July 1, 2014
This biography of Fr'd'ric Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, challenges prior accounts of how the colossus was realized. Yasmin Khan's Enlightening the World (2010) holds that the project originated with a group of liberal Frenchmen fond of American democracy. Not according to Mitchell. The idea was Bartholdi's alone, and he was motivated not by feelings of amity toward America but by the driver of many an artist, ambition. Directed toward sculpture by his devoted mother, Bertholdi early would learn that large works won attention. He made his initial mark with a military statue. Inspired by a tour of Egyptian monuments, he dreamed of creating the biggest statue in the world. His proposal to do so at the Suez Canal failed, but after an interlude of fighting alongside Garibaldi in the 187071 Franco-Prussian War, he fixated on erecting it in an American seaport. How New York became the location is just one of the elements of Mitchell's lively story. The statue's financing, construction, transportation, and unveiling complete her often archly characterized portrait of the creatively self-promoting Bartholdi.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)
June 1, 2014
Mitchell (Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing, 2002, etc.) maintains a light touch in this examination of the life of Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), the designer of the Statue of Liberty.A proud Alsatian whose widowed mother moved him and his older brother to Paris to further their artistic careers, Bartholdi studied under painter Ary Scheffer and was influenced by the work of architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc in his restoration of Notre-Dame. Having visited and drawn the monuments of the Nile Valley, Bartholdi fancied stone as his "mania" and initially proposed to the khedive of Egypt a colossal statue of a female slave holding a torch to stand at the mouth of the Suez Canal, a construction-in-progress marvel by engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps. Bartholdi maintained that his idea for a lighthouse in the form of "the angel Liberty" was in fact inspired by a poem by Victor Hugo. Spurred by the pro-American views of writer Edouard Rene de Laboulaye, whose bust Bartholdi was commissioned to make, and faced with revolution in Paris in 1871, he set sail for New York to try to sell his idea, especially as newly fashioned Central and Prospect parks needed statues-although nothing quite this large. Bedloe's Island in the harbor, containing 14 acres and a crumbling fort, seemed a perfect site, but it would take until October 1886 for the enormous funds to be gathered and the statue actually dedicated. Bit by bit, Bartholdi drummed up support from Franco-American friends and the American wealthy, from President Ulysses S. Grant to architect Richard Morris Hunt, while relying on the engineering know-how of Viollet-le-Duc and ironworker Honore Monduit, as well as invaluable advice from bridge builder Gustave Eiffel.A low-key, mannered treatment of the realization of a great vision.
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