Art: Mountain Carver

Last week fog swirled over the Black Hills of South Dakota, over the sides of Mount Rushmore, ice formed a dripping glaze over four gigantic stone faces. Mount Rushmore had been finished long ago, but the 14-year chippings from these granite visages made it look unfinished: under their chins the mountainside fell away in a gigantic dribble of scree. And now the figures of these four great U. S. Presidents —Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—would never be finished by their creator. For the man who had devoted nearly a quarter of his life to the task of hewing them from the mountainside, Gutzon Borglum, lay dead of a heart attack in a Chicago hospital.

Together these faces, 60 ft. high, were the largest piece of sculpture ever wrought in the Christian Era. For 14 years a crew of workmen, with dynamite, steam shovels and compressed-air drills, had patiently chipped their features into the mountain’s rocky face, removing 400,000 tons of granite in the process. Against them, even the driving weather of the Northwestern winter battled slowly. It would take 108 million years before wind, rain, freezes and thaws could wear them back into the stone mountain from which they had emerged.

For fiery, barrel-chested John Gutzon de La Mothe Borglum, the Mount Rushmore Memorial had been the crowning fight of a fighting career. Born nearly 70 years ago of Danish immigrant parents on an Idaho ranch, Borglum started out by modeling mud figures as a child on the banks of a nearby irrigation canal. When priests at a Catholic boarding school in Kansas tried to get him to draw saints and madonnas, he ran away to San Francisco to study, went on to Paris, where he worked under famed Sculptor Auguste Rodin. Back in the U. S. he bounded with bull-like energy into a mixed career of sculpture, politics, talk and tantrums, got himself elected to the Connecticut Assembly, Bull-Moosed for Theodore Roosevelt, was named investigator of U. S. airplane production by Woodrow Wilson during World War I. Irascible and outspoken, stocky Gutzon Borglum backed up his political opinions with his fists, once even put on the gloves with Champion Bob Fitzsimmons. Said he: “My life has been a one-man war.”

Sculptor Borglum’s artistic ventures were of a piece with the rest. When, in 1907, church authorities objected to the attractive femininity of the angels he had carved for Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Borglum took a hammer and smashed them. In 1916 Borglum got his first job of mountain carving when the Atlanta Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy hired him to decorate Stone Mountam with heads of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. Just when he had got a good start, hot-tempered Borglum got into an argument over money and politics with the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, was discharged. He demolished his models before he could be stopped.

All his life, Gutzon Borglum was fascinated by bigness. His statue of Abraham Lincoln in the rotunda of the Capitol at Washington was carved from the largest block of marble he could find. His Wars of America, in Newark, N. J., was at one time the largest bronze group in the U. S. Mount Rushmore was a big enough monolith to satisfy even Borglum. Said he: “There is something in sheer volume that awes and terrifies, lifts us out of ourselves, something that relates us to God and to what is greatest in our evolving universe.”