Art: Peace Arch

On Armistice Day 1918, with the bells still ringing in his ears, Sculptor George Grey Barnard vowed to devote the rest of his life to a great memorial to the men who died in war and to the women who bore them. In the ensuing months the project clarified in his mind as a gigantic arch, over 100 ft. high, with a mosaic rainbow at its summit. Though few people were interested in helping him build it, Sculptor Barnard was not discouraged. His art had given him an international reputation and a comfortable fortune. He retired into his Manhattan studio to complete his arch with his own hands and his own funds.

There for 15 years he worked, unnoticed and unnoticing. He had to move three years ago when the Rockefellers presented the land on which his old studio stood to the City (TIME, Nov. 10, 1930). But he found another studio in an abandoned power house for a trolley system and went on.

Last week came a great day in the life of George Grey Barnard. The full scale plaster model of his tremendous peace arch was completed. Sculptor Barnard scraped most of the plaster from his hands, opened his studio doors and invited the world to enter and admire.

All who responded were a handful of overcoated reporters lugging cameras and the polite directors of the trolley line. Tiptoeing round the vast draughty power house they looked at a towering erection of canvas and wallboard 100 feet high representing the arch. Over the opening was a painted rainbow which will be of colored mosaic in the finished work. Bracing either pier was an intricate iceberg of plaster. Together they contained 53 nine-foot figures—rows of muscular nude young men rising to a barrel-chested Superman with arms outstretched; nursing mothers, old men, children and refugees. Many were individual figures of great effectiveness. Two months ago Sculptor Barnard, with plaster in his hair, tried to explain all this to a puzzled interviewer:

“I don’t have to think of war in this studio. All right, I don’t have to think of it, but in hospitals thousands of men are twisting with torture because of the last war. I might be in a hospital bed myself. Let me make myself clear. I have a debt to pay.”

This and more Sculptor Barnard repeated to his little handful of photographers and trolley directors last week.

“If I hadn’t made this memorial, I would have gone out of the world. Winds were blowing inside me, driving me on. Not a dollar is going into this work that I did not make with my own chisel.”

The trolley directors went home. Sculptor Barnard returned to work. Ahead of him were eight more years of translating his plaster models into granite and marble. He is ready, if the city is not willing to accept his memorial, to tear down his own house for a site for it.

Art critics with every sympathy for the idea back of the arch, for the industry of Sculptor Barnard and for the artistic value of many of the individual figures stayed mum. None dared remind a man who has worked 15 years on one job that a 100-foot arch is not sculpture but architecture. The vast panels of plaster he has designed are white excrescences oozing from masonry. Despite their individual merit and the noble symbolism they represent, not one of the 53 figures has any structural connection with the arch of which it is a part.