam, the Parks Department decided that, to avoid such problems in the future, all monuments would first be subject to the approval of a private group, the National Sculpture Society.
It was a bitter pill when, in late 1895, just as fund-raising activities were at a peak, the society rejected the Heine Memorial, describing it as “dry, weak and conventional,” according to The Times. One society member, Russell Sturgis, called it “a two-penny affair,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported. The German-American backers were in an uproar, accusing society members of professional jealousy.
Yet, after flirtations with sites in Brooklyn, Queens and Baltimore, they tried an end run around the Parks Department. According to “The Politics of Urban Beauty (University of Chicago Press, 2006), Michele Bogart’s history of the New York City Art Commission, Tammany Democrats brought the matter before the Board of Aldermen in early 1896.
But Republicans in the State Legislature were concurrently moving ahead on establishing a formal art commission to vet any offered monuments or other artwork. The Legislature passed its bill on March 4 of that year, but the Board of Aldermen still voted on March 10 to accept the Heine Memorial — though for what site was still unclear.
There the matter rested for two years. In 1898, American Architect and Building News, which had generally been on the side of those who thought the memorial embarrassingly bad, noted that a move was under way to have it installed in the Bronx. The magazine suggested that the city relax its standards slightly, given the hurt feelings, and said that, in the Bronx, nothing could be uglier than “the mass of wooden tenements and crazy beer-shops to which the territory now seems exclusively devoted.”
Dr. Bogart, a professor of art history at Stony Brook University, has not been able to determine the actual mechanism, but through some sort of backdoor arrangement the Heine Memorial was unveiled in July 1899 near the Grand Concourse, at 161st Street.
Thus the memorial — what was supposed to be the art commission’s first project — was mired in international politics and ethnic animosity from the beginning. (And on top of that, it evaded the commission.)
At any rate, late one night in 1900, vandals used an ice ax to chop off the arms of the mermaids. A Times editorial recommended “a public whipping,” but the vandals were never caught. Repairs were quickly made, and more were required in 1905 when nearby demolition knocked off a head.
From this baptism by fire, the Art Commission has, through the decades, had to weigh the differences of opinion between two pivotal groups: the artists and reformers who saw the city streets as a canvas for the uplifting power of art, and the special-interest groups and politicians who saw any oversight as interference with efforts to memorialize certain constituencies. Dr. Bogart was herself a commission member from 1998 to 2003.
As her tightly written account demonstrates, despite the high aims of the Art Commission, politics has generally triumphed over art, beginning with the Heine Memorial.
Correction: June 3, 2007
The Streetscapes column last Sunday, about the Heinrich Heine Memorial in the
