Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 19, 2024: Gutzon Borglum, an American sculptor (#2054)

John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (1867 –1941) was an American sculptor best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. He is also associated with various other public works of art across the U.S., including Stone Mountain in Georgia, statues of Union General Philip Sheridan in Washington D.C. and in Chicago, as well as a bust of Abraham Lincoln exhibited in the White House by Theodore Roosevelt and now held in the United States Capitol crypt in Washington, D.C.

Born into a Mormon family that practiced plural marriage, Gutzon Borglum began his career as an engraver for an Omaha newspaper. He later moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a printmaker and fresco painter. After studying in Paris, Borglum moved to New York City to launch his career as a sculptor. Over the next forty years he created the monumental head of Lincoln in the Capitol Rotunda, General Sheridan on horseback in Washington’s Sheridan Circle, and other portraits of artists, politicians, and military men. Throughout his career he stirred up controversy because of the high standards he set for himself and for American art. On a trip to Washington two years before his death, he was asked whether American art was on an “upswing” and he replied, “it is bound to be . . . it has hit rock bottom.”

In 1901 Borglum established himself in New York City, where he sculpted a bronze group called The Mares of Diomedes, the first piece of American sculpture bought for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Versatile and prolific, he sculpted many portrait busts of American leaders, as well as of figures such as the Twelve Apostles, which he created for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York. But he soon turned toward what his wife, Elizabeth Janes Putnam, a scholar in cuneiform and other Middle Eastern scripts, described as “the emotional value of volume.” Reviving the ancient Egyptian practice of carving gargantuan statues of political figures in natural formations of rock, he executed from a six-ton block of marble a colossal head of President Abraham Lincoln that was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. This inspired a group of Southern women to commission a similar head of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Borglum was moved to begin instead a titanic sculptural procession of Lee and his staff and soldiers marching across the face of Stone Mountain in Decatur, Georgia. He began cutting away rock in 1916 and was able to unveil the head of Lee in 1924, but disputes with his patrons led Borglum shortly thereafter to abandon the enormous work, which was completed by others.

In 1927 Borglum was commissioned by the state of South Dakota to turn Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills, into another colossal monument. That year he began sculpting the 60-foot-high heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt on the face of the mountain, and in 1929 the United States government began financing the project, which would become a national memorial. Borglum brought all his engineering prowess to bear on this project, and he invented new methods that took advantage of the capacity of dynamite and pneumatic hammers to carve large quantities of stone quickly. Washington’s head was unveiled in 1930, Jefferson’s in 1936, Lincoln’s in 1937, and Roosevelt’s in 1939. The work was completed in 1941, the year of Borglum’s death, although the last details were completed by his son, Lincoln Borglum.

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