Was William T. Trego America’s Greatest Disabled Artist?

One of the biggest problems with lists is that with lists come labels. A list of African-American artists or women artists already sets them up as different (and perhaps less, somehow) than artists on another list. But sometimes lists also celebrate difference and how individuals overcome challenges and thrive in a society that can be less than totally accepting. Few people know the name of the disabled 19^th century American artist William T. Trego, even though one of his paintings, The March to Valley Forge, December 16, 1777, remains a staple of American history textbooks looking to illustrate one of the great turning points of the American Revolutionary War. In So Bravely and So Well: The Life and Art of William T. Trego by Joseph P. Eckhardt, we learn Trego’s remarkable tale of overcoming the effects of childhood polio, which left his hands paralyzed, to attend art school and even study in Paris in his pursuit of a career as a painter, all during an era when the physically disabled were perceived as mentally disabled, too, and in which the idea of accessibility for all remained nearly a century in the future. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Was William T. Trego America’s Greatest Disabled Artist?"

[Image: William T. Trego (1858-1909), The Color Guard (French Dragoons Charging), 1890, oil on canvas, H. 35 x W. 45.75 inches, West Point Museum, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York.]

[Many thanks to the James A. Michener Art Museum for the image above and to the University of Pennsylvania Press for providing me with a review copy of So Bravely and So Well: The Life and Art of William T. Trego by Joseph P. Eckhardt.]

Fallen Hopes

I remember standing under Alexander Calder’s gigantic stabile Eagle (above, from 1971) when the PMA installed it at the top of the “Rocky Steps” as part of the city’s push to get a Calder museum for Philadelphia as part of the “Museum Mile” dream to include the PMA, the PAFA, the Rodin Museum, and the eventually to be moved Barnes Foundation Museum. I remember looking down and seeing the optic orange paint chips scattered everywhere as evidence of just how much difficulty the installers had moving the gentle giant. Born July 22, 1898, Calder’s known better for his lighthearted mobile structures that dance in mid-air on wind currents. I never forget to look up at Calder’s Ghost high above the great staircase of the PMA. Although Calder’s stabiles seem whimsical, they’re just as monumentally crushing as the sculptures of Richard Serra, although I don’t know of anyone being hurt or killed by a Calder. Just because Calder’s works don’t seem to threaten you like Serra’s do, doesn’t make them less dangerous. For Philadelphia’s dream of a “Museum Mile,” the dream of a Calder Museum has been crushed time and again over the last 9 years.

Today, where the Calder Museum might have been on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a small park full of smaller Calder stabiles rests like a kind of graveyard. Many of these smaller stabiles wear the funereal black of Calder’s Man (above, from 1967) rather than the happy optic orange of so many other stabiles. Calder’s family’s association with the City of Brotherly Love goes back generations—from his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, who came to Philadelphia from Scotland in 1868, to his father, Alexander Stirling Calder. Sculptures by the Calders appear all over Philadelphia. Between the Peales, the Wyeths, and the Calders, Philadelphia-area art has always been a family affair. Unfortunately, local government just couldn’t put together the proper package to sway the current generation of Calders to take that final step that would have made the museum a reality.

Hope lives for the Calder Museum. The very nature of Calder’s work always gives new collections a chance. Calder’s Mountains and Clouds (above, from 1976), located in the Hart Senate Office Building, actually found its home after Calder’s death. Calder suffered a fatal heart attack right after finalizing plans for the sculpture in 1976. Six years later, the sculpture, a unique blend of mobile and stabile, appeared during the building’s own unveiling. Because Calder’s art is more about ideas than execution, versions of his work can be created just as well posthumously as during his lifetime. The idea of a museum of Calder’s greatest ideas in the city his family called home for over a century may see the light of day yet.

A Direct Line

One of the fun facts of art in Philadelphia is the direct line you can draw between the art of three generations of Calder sculptors, ending with Alexander “Sandy” Calder, born on July 22, 1898. Start with Philadelphia City Hall, covered by sculptures done by Sandy’s grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, including the statue of William Penn, still the largest statue on top of any building in the world. Move down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to Logan Circle and see the Swann Memorial Fountain by Sandy’s father, Alexander Stirling Calder (who also did the statue of Dr. Samuel Gross , of Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, standing behind Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia). Finally, walk or run up the “Rocky steps” of the PMA and climb the Grand Staircase of the main room. At the top you can look past Sandy’s mobile Ghost (above) and see his father’s and grandfather’s sculptures in the hazy distance. No family of artists has left the same indelible impression on Philadelphia as the Calder family.

Marcel Duchamp, one of the many modernist artists Calder knew and was influenced by, coined the term “mobile” for Calder’s once-revolutionary kinetic sculptures seemingly riding on the air as they hung from the ceiling. Now that mobiles are the commonplace toy of nurseries everywhere, it’s hard to fathom just how unique these sculptures were when they first burst upon the scene. As light and delicate as his mobiles appear, Calder’s monumental-sized “stabiles” dig their roots firmly in the ground. I remember walking around Calder’s Eagle when it stood on the East Terrace of the PMA in late 1999 and early 2000 (pictured above in its home in Seattle, Washington). The orange paint chips scattered around the base testified to its weightiness and how difficult it was to swing into place. Some friends and I, out celebrating the incoming millennium, walked around the base that New Year’s Eve before enjoying the fireworks.

Calder’s mobiles and stabiles make modern art accessible and even friendly for the casual observer or even the diehard modern art hater. The room at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC filled with Calder’s mobiles (one example appears above) remains one of my favorites in their modern art wing. It was like standing in a environment of exotic birds or giant, beautiful butterflies, constantly moving on the almost imperceptible air currents. Rumors have milled about for years of a Calder museum to be erected near the PMA here in Philadelphia, but that plan sadly seems dead. Calder truly created art for the masses, especially children, who can see and experience his living art free of all extraneous interpretation and meaning. Calder’s art follows Archibald MacLeish’s maxim for poetry: it “should not mean/ But be.”