Philip Martiny

Background

Philip Martiny was the son of Philip and Kathrine (Blacke) Martiny. He was born on May 19, 1858 in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, and as a boy often hid in the cellars during the Franco-Prussian War.

Education

Foreign sources state that Martiny was a pupil of Eugen Dock, who was born in Strasbourg in 1827, who studied at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and who became in 1860 the foremost decorative sculptor in his native town. American accounts state that as a boy Philip worked as a carver with his father, and that he studied in various French ateliers.

Career

Certain it is that he came to New York as a young man thoroughly well grounded in old-world technique and tradition. In the early eighties, Augustus Saint-Gaudens was superintending the wood-carving in the important scheme of decoration he had planned for the Vanderbilt house. "I had noticed, " he wrote in his Reminiscences "that one of my carvers reproduced models with an artistic felicity so markedly superior to any of the others that I asked him to come and help me in my studio. This was Philip Martiny, " who during his first period of a year or so in the Saint-Gaudens studio, worked on the figure of the "Puritan. " Saint-Gaudens often recalled Martiny's boundless skill and inventiveness, then displayed with a fervor which the master was no doubt obliged to curb, in order to keep the integrity of his own design. At this period Martiny came into contact with Saint-Gaudens' close friends, McKim, Mead, and White. The young Frenchman's instinct for the decorative aspect of sculptural form met appreciation from this famous firm, and indeed from other architects, with the result that when he started out for himself, he had plenty of work. For the Chicago world's fair of 1893, in which McKim, Mead, and White were actively interested, Martiny received a fifty-thousand-dollar contract to execute an ambitious scheme of sculptural decoration for McKim's Agricultural Building. The design was to include figures of eighty-three great angels, forty towering eagles, and sixteen large groups. This first large commission of Martiny's was typical of others to follow. It called for exuberant imagination, a consummate understanding of sculptural light and shadow, a power of quick decision, and an ability to make the best use of assistants. Deities, angels, men, women, infants, oxen, horses, goats, fruits, flowers all were stuff for his undaunted designs. In the roof decorations for McKim's building, with their "Groups" and "Seasons, " he triumphed as the foremost decorative sculptor of the day. His impassioned improvisations of putti and frutti, of trumpery trumpets and papery drapery supplied every demand of the sculptural pageantry.

He juggled with his plaster, apparently creating a figure by assembling parts once belonging to another. It would seem that in some such manner he put together the study for the central motive of his "Fountain of Abundance" for the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1901 a garlanded figure surrounded by dancing cherubs. The method was dubious, the result delightful. For the St. Louis world's fair of 1904 he made the group of "Apollo and the Muses, " crowning the main entrance to Festival Hall, and two massive quadrigae, "Progress of Art" and "Progress of Commerce, " flanking the dome of the New York State Building. Apparently no subject baffled his imagination or exceeded his capacity. Martiny's technique was suitable for world's fairs, but at times unpleasing traces of this facility appear in his more lasting productions perhaps in his bronze "Lampbearers" on the newel-posts of the famous double staircase in the entrance hall of the Library of Congress, but not in his idyllic high-relief marble carvings of the balustrade. Only a pedant could find fault with those twenty-six panels, in which babes astride garlands disport themselves at various genial trades, such as the "Hunter with a Rabbit, " and the "Vintager with Grapes. " Other works by Martiny in this building are cartouche and tablet figures for ceiling and dome. Adequate to their purpose, they display that "papery drapery" in which he was at times all too skilful, for monumental ends. To the same period, yet in different vein, belongs one of the most impressive productions of his career, the Soldiers and Sailors' Monument in Jersey City, New Jersey, 1899. A seated female figure, draped and helmeted, holding a sword in her left hand, an olive branch in her right, surmounts a high pedestal of beautiful design. The ensemble is monumental rather than decorative. Both monumental and decorative, as well as perfectly adapted to its architectural purpose, is Martiny's south pair of bronze doors, with limestone frieze and marble tympanum, for Saint Bartholomew's Church, New York City. The frieze of the "Road to Calvary" is fine, the marble tympanum less so. As a whole, his contribution to the St. Bartholomew façade is notable for actual richness of surface rather than for suggested depth of religious feeling. His closing years were clouded by illness; a stroke incapacitated him. He died on June 25, 1927 in New York, of paralysis.

