Art: Going-Forwardness

The name on the plaque said “Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Otherwise people might have been hard put to recognize the bronze face (see cut) which President Truman will unveil next week in Washington’s Recorder of Deeds Building.

Selma Burke, a Negro sculptress and onetime pupil of France’s Aristide Maillol, won a nationwide competition to design the plaque. Said she, explaining the less-than-speaking likeness: “I had to make up my mind to show . . . three or four things which I felt he meant to me and millions of others: strength, determination, and that look of going-forwardness.”