Publications
Partners
Gutzon Borglum was a great sculptor. His goal was to create monumental art that was “American, drawn from American sources, memorialising American achievement”.
This philosophy led him to create the most famous sculpture in the US and the most significant monumental sculpture in the world – Mount Rushmore.
Borglum was born in what was then the Idaho Territory in 1867 to Danish parents.
He studied art in San Francisco, then went to Europe for more formal art training in Paris. After returning to the US, he worked in New York and one of his bronzes was the first American sculpture purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Borglum was fascinated by monumental stone sculpture and carved a large bust of Abraham Lincoln out of solid marble in 1908.
This sculpture led a group of women in Georgia, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, to ask Borglum to do something similar – a bust of Civil War General Robert E Lee on Stone Mountain.
Borglum told them a 20-foot bust of Lee on the mountain would look like “a postage stamp on a barn door”, and suggested a group of figures on horseback instead. He designed the figure grouping, and started work on the massive relief sculpture.
After Borglum had unveiled the head of Lee to great fanfare in 1924, he and the city administrators had a serious falling out, which led the sculptor to leave the project and his work was sandblasted off the mountain. The sculpture was eventually finished over the next 50 years, following Borglum’s design.
Borglum learnt an enormous amount while working on Stone Mountain.
He learnt how best to use jackhammers and dynamite to sculpt monumental figures, and was able to use this knowledge on his best known work on Mount Rushmore.
He started working on the four presidents’ heads in 1927 when he was 60. For the next 14 years, he and his son Lincoln, along with 400 workers, stone masons and blasters, transformed a mountain in South Dakota into one of the world’s best known landmarks.
The head of George Washington was completed and dedicated in 1934, Thomas Jefferson in 1936, Abraham Lincoln in 1937 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1939.
Borglum died the year before the monument was completed, but it is his design and vision that stands today as a testament to one man’s artistic tenacity and his belief that no project is too big to take on.
Buy the book for R90 at CNA, Exclusive Books, takealot.com or by emailing Tim Mostert at tim@timtv.biz
