Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

with sharper focus. Käsebier deliberately combined an out-of-focus

background with a sharp or almost-sharp foreground in order to

achieve an expressive effect by blurring the entire image slightly. In

Blessed Art Thou,the soft focus invests the whole scene with an aura

of otherworldly peace. The photograph showcases Käsebier’s ability

to inject a sense of the spiritual and the divine into scenes from

everyday life.

Sculpture

The three-dimensional art of sculpture was not suited to capturing

the optical sensations many painters favored in the later 19th cen-

tury. Its very nature—its tangibility and solidity—suggests perma-

nence. Consequently, the sculptors of this period pursued artistic

goals markedly different from those of contemporaneous painters

and photographers.

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS One artist who used sculp-

ture to express timeless ideals rather than to depict transitory moments

was the American Augustus Saint-Gaudens(1848–1907), who

trained in France. When Saint-Gaudens received the commission to

produce a memorial monument honoring Mrs. Henry Adams (FIG.

31-30), he chose a classical mode of representation, sculpting a

woman of majestic bearing sitting in mourning. The voluminous gar-

ment that enfolds her body also partly shadows her classically beautiful

face. The gesture of the woman’s right arm, which reproduces a com-

mon motif in ancient Roman portraits of women, only slightly stirs the

immobility of her form, set in an attitude of eternal vigilance.

Sculpture 843

31-29Gertrude Käsebier,Blessed Art Thou among Women,1899.

Platinum print on Japanese tissue, 9– 83  5 –^12 . Museum of Modern Art,

New York (gift of Mrs. Hermine M. Turner).

Gertrude Käsebier was able to inject a sense of the spiritual and the

divine into scenes from everyday life. The soft focus of this photograph

invests the whole scene with an aura of otherworldly peace.

31-30Augustus Saint-Gaudens,Adams Memorial, Rock Creek

Cemetery, Washington, 1891. Bronze, 5 10 high. Smithsonian

American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

For the Adams Memorial, Augustus Saint-Gaudens chose a classical

mode of representation. A woman of majestic bearing sits in mourning.

The gesture of her right arm derives from ancient Roman statuary.

1 in.

1 ft.