Art: Unsolved Problem

This week Philadelphia’s Art Alliance put models and plans for 15 U.S. war memorials on display. The work of well-established firms selected by the U.S. Battle Monuments Commission,* they would be translated into stone within two years at military cemeteries in Britain, Europe, North Africa and the Philippines.

The show was intended to represent solutions to “the problem of adequately—or gloriously—commemorating the sacrifice of those soldiers and sailors who died in battle.” The question was: Were its solutions adequate, let alone glorious?

At least two outspoken architects thought not. Complained Philadelphia’s J. Roy Carroll Jr.: “The designs for the most part are pale copies of those executed after the first World War, with the usual classic pavilion, symmetrical stairways and Grecian urns.” Architect George Daub agreed: “It should have been competitive.”

The commission’s chief criteria had been “durability, dignity and beauty.” There was no denying that the monuments they decided upon were on the conservative side. More modern ones, lacking classical associations, might have seemed to lack dignity as well. Among the best-planned and least assuming of those on exhibition was the Voorhees, Walker, Foley & Smith project for Hamm, Luxembourg, which provided for an ungadgeted chapel and a well planned area for memorial services. The monument that Holabird, Root & Burgee had designed for Henri Chapelle, Belgium was more dramatic, but its forbidding stone facade with 14 rectangular columns was low as death’s door and suggested little beyond the threshold.

Actually the exhibition was bound to be disappointing; it would have required very great architects indeed to design “adequate” war memorials.

* A U.S. Government body long (24 years) headed by General John J. Pershing. His successor and present chairman: General George C. Marshall.