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| Carl Milles, The Hand of God, 1949–53. |
Most of Milles’s figures are travelling towards a goal, uncertain, perhaps unknown, but they belong there and not to that place on earth to which they are attached. The purpose is twofold: it is the world of art, liberated from the obligations of this earth, but finally also something else, something higher, a vita magna, a life idealised, inspired, sublime.
– Henrik Cornell, Carl Milles and the Milles Gardens
A very famous bearded little man was knock, knock, knocking on the door to the damp home-atelier of a twenty-one-year-old Swedish artist in Paris by the very end of the 1800s.
This courtyard greenhouse at 9 rue de la Grande-Chaumière (only a three-minute stroll from the south end of Jardin du Luxembourg) was so poor and miniscule that, as the artist described it fifty years later, there was only “one single place where I could stand upright but then I had to open a skylight in the roof. From there I could see all of Paris and that was not so bad after all. Then there were all the stars at night.” No other sculptor of the following century would move towards the pensive immensity of the Milky Way and deep dive with the towering sea gods and the sensual mermaids of the hidden depths as eloquently as Carl Milles (1875–1955).
These knocks that day caught him unawares in the glasshouse. The sturdy visitor looked at him with eyes ajar, then inquired: “Have I the honour of speaking to the sculptor M Milles? Good. I must explain that I was a member of the jury that recently refused your model for Dante’s Heaven and Hell. I contested the decision, for the piece has great merit, and I have come to congratulate its creator and offer him my assistance. My name is Rodin.”
“There are around seventy works of art, sculptures and previously unseen plaster models and bronzes that I have chosen to accentuate and include in this exhibition, which is not only in-depth but also introductive. The public may have encountered many Milles sculptures without associating them with Carl Milles. I wanted to show his thoughts and his many aesthetic expressions, which are very diverse. The total work of art that is the Milles Gardens and Milles as a person, it is this world that I aim to highlight,” says Evelina Berglund who has curated The Sculptor Carl Milles 150 Years in the exhibition room at the paradisal Millesgården on an island not far from Stockholm’s city centre.
“The structure of the exhibition is a chronological sequence, with different sections containing texts that describe each chapter,” explains the curator. “Milles is an interesting character. He had a very large network of contacts, and many of his friends have written about him, but there are also tall tales and legends surrounding him. Milles was a great and complex figure in many ways throughout his life so when I look at Milles, I focus a lot on what is actually said in his letters.”
What Berglund and her colleagues have created is an exhibition about this rather larger-than-life figure that works so splendidly for both the newcomers and for those who think they know their Milles very well – with Berglund’s engaging added touches of Carl Milles’s more generous and humble traits, and her insight into his longing for beauty and the quest for spiritual matters which in this dance of life mayhap would offer us wings.
“There was something out of the ordinary about his youth, something that charmed and fascinated,” argues Swedish art historian Henrik Cornell in his Milles biography of 1957. “Perhaps it could be partly explained by his open and receptive attitude, his great willingness to receive and see and understand all that was good and characteristic in everything and everyone. And this perceptiveness was equalled by a rare ability to discover things old and new, and to grasp their significance. He was always guided by this attitude towards life, a mixture of sensitiveness, awe and keen sense of humour. In fact, Carl Milles was an eager acceptor of life.”
Milles’s first experience of Rodin’s sculpture was at the General Art and Industrial Exposition in Stockholm, just before his incidental move to Paris in the fall of 1897. It was when he saw Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, presented for the first time at the Palais des Machines that same year, that Rodin became Milles’s “idolised master”. (In his late-1960s masterpiece series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark called it “the greatest piece of sculpture of the 19th century – perhaps, indeed, since Michelangelo”, and this was a man on television who knew what he was talking about.)
Auguste Rodin’s propensity for letting his sculpture “grow” out from where it stood on its base, and then allow it to solidify in a non finito state between realism and impressionism, was likewise the point of departure for the young sculptor’s tall piece of clay, Dante’s Heaven and Hell, where the humans are either swirling towards the light or sucked into the hellhole below. This was the one that was met with refusal at the first Salon at the not yet completed wonder of art nouveau, Grand Palais, in 1898. And just as Berglund remarks, “Here you can really feel Rodin.” The piece was indeed based on Rodin’s never ever finished Gates of Hell, with the 180 figures climbing upon each other for the most advantageous position in their self-imposed, abysmal rat race.
