Art: Music of Motion

Orpheus, son of Apollo, played his lyre so well that birds and beasts were stilled and oak trees moved from their places to listen. Even Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of Hades, was lulled to sleep when the musician tried to bring Eurydice back from the dead. Jealous Thracian maidens killed Orpheus who was buried in Libethra where the nightingales are supposed to sing more sweetly than in any other part of Greece. He is remembered as the God of Music.

Ten years ago Sculptor Carl Milles, recalling this familiar legend, won a competition with a sketch of a fountain to be placed in front of Stockholm’s Concert Hall. Last week Carl Milles had finished the last of the plaster models of his Orpheus group. He and they were on their way to Stockholm where the models will be cast in dark green bronze. The fountain will be completed in 1936.

In 1929 Architect Eliel Saarinen invited Sculptor Milles to teach and work at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in pleasant, rolling Bloomfield Hills, near Detroit. There Carl Milles created his huge Orpheus fountain which many of his admirers consider the greatest of his great work.* Milles modeled an Orpheus descending from Heaven, his lyre resting on his left shoulder, his right hand plucking its invisible strings. Directly beneath Orpheus a stylized Cerberus is about to doze off into careless sleep. Around the rim of the fountain nude figures are arrested in various postures by the strains of Orpheus’ music. A very young girl in her rapture drops a flower. More mature is a girl who lifts her hands in surprise, turns her head to hear whence the music comes. A third girl turns haughtily as if to resist the spell. Most mature is the woman who was arranging her hair when Orpheus began to play. She suggests a worldly, sated figure to whom spiritual beauty has suddenly been revealed. A youth lifts his hand as if he were trying to catch the music. A man, holding a bird, motions it to be quiet while he listens.

“I have no names on the figures,” says Sculptor Milles. “The only one is Beethoven.” The deaf composer, his body lean and naked, his face seamed with anguish, raises imploring hands.

In the Orpheus fountain, water will spurt up as high as the knees of Orpheus. Dripping lines of water from the teeth of Cerberus will harmonize perpendicularly with the legs of the figure. Human torsos representing shades in Hades have been carved into parts of the angular unsymmetrical base. When the fountain works they, like the dead, will seem to float in the mists of another world.

Carl Milles is a master at translating motion into monuments. In his fountain figures he seems to catch, as few others before him have been able to do, the pure music of motion. Born in Upsala, Sweden, 59 years ago. Carl Milles, when a boy, tried to run away to sea, was stopped by his father. But sea motifs have always played through his art, and fountains are his favorite and best subjects. He de signed a fountain of Tritons for McKinlock Court at the Chicago Art Institute, a jolly merman and mermaid for a Stock holm public square. He studied under Rodin, was for a time submerged by his master’s style but finally broke away, developed a style of his own which experts today consider as genuinely MILLES as Michelangelo’s was MICHELANGELO. He has the grave face of a Catholic priest, the soft, calm voice of a man who sees far beyond reality. Two years ago he be came a U. S. citizen.

* For a photographic display of Carl Milles’ sculpture see November’s Architectural Forum.