Give the Man Room

THE SCULPTOR WHO CARVED THE FACES OF AMERICA’S HEROIC DEAD ON GRANITE MOUNTAINS—AND THEY WERE SELDOM BIG ENOUGH.

First published in 1952, Robert John Casey co-wrote this fascinating biography with the wife of Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941), the American sculptor best known for his colossal sculpture of the faces of four U.S. presidents on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. The son of Danish immigrants, Gutzon Borglum studied art in San Francisco and for four years in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. His painting and his sculpture were admitted to the officially recognized Salon and he subsequently received important commissions and royal recognition whilst in England. 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, Borglum 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. He turned toward reviving the ancient Egyptian practice of carving gargantuan statues of political figures in natural formations of rock, and executed from a six-ton block of marble a colossal head of President Abraham Lincoln, which was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. This led to a commission in 1927 by the state of South Dakota to turn Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills, into another colossal monument, and that same year Borglum began sculpting the 60-foot-high heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt on the face of the mountain. The project was completed in 1941 and became a national memorial.

Physically only medium-sized, Borglum was a big man, colorful, worth knowing. The change to know him is here in the stimulating pages of Give the Man Room.