The curator reveals that Milles’s sculptured tour between Heaven and Hell was supposed to be an electric lamp with a lambent globe at the top. What is left of it, however – after he smashed it to pieces at the Grand Palais in sheer protest of not being accepted among the sanctioned banality of the Salon – is a patched-up, Frankenstein-y, pillar of angst that was graciously saved by his good friends who were deeply aware of Carl Milles’s budding talents.
Ever since he was a child, Milles was a dreamer. One would need to go very deep into that allusive rabbit hole to figure out why the aspiring artist assumed his father’s nickname, considering the military-minded “Mille” Andersson’s persistent efforts to deaden his son’s fancies. “He was a boy who did not want to sit still in school. His father wanted him to join the military, but he wasn’t equipped for that; he preferred to be out in the woods, wandering,” says Evelina Berglund. “Carl was incredibly skilled with his hands and picked up pieces of wood and carved them.”
When his father found out that his “idiot” son had been wandering the woods around the farm south of Uppsala for a whole year instead of going to school, Carl was beaten up so badly that he did not return to the family home for quite some time, which of course worsened the motherless child’s already poor health and alarming chest condition. Milles’s later schoolyears in Stockholm were more than often spent in the mile-long harbour area of the Old Town and Södermalm – his new fantasy world where he ran errands for the salty seafarers, dreamt of distant shores and of leading the life of an artist. It was here that Milles’s first water-themed sculpture – the grinning granite blob The Sea God (and his loving mermaid) from 1913 – was placed in 1930.
His father took him out of school and arranged an apprenticeship in the shop of a master woodworker who became a worthy father figure to Milles. The young Milles continued without difficulty as a student at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design where he received all sorts of awards and good scholarship money. But his old man was still not satisfied and wrote a letter to an army fellow who had started a “Swedish Institute for Physical Training” in Santiago de Chile: “Papa complained to him about me. He wrote back and said, ‘Send me the boy, a shall try to make a man out of him.’ He was to pay my fare from Marseille,” Milles told Swedish Radio in 1952. “But for me it was not Santiago I went to and not even Marseille. It was Paris.”
If we are to believe Milles by every word, he waited two full years before he, one Saturday, felt brave enough to visit Rodin’s residence at 77 rue de Varenne. “He was extremely friendly. First, he took me to a restaurant and then I had to follow him out to Meudon where he lived on a hill with Clamart opposite. In the distant lay Paris – spring, summer and autumn in a wonderful haze. One could hear the noise of the city and sometimes when it was calm one heard music from Paris – it was a delightful and lovely atmosphere.” Milles was asked to stay the night in an open guest house with many surprises. During the following years he worked at Meudon from time to time, but it was also much necessary for Milles to emancipate himself from Rodin’s overwhelming influence.
“This has always appealed to me,” Milles said, “in France there is an understanding between companions and a readiness to help that is wonderful. It is a practice as far as art is concerned.” He spent his days soaking up the works of his fellow sculptors in Paris, carved wood details at a conveyor belt station in a carpentry factory at the Bastille while his own art slowly gained strength. Milles was awarded at the Exposition Universelle in 1900 and received a major assignment from Sweden two years later when there was not much left of Rodin in him. It was still a decade away till the astonishing imagination, originality and craftsmanship, all those qualities that make his works so evident and special, emerged with unrestricted autonomy.
Milles’s lifelong interest in the phenomena of the skies led him to astronomer Camille Flammarion’s popular lectures in Paris on galactic affairs. “He has written an infinite number of books, though he made many enemies in the world of science. He did not write with scientific exactness but mixed in a lot of astronomical romanticism, which opened people’s eyes and minds to a new world,” Milles said. “To this day I always read this sort of things before going to bed.”
“Milles had an inborn sense of psychology both of people and animals,” argues biographer Cornell. “This is far more than representation of a physical form.” When the painter Maillol turned to sculpture at the beginning of the new century, he successfully transformed his style into his new medium with continuous, undetailed forms that manifested the female body with sleek, effective simplicity. This novel approach to sculpture was instrumental when Milles was still finding his way to render inner and outer life in his works and provide them with purer shapes, less detail, more essence.