Achievements

• Between 1903 and 1908, an enormous volume of architectural sculpture in granite, and of heroic size, was executed in the Martiny studio for the New York City Hall of Records. The list includes eight cornice statues of New York worthies, from the seventeenth century onward; sixteen symbolic cornice statues; two seated entrance figures, "Justice" and "Authority"; two entrance groups of three figures each, "New York in its Infancy, " and "New York in Revolutionary Times. " Of earlier date are his two groups for the New York Chamber of Commerce, with their central figures of John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, and his marble statue of Confucius for the appellate court (1899). He made sculpture for the residences of Senator Clark and Charles T. Yerkes, New York City; for the Carnegie Library, Washington, D. C. ; for the Courthouse at Elizabeth, New Jersey; for the Kunhardt Memorial, Moravian Cemetery, Staten Island; for a tympanum over the doors of the Shepherd memorial chapel, Scarboro-on-the-Hudson; for the Cullum Memorial at West Point. His statue of Vice-President Hobart, erected in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1902, is considered excellent. His McKinley monument at Springfield, Massachussets, with its familiar French motive of a draped female figure of Fame, reaching upward to adorn with a palm branch a portrait bust on a lofty pedestal, has dignity and beauty, yet on the whole is decorative rather than monumental. In 1919, for New York's celebration of the return of American troops from overseas, his vigorous staff group, "Our Allies, " had a prominent place on the Flatiron Building. His last public works of importance were two World-War memorials for New York City. The monument to the soldiers from Greenwich Village is on a high pedestal in Abingdon Square, and shows a single bronze figure of an American soldier defending the flag. The tribute to the soldiers from the Chelsea district is in Chelsea Park. Here a lofty, well-designed stele of granite is used as a background for a bronze figure in a resolute attitude. Both these memorials are simple, dignified, eloquent, though their monumentality is slightly impaired by Martiny's characteristic "papery" rendering of flag and uniform. In view of his amazing fecundity, his list of portrait busts is not long.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Northeast Pier of the Dewey Memorial Arch, New York, NY

Personality

Martiny was no solitary worker; from boyhood he had the habit of gregarious endeavor. He spent little time in soul searching, either of himself or others, and so has left behind none of those vivid records of contemporary personalities, such as Grafly's portraits of his artist friends, or Saint-Gaudens' bust of Sherman. Of the countless heads his nimble fingers shaped, all decorative, all somehow suited to his purpose of the moment, few or none awake in the beholder a new and poignant sense of human beauty or of human greatness. Yet both as to inner meaning and outward expression, he brought a new note into American sculpture. In his creations it is vain to seek for what he never set out to disclose, a feeling for the profounder issues of life. It would be equally wrong to call his contribution to our art a superficial one. On the contrary, his spontaneous grace of color and rhythm, supported by unlimited technical resources, indicated to American sculptors at least one way to avoid a Puritanic drabness in expression. His work might set a standard for the wise as well as a snare for the foolish. Martiny's temperament was jovial. In the words of one of his assistants, he earned largely, and spent everything twice once before he had it, and once after.

Quotes from others about the person

• "full of delicate inventiveness, and gifted with a rare feeling for grace, " an "ingenious and delightful master".
  
  "Martiny is 'clean bust' as usual, and if you can come down and make an estimate of what is due him, you will save him from the poorhouse and McK. , M. & W. from the lunatic asylum".

Connections

Martiny was twice married, first to Hermine Horning, a German, they had four children and afterward to a young French woman, Yvonne E. Flouret, they had eight children.

Father:

Philip Martiny

Mother:

Kathrine (Blacke) Martiny

Wife:

Hermine Horning

Wife:

Yvonne E. Flouret

References

• Allgemeines Lexikon Der Bildenden Kunstler Von Der Antike Bis Zur Gegenwart.