Art: Where the Rub Comes In

A great body of important Early American stone sculpture is in danger of annihilation. Weather, children, riflemen and clumsy power mowers are rapidly wreaking havoc on the ancient tombstones that stand row on row in cemeteries all over New England and the South. But with the help of a Ford Foundation grant, two young artists, Ann Parker and Avon Neal, have been haunting graveyards since 1961, preserving the crumbling heritage in a less vulnerable form. Last week a show of 120 of their meticulous gravestone rubbings (see opposite page) opened at the Brooklyn Museum.

A rubbing is made on the principle that schoolboys have been using for generations when they put paper over a coin and run a pencil over the surface to make a copy. Parker and Neal use large sheets of strong, pliable Japanese rice paper placed over the carving. A silk pad, dipped in black ink, is rubbed over the paper, and colored inks—coppery green or earthy brown—are added with other pads until the final effect is achieved. “Sometimes it takes hours—a whole day for a big one,” says Neal. “We are often surprised to see how a rubbing will bring out details that we couldn’t see by eye. White marble tends to granulate when weathered, but was originally carved in deeper relief. Slate holds up much better through the years, and slate also permitted more delicate designs.”

Memento Mori. Ann Parker, a handsome blonde whose lively enthusiasm is far from ghoulish, got the idea of immortalizing tombstone carving one weekend after stumbling on a weed-grown graveyard near the hamlet of Colrain, Mass. She and Neal started boning up on New England stonecutters, found that most of them had been Yankee Jacks-of-all-trades who knew how to use chisel and mallet. One stonecutter, John Stevens of Newport, R.I., set up a shop for himself in 1705 that is still in operation after being handed down through generations of stonecutters.

The most prolific era of tombstone carving lay between 1650 and 1800. With prosperity and education, fashion began to dictate design, and the fine art of the gravestone, with its candid memento mori portraits, its fire-and-brimstone skulls and scythe-bearing skeletons, disappeared. “After’ 1820, everything was urns and willow trees.” says Ann Parker.

In a Salem Cemetery. Last summer the artists traveled 26,000 miles in New England in a 1952 black Chrysler sedan—”sufficiently hearselike to be inconspicuous in a graveyard.” This winter, in a Salem, Mass., cemetery, they were bundled in hooded parkas, sweeping away snow, when they found themselves surrounded by a ring of hostile-looking observers. “You know how Salem feels about witches,” says Ann, but nothing happened: burning people is another old New England art that has disappeared.

Each rubbing, like an etching or a print, is an original. The cost ranges from $15 to $75, making them within the budget of the average collector. Parker and Neal have a show scheduled at Carnegie Institute of Technology this month, another at Princeton in April, and late fall exhibitions in Paris and New York.