Page:Woman in Art.djvu/271

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WOMAN IN ART

its title, and represents a man and a woman embracing, a most delicately modeled nude with figures half life size. Another of her works idealizes the invisible power "Electricity," a colossal, winged, male figure in bronze wresting electricity from the elements with one upraised hand, while the other holds a live cable loosely coiled about his nude body. She won the commission in anonymous invitatory competition in 1916. This unique and altogether striking symbol surmounts the American Telephone and Telegraph Building in New York.

The Illinois Centennial Monument is a lofty fluted column rising from a drum-shaped base twelve feet in diameter, which supports thirteen appropriate figures in high relief, more than life size; upon its doric capital rests the American Eagle done in marble. To the left of the base stand historic figures of Indians, Pere Marquette, La Salle and Clark, and to the right are symbolized Agriculture, Industry, Transportation, Education and the Fine Arts. Miss Longman's work in 1918 includes a young girl called "The Future," one hand reaching out dreamily toward a dreamed-of future. The Naugatuck War Memorial in Tennessee marble was worked out the same year. In 1922 the Theodore Chickering Williams Memorial, Carrara marble, was accomplished for All Souls Church, New York City. A more than life-size portrait of the man, seated, is in high relief, and he holds the quill pen over the manuscript; the background is in low relief, and indicates beautifully the female figure of Inspiration, with wings outspread, holding a Roman lamp as she inclines gracefully toward the earnest thinker, whose upturned face expresses inspiration. Although Miss Longman's work is with the hard material of marble, she not only achieves grace of form and line, not only texture of metal, feather, or fur, but in a marvelous degree the impress and expression of spirit, of emotion. From the very shape and form of that memorial tablet, carved as an intaglio, comes the low relief of Inspiration bringing forth the high relief of thought in the brow and eye to action with hand and pen.

The setting, the environment of even the finest works of plastic art may heighten or mar their beauty, if not in harmony; but the architect, Henry Bacon, has enhanced the idea of the artist by his appreciation of the spirit and dignity of her subjects.

Miss Longman has accomplished another work of exceeding impressiveness. It is the Storey Memorial: a seated figure in high relief is volumi-

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