In Carl Milles: An Interpretation of His Work (1940), Meyric Rogers describes Milles’s journey from being a promising animalier to a master jazz musician in plastic form: “The years before and after his departure from Paris in 1904 saw the immediate results of this intense study in a series of notable animal groups which added much to his growing reputation; but probably the most enduring and significant outcome of his labour of love was the sculptor’s development of a thorough grasp of underlying principles of organic construction and an ability to vitalise natural form even when reduced to its mere visual essentials.”
“The immediate result of hard-won hours spent in the Jardin des Plantes was a series of animals produced mainly between 1903 and 1909, some in bronze but many in marble and granite. While these groups are all interesting and vital studies of animal life, they are perhaps more important as indicating the perfect knowledge which the sculptor was gaining of the fundamental laws governing the growth of organic form. From this he developed an ability to recombine and even recreate the forms of nature with convincing logic even though no actual models might exist. Such an understanding was shown immediately in the group of plesiosaurs dating from 1906, a work never taken beyond the stage of the plaster model; but its more lasting effects are evident throughout his later work in the convincing structural reality of his mythical water creatures that seem to be evolved so naturally from the necessities of their aquatic existence.”
Milles got his magic key to the city’s botanical garden and zoo so that he could watch the large animals wake up to a new day, and as he observed their movements, he sketched them with clay in his hands. He was also fascinated by the thought of reconstituting prehistoric animals like the giant sea-dwelling swan lizards with their periscopic necks and heads that Meyric Rogers is talking about. That plaster model with the four lizards is a joy to behold in the exhibition at Millesgården and Berglund says that the idea was that the work would be situated by Lake Michigan and serve as a lighthouse.
In 1904, as mentioned, Milles was done with Paris and moved around in Europe for a couple of years with Munich as his anchor and the Austrian artist Olga as his bride – Olga who forever would be his loving wife, nurse and adherent. When they finally arrived in Stockholm, Milles had a hard time coping with the Swedes and their strange yet conventional ways. Then came the pressure, the relentless demands, the stress from his considerable workload. The country’s unappealing climate most of the year did not help and when Milles developed an acute gastrointestinal disorder, he was forced to discontinue all work for months and the spouses travelled to Rome.
The return to Stockholm was brief since further distress befell Milles after he had been inhaling stone dust. He also suffered from a chip of marble that was embedded in his lung tissue, which led to another life-threatening situation where the Austrian Alps and Lake Garda offered a cure. In 1906, Carl and Olga Milles acquired an unattainable piece of rock on the western part of the Lidingö Island with a panoramic view of Stockholm across the bay. In those days the island was reached by a floating bridge, but when the American suffragette Frances Maule Bjorkman visited Millesgården in 1918 there was a ferry that stopped at a pier where an elevator took her up to the top of the cliff.
In the August issue of The Touchstone that year, Bjorkman wrote that the Milles Gardens “had evolved gradually out of his intense desire to have a home that was in itself a form of art expression; a workshop that had in addition to all the necessary mechanical conditions in perfection a certain other quality, only to be described as spiritual, which would be a perpetual stimulus to the imaginative faculty; and an exhibition place where he could show his works in just the surroundings in which he wanted them to be.”
Milles told the infatuated writer that once he had conceived a new piece of sculpture, he couldn’t “bear to let it go from me unless I have some assurance that it will be placed under the proper conditions”. For several decades Milles was creating the ideal home for his works, his principles and longings, as the site burgeoned in magnitude and beauty until the whole place became a celestial work of art, a gift from the Golden Age.
“In this domain of beautiful buildings, picturesque walls broken down by niches, pergolas and tiled walks, paved courts, ponds, terraces and flagged steps, the muse of sculpture reins,” wrote the British sculpture critic Kineton Parkes in the June issue of Architectural Review in 1928. “It is a plastic conception of the finest kind realised with a singular integrity, without ostentation and without error of proposition, for composure is the necessity of art and life to the man who has made this domain wherein to dwell and work.”
