The Face of Copernicus, now installed at the William Andrews Clark, Jr. Memorial Library in Historic West Adams, is a casting of the Face of the full figure of Copernicus on the Astronomers Monument at the Griffith Observatory overlooking Hollywood. The following is the story of its creation, and how this casting came to be at the Clark Library.
THE ASTRONOMERS MONUMENT
The Astronomers Monument was commissioned in March of 1934 under the U. S. Treasury Department's Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and completed in November of that year. Its commission was awarded by means of a competition in which local sculptors were invited to submit designs in a theme appropriate to the observatory setting. The design chosen by the regional committee (made up of local intelligentsia) was that submitted by my father, Archibald Garner (1904-1969.) Archie, as he was known at the time, had graduated from Long Beach High School in 1922, and had taken up a career in commercial art, studying with Los Angeles artists before taking a job as an illustrator for the San Francisco Examiner. While in San Francisco, he had become interested in sculpting, and had studied with Ralph Stackpole and Ruth Cravath at the California School of Fine Arts.
He returned to Los Angeles in 1927 and began his career as a sculptor, primarily in portraiture, as well as working for 20th Century Fox making statuary and miniatures. The Astronomers Monument was his first monumental public work. The monument's design is a six-pointed conical spire, thirty-seven in height, with an armilary sphere at the tip. The figures of historical leaders of astronomy, Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Herschel are arranged around the hexagonal spire, set in the angles formed by its six-pointed star shape. The figures are nine feet in height.
The PWAP, a pilot project for the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts which would provide public art in federal buildings for decades to come, paid the salary of the artists, and the City of Los Angeles paid for the materials, mostly from funds raised by the Women's Community Service Auxiliary of the Chamber of Commerce. Five of the other sculptors who had submitted designs to the competition were hired to work with Garner on the monument, both to provide jobs and to have the monument be completed quickly. These were: Gordon Newell (1905-1998), Djey El Djey (a.k.a. Djey Owens, 1905-1980), George Stanley (1903-1977), Roger Noble Burnham (1876-1962), and Arnold Foerster (1878-1943).
Garner sculpted Copernicus, Newell sculpted Kepler, Stanley sculpted Newton, and Burnham sculpted Herschel, the other two figures being done by the remaining two sculptors. (I have not been able to determine which with sufficient certainty. The Griffith Observatory web site lists the sculptors and which figure was done by each, but the listings I know to be incorrect in at least two cases, and thus the information is rendered less than certain. Based on style, I suspect that Djey did Hipparchus. If I am correct, then Foerster would have sculpted Galileo.) In order to create a stylistically consistent work, they were instructed (and of course agreed) to follow the style set forth by Garner's design.
Garner was, as noted, primarily a portrait artist. Newell was a direct-carver, mostly of stone, whose work tended toward the abstract. Stanley, who had sculpted the "Oscar" for the Motion Picture Academy Awards in 1927, had worked for several years in a modern style closer to that of the Astronomers Monument than perhaps even Garner. Burnham worked in the classical tradition. He was Harvard-educated, and had taught sculpture and architecture there. In the 1930s, he taught sculpture at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and was locally renowned for his sculpture of the Trojan (now dubbed Tommy Trojan) at the University of Southern California in 1930. Djey sculpted in a realistic representational style, though not as traditional as the styles of Burnham or Foerster. Foerster was also a traditional bronze sculptor, having done the twelve-foot statue of Beethoven in Pershing square in 1932, and also a bust of Col. Griffith for the Observatory in 1935. His greater experience in the making of large scale works made him the one who was relied on for the engineering of the casting of the Astronomers Monument.
THE FACE OF COPERNICUS
In recognition of their individual styles, which were quite diverse, each sculptor was free to execute the face of his figure as he chose. At the completion of the monument, several, if not all, of the sculptors made a plaster casting of the face of his figure to be exhibited at a show in the book-store gallery of Jake Zeitlin in downtown Los Angeles.
Garner's Face of Copernicus, which was given a faux finish of dark green enamel and rottenstone to mimic weathered bronze, was shown at Zeitlin's (at a different location) again in 1940. The whereabouts of the Face after 1940 is a mystery, but it survived, and eventually found its way into the possesion of Arch's best friend Gordon Newell. Gordon kept the work for the rest of his life, and in the late 1980s or early 1990s, he had a mold made from it, intending to have it cast in bronze. A bronze was never made, however, and Gordon passed away in 1998.
In 2001, on a visit to Darwin, CA, where Gordon had lived and worked the last years of his life, I asked his son Hal about the Face. He wasn't sure about it, but he searched through the old studio and found it, and gave it to me. I have been casting copies of it in white concrete, which was the material of the monument. Some of the castings have been made using crushed marble as the aggregate in the concrete, which has no historical significance, but was suggested by Hal as a good material for such a piece. In addition to castings from the mold, I have restored the finish on the original plaster casting.
WHY A CASTING OF THE FACE OF COPERNICUS AT THE WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK, JR. MEMORIAL LIBRARY?
The gift of the Face of Copernicus to the William Andrews Clark, Jr. Memorial Library was made in loving memory of my father, and in honor of his friendship with Gordon Newell and Ward Ritchie. While working on the Astronomers Monument in 1934, he had become close friends with Newell, and Ritchie had been friends with Newell since their days at Occidental College. Thus, Garner was initiated into the remarkable circle of artists and intellectuals who gathered at Ritchie's print shop on Griffith Park Boulevard. The group included the sculptor George Stanley (noted above,) wood engraver Paul Landacre, songwriter Leigh Harline (When You Wish Upon a Star, and My Prince Will Come,) painter Fletcher Martin, impresario Merle Armitage, Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier, bookseller and promoter of the arts Jake Zeitlin, and Ritchie's friend since childhood, Lawrence Clark Powell, to name but a few. The camaraderie and the exchange of creative ideas among them was to spawn what Ritchie would call "the flowering of Los Angeles."
Ritchie and Powell, instrumental as they were in the world of books, literature, and libraries in Los Angeles, were closely associated with the Clark Library. Thus, art works of their close friends are appropriate to the setting. We have placed the Face of Copernicus in the garden courtyard where a casting of Newell's sculpture Sapphic Echo (1931) is also mounted in the masonry. In its way, the Face of Copernicus here at the Clark traces historical connections between key components of what Jake Zeitlin would call "a small renaissance, Southern California style"... from the Public Works of Art Project that sponsored the Astronomers Monument to dealers and collectors of books and prints, and along the way including the composers and cartoonists of Disney Studios, the California painters of Chouinard and Otis Art Institutes, script writers, architects, poets, photographers, designers of every sort, and many others in the professions and academe who were collectors, patrons, and critics. Fitting company for a Polish astronomer, if you take a California Southland point of view.