Picasso in Chicago
McDANIEL, CHARLES-JEAN
Picasso in Chicago People in Chicago are talking. And to each other. This sudden loquacity was brought on by the city's new conversation piece—the five-story Picasso sculpture that graces, or...
...Just a few days over a year elapsed from Picasso's completion of the design to the unveiling on August 15...
...On and on, heatedly or with humor, the speculation continues...
...If it is art they ought to put it in the Art Institute...
...The old man who walks around town with a white duck under his arm stayed on...
...Demonstrations are not allowed without a permit...
...Gwendolyn Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, read a poem she had written for the occasion...
...Scene : Afternoon, two teen-age boys, one to the other, "It looks like Mayor Daley...
...The ban on demonstrations notwithstanding, not since the blizzard last January have strangers in Chicago talked to each other the way the Chicago Picasso has got them talking...
...Any idea of reserving the physical forum of the Civic Center plaza alongside the Chicago Picasso only for use by those in authority, or who express popular, safe, or majority concepts, is bizarre...
...The Picasso cost $300,000 and was paid for with gifts from three foundations—to the relief of taxpayers who pre-judged the sculpture to be a monstrosity from pictures and drawings of the model in the newspapers and expressed their indignation, in letters to editors, that tax money would be used to pay for such a thing...
...Art critics generally agree that it represents a woman's head, and this is architect Hartmann's view, as well as the one adopted by Mayor Daley...
...Everything attendant to the sculpture has been phenomenal, from the artist's decision to give the design to the people of the city, to the fifty thousand spectators who turned out to view the unveiling...
...Hartmann gave Picasso souvenirs—a fire chief's helmet, White Sox baseball and Bears football uniforms, an Indian headdress, all ideal gifts for the eighty-five-year-old artist who still views and depicts the world with childlike whimsy...
...The pieces were made and put together in Gary, then dismantled and brought to Chicago for reassembling, starting in June...
...The resemblance to numerous Picasso paintings of women's heads is unmistakable...
...This, in the long run, may be more dangerous to Mayor Daley's regime than demonstrations...
...It looks like a rusty anchor," says one befurred matron...
...Colonel Jack Reilly, the mayor's director of special events, lost his cool after representing the mayor at a FUipino patriotic ceremony in the plaza...
...Most of it didn't matter much anyway—speeches by politicians, prayers by clergymen invoking God's ecumenical blessings on the creation of an atheist artist, a telegram from President Johnson congratulating Mayor Richard J. Daley...
...A gentle, polite applause swept through the crowd...
...Even before the unveiling, Mayor Daley's forces grouped to squelch an alderman who did not like the sculpture...
...The thousands of others there did not so much leave as drift away, reluctantly, as though they expected something else to happen, that maybe this mammoth rusty thing would flap its wings and fly away...
...The Chicago Symphony, in its first performance at a civic function, played George Gershwin's An American in Paris...
...The mere fact that it is an open way for people to walk back and forth makes it public property," an ACLU spokesman said of the plaza after the peace worker was arrested...
...Slow-moving carloads of spectators create traffic jams in the blocks bounding the plaza and sometimes, especially on weekends, for several blocks beyond...
...His forty-two-inch ma-quette for the sculpture was given to the Art Institute, where it was displayed before fabrication of the 160-ton sculpture was begun by U.S...
...After the gift was announced and its design made public in September, 1966, the model was displayed at the Art Institute for a while before being sent to Gary for the fabrication...
...A young man replies, "It's a woman's head...
...If it is a bird or an animal, they ought to put it in the zoo," he said of the sculpture...
...And Hartmann showed him a model of the Civic Center, the city's tallest building, made of rusty steel and glass, so he could fit his sculpture to the environment...
...When it came time to discuss Picasso's fee for his work, he advised Hart-mann that it was a gift to the people of Chicago...
...But that was not why people came —and stayed...
...The "What is it...
...This sudden loquacity was brought on by the city's new conversation piece—the five-story Picasso sculpture that graces, or defiles, depending on one's point of view, the plaza in front of the Civic Center in the Loop...
...What's it supposed to be...
...While the sculpture did not take on a life of its own, it brought new life to the granite-covered plaza, heretofore a half-block expanse relieved by an ornamental pool, bubbling fountains, three trees, some granite benches, and three flagpoles...
...And one of the men: "I don't care if it is supposed to be rusty, I think it looks like hell...
...He called it a "rusting junk heap," proposed that it be sent to Paris and a statue of Chicago's baseball hero, Ernie Banks, be erected in its place...
...The hour-and-a-half proceedings were over-long and inaudible in the skyscraper canyon...
...They congregate by the hundreds in the daytime and still are there by the dozens past midnight, debating the merits or demerits of the sculpture with the seriousness of farmers debating the qualities of a bull at auction...