Millesgården – which has been a public museum since as early as 1936 – had something of a false start in 1906, however, with the first building that Milles’s architect half-brother designed in a mediocre fashion after Germanic romantic values. “They had something in common about compositions, about bringing architecture into the Milles Gardens in a natural way. Carl Milles was involved since 1911. He loved Italy all his life and when he came home after being in Pompeii in the 20s, he changed this house to the very distinct Pompeian style. The brothers sent letters to each other all the time, and Evert sometimes got irritated because he had other jobs to attend to. But Milles was so strong in his vision,” tells Evelina Berglund before we go up the stairs to the tower where Milles used to watch the stars.
Two people spend their last day on Earth at Millesgården in a 1970 sci-fi novel by Poul Anderson, Tau Zero: “They were the last to go as Millesgården was closed. Most of that afternoon they had wandered among the sculptures, he awed and delighted by his first experience of them, she bidding an unspoken farewell to what had been more a part of her life than she had understood until now. They were lucky in the weather, when summer was waning. This day on Earth had been sunlight, breezes that made leaf shadow dance on the villa walls, a clear sound of fountains.”
“But when the sun went down, the garden seemed abruptly to come still more alive. It was as if the dolphins were tumbling through their waters, Pegasus storming skyward, Folke Filbyter peering after his lost grandson while his horse stumbled in the ford, Orpheus listening, the young sisters embracing in their resurrection – all unheard, because this was a single instant perceived, but the time in which these figures actually moved was no less real than the time which carried men.”
The woman in this story, Ingrid Lindgren, is the Swedish First Officer of the interstellar vessel Leonora Christine which will lose its figurative wings on its journey to the star Beta Virginis, 37.5 light-years away.
“Longing, dreams and hopes dash ahead, showing the way for the aspiration of man,” writes Cornell. In his beautiful studio at Millesgården, Carl Milles usually had twenty men working for him, one was wholly occupied with mending the tools. By 1917, Milles had developed so much as a sculptor that he compelled himself to get rid of most of the plaster models that he had in his studio in a smash purge, and the pieces were buried under what was to become the lower terrace. “At this time, I found almost all I had done was like the work of another man so I decided to destroy whatever I could and start again.”
That year the revived Milles began his work on Sunglitter, which would become one of the pieces that he treasured the most. Sunglitter is a rather small but very joyous bronze sculpture of a naiad on a dolphin at full throttle, one hand on the dorsal fin and the other on her flying hair, while the water is gushing from the blowhole(s) of the briny mammal. The fountain brings to mind a story called A Grave for a Dolphin. Albert Denti wrote it in the 1950s after hearing the Ethiopian folktale about a young Italian solder who becomes enamoured with an aquatic Somalian girl who had barely made it out alive from the Muslim slave trade and who can swim, like dolphins can swim. When Shambowa suddenly dies from high fever, her dolphin friend perishes too and the locals arrange to have them buried side by side.
The last years of the 1910s and the first years of the 20s was a period in which Milles suspended much of his physical productivity, and in the middle of all this agreed to a professorship at the Royal Academy in Stockholm. Though he detested the academic system and its principles and procedures, Milles made regular appearances at the Academy during the most part of the 1920s. There were at times pauses due to his recurring health issues, and in Montreux 1927 he was treated in the very bed that Rodin’s old secretary Rainer Maria Rilke had taken his last breath.
Two things are important to mention in regards to Milles’s seemingly boundless imaginative force from the mid-20s and onwards: his love for music and the new kinds of rhythms presented by the leading avant-garde dance companies Ballets Russes and, a bit later, Ballets Suédois that both mixed movement with art. The other thing was a concurring note that Milles had made in one of Eugène Delacroix’s published diaries: “a so-called fault is often that which sustains a work of art”. Milles was of the opinion that “the more correct a work of art is the duller it is and the less it offers the viewer. When I have seen things that are unfinished, I have always been delighted because the incomplete work is often that which enhances the work of art.”
“The masses become simpler, yet at the same time sculpturally richer and more unified, and imbued with a vitality which increases with each successive work,” observes Meyric Rogers. “In this period his style came to what might be called full symphonic maturity, with compositions built of many separate units which were not only highly organised designs in themselves but successfully subordinated parts of a larger whole. The charmingly polished sequences of the preceding period were largely replaced by more rugged rhythms of mass which give to the work of the 1920s its striking originality.”
