Art: Arch Man

A ferreting real estate agent with an eviction notice scaled the highest point on Manhattan, a cliff known to oldsters as God’s Thumb, to city directories as Washington Heights, and flushed Sculptor George Grey Barnard into unexpected publicity last week.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, George Grey Barnard was born 67 years ago in Bellefonte, Pa., now famed as the “hell hole” of trans-Appalachian aviation. He spent his early childhood and learned taxidermy in that delight of small-time comedians, Kankakee, Ill. After studying sculpture at the Chicago Art Institute and the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, he first attracted general attention in the U. S. in 1907 by erecting the Great God Pan, at that time the largest single bronze casting in the country, on the campus of Columbia University. In 1919 the entire nation became Barnard-conscious when a replica of his great gaunt statue of Abraham Lincoln was erected in Manchester, England, to celebrate a century of British-U. S. peace. In 1925 John Davison Rockefeller Jr. bought for $600,000 The Cloisters, the beautifully arranged collection of Gothic sculpture and woodcarving which Sculptor Barnard had assembled. Mr. Rockefeller presented it as an annex to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Billings estate on God’s Thumb, the rambling stone stable of which Sculptor Barnard used as a studio, though purchased by Mr. Rockefeller in 1917, was leased to Sculptor Barnard. There he continued to live and work undisturbed. With his financial difficulties solved, Sculptor Barnard disappeared into his studio and out of the public prints.

Recently the Rockefeller estate decided to offer 56 acres of land including God’s Thumb to the city as a public park. Eviction notices were served last week on all residents, including Sculptor Barnard. Reporters, anxious to see what he had been doing for the past ten years, rushed up to interview him.

Squat, bristle-haired George Grey Barnard, always dramatic, received them in a studio bursting with sculpture.

“They say my lease expires Nov. 21. That gives me three weeks,” he stormed. “But if they come to make me move I will be here working. And if they come to tear down my studio I will still be here working.”

What he has been working on for the past decade is a monumental Arch of War and Peace which he expects to erect by himself and at his own expense as his gift to the city. There is nothing niggardly about the Barnard Arch. Critical eyebrows raised slightly to learn that it is to be of blue tombstone granite, 120 ft. high, 60 ft. wide, covered with an intricate icing of nine-foot, white marble figures: nursing mothers, pregnant women, soldiers, supermen. Over the top will go a rainbow of colored mosaic glass.

“I must have three or four more years to finish it.” said he. “I have spent 15 years perfecting the light in this studio through an arrangement of about 50 curtains and 60 lights and if they tear it down my life and art will be like the movies when the lights go down and everyone hoots and whistles—Darkness and Chaos!”

Startled by these awful forebodings, good members of the Fine Arts Club and the Federation of Women’s Clubs sent petitions to the Rockefeller Estate and the New York Board of Estimate. The latter replied that they had no intention of blighting the life of George Grey Barnard, that the dispossession notice was a mere formality, that it would be some time before the city would be ready to tear down the studio.