Charles Follen McKim
Maginnis, Charles D.
CHARLES FOLLEN McKIM By CHARLES D. MAGINNIS A COMPETENT authority has chosen a dramatic moment in the evolution of American architecture to measure the accomplishment of Charles Follen McKim....
...The Morgan Library, the University Club, the Pennsylvania Terminal, will pass away in the fugitiveness of civic enterprise, but the American Academy at Rome as an educational influence will be an enduring memorial...
...The Richardsonian epoch had already begun when McKim returned from his European studies "with a. trunk filled with sketches of chateaux, round towers and pepper-pot extinguishers...
...To assure the integrity of the plan the Fine Arts Commission came into being, and on this McKim served for many years under the chairmanship of his present friendly biographer...
...None but a master could have leaned so heavily upon history without inviting the stigma of archaeology...
...He never abused his precedents, but added new meanings and graces to them always...
...Later criticism, without denying its objective beauty, will doubtless dismiss it as episodic...
...Perhaps his art had some of the faults of its virtues...
...One gathers from the realistic criticism behind the walls of the Boston Library that the grave composure with which it confronts Copley Square was not achieved without some violence to the anatomy...
...Gaudens, he was entrusted by the Senate with the preparation of a plan for the development of the city of Washington...
...This is an event of no ordinary significance...
...The Boston populace submits complacently, however, to the exactions of the classical idea for the library remains the proud building of the city...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, $6.00...
...The twenty years which have elapsed since the death of the distinguished architect have favored the biographic perspective, but they have witnessed as well an embarrassing twist in our artistic philosophy...
...Such is the inevitable tragedy of artistic creation...
...Whatever modes and manners may impend, they cannot impair the significance of his contribution to American architectural history...
...Moore, however, has sharpened the attributions deftly so as to detach the figure of McKim into convincing symmetry...
...it brought him into contact with St...
...Its immediate effect was to stem the flood of sentimental illiteracy which was sweeping the land in awful travesty of Richardson...
...For this he wrought singlehanded in a fine frenzy of patriotism and lived to see it in successful life...
...And there was the modest anonymity of Wells, who refused a copartnership with the disconcerting comment that "he did not want his name mixed up with such stuff...
...A less judicial biographer than the chairman of the.National Fine Arts Commission might, in the face of gathering storm, have qualified the confidence of his estimates, but Mr...
...If he borrowed from the great treasure of the ages, he paid a generous interest...
...But the largest opportunity for the play of this principle came to McKim when with Burnham, Olmsted and St...
...His product was stamped with a distinguished hall-mark by the qualities of sound proportion, of elegance, of impeccable taste...
...White's was the opulent imagination which lavished itself on the Madison Square Garden-Mead, it would appear, symbolized more than the function he claimed for himself, on playful challenge, of "keeping the other two chaps from making damn fools of themselves...
...The architecture of reminiscence which McKim carried in this country to aristocratic levels of dignity and refinement now finds itself confronted by a spirit of protest, of revolution...
...Gaudens, LaFarge, Frank Millet and others of that brilliant group of the allied arts, whose collaboration he was later to enlist so responsibly in his own enterprises...
...The brief association was influential none the less...
...Moore rightly deducts nothing from the validity of the academic principle which wrought to such felicitous purpose...
...It was occasionally over-abstract in its subordination of function to monumentality...
...McKim belonged to his day...
...It was during a momentous visit to New England soon after that the reticence and ordered simplicity of the colonial work of Bulfinch renewed in him the early sensibility of his temperament to Rome of the Renaissance...
...In the daring simplicity of its motive, the design makes none too large an acknowledgment of the subtleness of modern library administration...
...An absorbing passion of the distinguished architect's later years was the creation and development of the American Academy at Rome, where in the atmosphere of the great masters American youth might receive the richest cultivation in the allied arts...
...From that time forward, the fine hand of McKim was unmistakable...
...He made no effort for originality, but he dealt fastidiously with his historical material...
...The sustained study of this group of designers brought a new vitality to the plan and a flexibility which now admitted the free expansion of the modern city, without impinging on the monumental symbols of government...
...Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim, by Charles Moore...
...Trinity Church did not, however, represent the type of romance which could long engage the delicate artistic sympathies of McKim...
...He made ingenuous acknowledgment of his veneration of Bramante, nor did he question the relevance of Bramante to the American scene...
...The title of McKim, Mead and White connoted such a variety of contributing talents as to discourage the invidiousness of the biographer...
...His dependence on tradition was not apish, however...
...He became draughtsman to the robustious protagonist of the Romanesque at the moment when the Episcopalians of Boston were being lured to forsake Canterbury for Saint Giles and Salamanca...
...From that devotion proceeded the most effective single influence which has ever been exerted upon our secular taste...
...He is revealed as the creative genius of the group-the austerely classic spirit which accounts for the Boston Public Library...
...Henceforth, he devoted himself unwaveringly to the "exploitation of the classical ideal in design...
Vol. 11 • March 1930 • No. 21