To cite a few of these rugged beauties it would be necessary to mention the Europa Fountain (1926) in the Swedish city Halmstad, which was Milles’s first fountain of significant size. The centrepiece Europa and the Bull – attended by four tritons – with Zeus as the bull, kneeling for the fair Europa to climb onto his back, but instead of a most likable violation of the goddess she takes command and reaches out her hand to touch his tongue. (The sexuality of this sculpture went over the heads of the prudes who were often inconvenient with the nudity in Milles’s works.)
The Poseidon Fountain materialised in 1927 at the square at the top of the Avenue in Gothenburg, and it is one of the greatest fountains of the 20th century. The soaring Poseidon, half human, half sea god, is holding a big fish in one hand and a big clam in the other and below him, in and around the splashing pond, Milles has trawled the exotic creatures of the deep and the high seas of his imagination to display a wonderful array of merriments from the piscatorial domain and the land of legend.
Atop of the elegant Diana Fountain (1928) that is crowning the Matchstick Palace’s yard at Västra Trädgårdsgatan 15 in Stockholm, the Roman goddess of the woodland is spinning around with her (invisible) spear, stirring up the birds to a fresh day. Between her and the white marble basin with the faun, the wild boar and the hind sprout four stems that paralleled the vegetal art nouveau that Karl Blossfeldt would make known with his classic plates in Urformen der Kunst the same year.
Henry Vollam Morton describes the joys of gushing sculptures so lucidly in his book The Fountains of Rome (1966): “The fountain and the firework have the odd distinction of displaying elements of devastating possibilities in a mood of playful benevolence. Water, the giver of life, and also the taker of life in storm and tempest, achieves in the fountain an appearance of obedience to the will of man […] The fountain has no enemies, even in cold countries: it is a device or invention which has given nothing but pleasure in the course of a long history. It has the ability to minister equally to joy and melancholy, to appeal to eye and to ear, to stand at a street corner ready to fill the water pots, or in a garden to assist the meditations of poet and philosopher.”
As it was, Milles’s fountains did have their enemies in Sweden. Many disliked the buoyant fact that fountains are boisterous and exhilarating, and that they splatter. Another thing that upset the Swedish mindset was that these sculptures did not look like his old works, and the disagreement and misconception of his real endeavours hurt him to the core. In 1925, Milles had been bestowed a gold medal at L’exposition des arts décoratifs in Paris (where art déco was officially introduced). In 1927, Tate in London introduced Milles as the institution’s first foreign artist, and a year later he was on show in two German cities.
In 20th-Century Sculptors, which was published in 1930, Stanley Casson argued that “There is no more interesting sculptor today than Carl Milles. He can be considered more than any other as the sculptor par excellence of the 20th century […] He shows how an artist can be free and individual without forgetting the masterpieces of past ages.”
“And somewhere along the line, I would guess that he started thinking about where he wanted to position himself in the world,” implies Evelina Berglund. “He was courted in New York by newspaper magnate George Booth, who had English roots [Cranbrook] but whose businesses were based in Detroit. He founded the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a multidisciplinary art school with roots in India, based on Rabindranath Tagore's ideas about art institutions, but with all disciplines gathered in one place. It was a bit like an American Bauhaus in its own way. This place is a mini-English campus with an English church and small cottages, a girls’ school and a boys’ school.”
It was thanks to Finnish-born architect Eliel Saarinen’s attempts to persuade George Booth to have Milles heading the Sculpture Department at the not yet realised Cranbrook that Milles, in New York in 1928, was entreated to relocate to Bloomfield Hills on the northwestern outskirts of Detroit. This was followed by years of correspondence between Milles and Booth: “We are looking forward to your coming to Cranbrook this fall, and are doing everything possible to complete the house and studio by that time. I notice what you say about people writing you about teaching at Cranbrook. Of course, you know that we understand that you did not undertake to be a ‘teacher’ but would act as a critic and be helpful in any other way you could. After all, I rather think this is the very best way of teaching.”
