Public Monuments
The years following the close of the War Between the States saw a huge increase in the number of public monuments erected in the United States. "By far the most prevalent monument features a fully equipped Confederate soldier (the same prototype held true for Union monuments) in a realistic pose." This style of monument was popularized by sculptor Martin Milmore who created one of the first ones in 1868. Milmore's own monument, authored by Daniel Chester French, Death and the Sculptor remains one of America's "noble tributes."
As the century closed, the pace of monument-building quickened in the great cities of the East, especially those erected to memorialize the Civil War. Several outstanding sculptors emerged, most of them trained in the beaux-arts academies of Paris. Daniel Chester French stands out, as do Frederick William Macmonnies, Hans Schuler, and Lorado Taft. This tradition continued to the 1940s with Charles Keck, Alexander Stirling Calder and others and the use of figurative sculpture in monuments persists into the 21st Century. After the middle of the 20th Century sculpture used in public monuments was increasingly abstract.
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Civil War monument, by Martin Milmore in York, Pennsylvania, 1872
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The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, Boston Common, commemorates Shaw and the Afro-American 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, St. Gaudens
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U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, located in Arlington, Virginia, 1954, designed by Felix de Weldon
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A Marine at Vietnam Veterans Memorial on July 4, 2002, designed by Maya Lin
Read more about this topic: Sculpture Of The United States
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