Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Madison Square’s refurbishment in recent years has been carried out beautifully and is cause for hosannas. A problem seemingly endemic to such undertakings, however, is that the refurbishers, especially when they are private concerns, seldom sense when it is time to leave well enough alone.
A case in point occurred last week, when Madison Square’s managers erected a gigantic television screen showing the U.S. Open tennis tournament. So far, nothing wrong with that. What was wrong, what indeed was unconscionable, was that the screen was placed immediately in front of the statue of Admiral Farragut, at the north end of the park just south of 26th Street.
The park managers would say that there was really no other logical place to put it. Many park users would say it’s no big deal.
I beg to differ. Would Italians put a television showing the World Cup in front of Donatello’s St. George? Rabid Italian football fans might be fine with that, but it would never happen. Nor does it matter that most of the tennis watchers in Madison Square would say “Farragut? Who’s he?”
We’ve just witnessed a great American city’s annihilation, and we’ve just passed the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Should we not as a culture take stock, and consider that maybe, just maybe, we have a great cultural patrimony that should not be treated so cavalierly? Yet between the New York Public Library’s sale of “Kindred Spirits” and Madison Square’s (albeit temporary) concealment of Farragut, that is exactly what New Yorkers are doing.
Dedicated in 1881, the Farragut statue was the first public commission awarded to one of the greatest American artists, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. He won a competition for the statue’s design in 1876. For five years, much of that time in his studio in Paris, he toiled on this work that would make or break his career. For the figure of the admiral, Saint-Gaudens applied the naturalistic techniques he had recently learned at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where the pedagogy had revived the style of the quattrocento sculptors of Italy.
For the base, Saint-Gaudens asked his friend, the young architect Stanford White, for help. Together they created a marvelous exedra, embellished with nautical motifs in sinuous lines that seem to belong to Art Nouveau. The biographical inscriptions, in stylized lettering, were prepared by the architect’s father, the arts critic Richard Grant White. In the pebbled foreground of the exedra, look for Saint-Gaudens’s and Stanford White’s names – inscribed on a bronze crab.
Among the admiral’s accomplishments was his victory in the Battle of New Orleans, a crucial port city he wrested from the Confederates as Andrew Jackson had once saved it from the British. Today, its importance as a port is vastly greater than in the 19th century. Too bad Farragut wasn’t in charge of hurricane preparations. And too bad Madison Square’s managers hid the admiral at a time when his noble visage may have given us heart.