...CHARLES-GENE McDANIEL is a Chicago writer and editor with special training in journalism and art...
...When Mayor Daley finally pulled the long white ribbon that dropped the turquoise shroud from the rusty orange creation, there were no roaring cheers or boos...
...The artist became fascinated with the city and its association with some of his old friends, particularly Ernest Hemingway...
...The wing-like appendages on either side provide sweeping lines that contrast with the stark, boxlike construction of the Civic Center...
...Architect William E. Hartmann visited Picasso at his home in southern France to induce him to undertake his first project in designing civic sculpture...
...The American Civil Liberties Union, not surprisingly, takes a view quite different from City Hall's...
...Picasso has not offered any hints, letting the work speak for itself to each viewer...
...A week after the unveiling, two hundred permits had been refused...
...The sculpture has been called an Afghan dog's head, a dodo bird, a Barbary ape, a woman's head, an ape, an angel, a praying mantis— among other things...
...Metal scaffolding was erected around the work and draped with canvas...
...by CHARLES-JEAN McDANIEL...
...debate accelerated with the unveiling...
...The City Council—over whelmingly dominated by Daley alderman—threatened to censure him...
...Unless the courts rule them out of order, the city officials are going to see to it that no institution develops on the plaza such as London's haven of free speech, Hyde Park, or even Chicago's Bughouse Square across from Newberry Library, where for decades crowds have gathered to debate the spectrum of ideas from the divine to the ridiculous...
...Ironically, the sculpture has brought about an official stifling of free expression in the plaza...
...Steel in Gary, Indiana...
...And the crowds have continued, in a seemingly endless flow, to gather day after day in the plaza before the overwhelming presence of the fifty-foot-high whatever-they-decide-it-is: American tourists, foreign tourists with cameras, suburbanites who rarely visit the city, Chicagoans who have not been to the Loop in years...
...They say they want the plaza reserved for civic functions, meaning those sponsored by the mayor or some governmental unit...
...City officials say they do not want the plaza to become a haven for hippies, bums, anti-Vietnam and civil rights groups...
...Scene: A swarthy man in sports clothes approaches two well-dressed teen-age couples standing beside the sculpture at midnight and asks, "What is it...
...Others came throughout the day...
...And so for a while did the Women for Peace, with their Picasso peace dove signs and anti-Vietnam war leaflets...
...Over a number of visits, Hartmann and Picasso became friends...
...Eventually the rusty orange will deepen to match the purplish brown rust of the Center itself...
...Office workers in nearby skyscrapers stopped work and stood in windows...
...It looks like a cross-eyed bird to me," says the other...
...It has been designated as such...
...But the curious peeked through openings between the canvas sheets, and the speculation and debate intensified as the work progressed this summer...
...One member of the official family who spoke his mind candidly, and un-flatteringly, about the sculpture has not had anything to say publicly about it since...
...Picasso in Chicago People in Chicago are talking...
...Hundreds of the spectators did not leave but stayed to look and debate...
...The day after the unveiling, a peace worker for the American Friends Service Committee was arrested as an intruder on private property, even though taxpayers are footing the bill for the plaza...
...The hippies who rattled tambourines and passed out flowers and posed for television cameramen during the ceremonies behied their little group afterward to Grant Park, a few blocks away on the lajcefront...
...The manager of the Civic Center said, "The . . . plaza is private property...
...The grandeur of Picasso's conception could be seen at last, and the relatively quiet reception the sculpture was given was perhaps as much the result of awe as of disappointment...
...The climax came with the Roman holiday unveiling, when spectators arrived in unexpected thousands to overflow the plaza and streets and sidewalks of three blocks surrounding the plaza...
...Initial public reaction was pretty much that which usually greets an art innovation: "It's junk...
...If he was there, he was inconspicuous...
...Scene : Again at midnight, two middle-aged couples approach the sculpture...
...From the comments exchanged in overheard conversations, few have even read about the sculpture in the newspapers, which for months have featured it in stories and photographs...
...Alderman Seymour Simon, who incurred Daley's wrath as president of the Cook County board of supervisors, issued a statement: "Although no one knows what the Chicago Picasso represents, it and Picasso's career symbolize the privilege of free expression...
...A local sculptor, miffed because he was not commissioned to do a statue for the plaza, paraded with his family and friends bearing signs denouncing Picasso's work...
...Questioned by newsmen about Reil-ly's outburst, the mayor replied, "Oh, it was rather hot that day, you know, but he'll be there the day of the dedication...
...At eleven that night there still were traffic jams for , blocks around created by spectators in automobiles...
Vol. 31 • October 1967 • No. 10