When Carl and Olga Milles arrived at the experimental school by the end of 1931, they were pleased to see that their house and Milles’s first studio were neighbouring Saarinen’s. Milles used to visit the older sculptor students and advise them in their work, and everyone at Cranbrook was welcome to his home to have a look at the Milles collection of antique sculptures, which he spoke about with a flashlight in hand, and to be entertained by his many stories. He and the students could talk about everything except political leanings as Milles never wanted to have anything to do with politics.
“For two decades after this initial appointment, Carl Milles was a major luminary and guiding force at the Cranbrook Academy of Art,” clarifies Joan Marter in Design in America: The Cranbrook Vision 1925–1950. “His bronzes enhanced the grounds of the educational community, and his large studio was constantly filled with major sculpture commissions. Thus his presence and activity at Cranbrook infused his students with a seriousness of purpose for their own works.”
Milles and his wife spent these decades with each year divided into nine months at Cranbrook and three months at Millesgården and in Rome. Almost immediately after the couple’s arrival, a bigger studio was constructed to accomodate the monumental Orpheus for the blue-painted and neoclassical Stockholm Concert Hall in Stockholm that had been inaugurated in 1926 at the Hötorget Square. The first work that Milles completed in his new country, however, was the curious Jonah and the Whale (1932) with the Jewish prophet in a state of levitation as the whale is spewing him up in the air with the aid of water jets from the great congregation of surfacing fish. Milles said that he wanted to make something to amuse the children, hence the bewildered look on the otherwise zen-like Jonah’s face.
Orpheus – the heartbroken god, yearning for his beloved Eurydice forever lost to the netherworld, and yet with his tremendous capacity to pull us up from our ignoble concerns – might be the best thing that Milles ever did, though this piece is strangely not present at the Milles Gardens (other than the chest-and-upwards plaster in the old studio) since the only cast of it is the one at the Haymarket Square in Stockholm. When the lyrical piece was finally installed in 1936, Milles had supplemented his Orpheus with eight human figures that rise above Cerberus, Hades’s three-headed mongrel, and who revolve around the lyre-playing divinity in a fervent state of sacredness.
“The Orpheus Fountain at Cranbrook is composed of casts of these male and female figures surrounded by a basin of water about twenty-five feet [7.6 metres] in diameter, and in a circular composition that lacks the central, towering Orpheus. Nevertheless, each of these attenuated, somewhat androgynous forms reveals his or her response to Orpheus’s celestial music,” explains Joan Marter. “The absence of Orpheus here only seems to add to the haunting effect of this ensemble of figures.”
In the spring of 1933, Milles contacted George Booth: “I am anxious to have your decision regarding my collection before sailing [to Stockholm] since all my future plans depend on this transaction. May I suggest that you discuss this matter with the trustees, leaving details to be settled upon my return. With my collection at Cranbrook, I should feel more at home here and able to continue my work with more satisfaction and security and I would feel that from now on Cranbrook would be my centre of activities.” From the next year and onwards, Milles’s bronzes started to fill up the vast grounds of Cranbrook, following the Foundation’s commission of sixty of his works. As one would expect, Cranbrook has the second largest collection of Milles sculptures in the world.
Before his transfer to North America, Milles participated in a group exhibition of European three-dimensional art at the Metropolitan in New York. His first year in the country saw his first solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum, an exhibition that moved on to Detroit, Cleveland and Brooklyn, and was met everywhere with great accolade. (There are works by Milles, often more than one, in twenty-eight places across the US, though most of them are concentrated to the east.) The Saint Louisans launched a campaign in the early 1930s to have an original outdoor piece made by Milles for their city – after the exhibition period in the city, the museum had purchased his horseman sculpture of the mythological Swedish figure Folke Filbyter from 1927 – and the sculptor was to work on his great fountain The Marriage of the Waters during the better part of the decade.
Due to moral panic about “the Milles nudes for Aloe Plaza”, Milles was urged to modify the title before the sixty-one-metre-long fountain with its two main large figures, embodying the unifying of the nation’s two largest rivers north of Saint Louis, and the seventeen other water spirits was fully ready to bring new pleasures to the American public.
“Milles prepared models of sportive tritons, mermaids, and leaping fish, led by a male Mississippi figure and a female Missouri advancing towards each other, in celebration of the confluence of the two great rivers,” explains George McCue in Sculpture City, St Louis: Public Sculpture in the “Gateway to the West”. “A one-word revision of the title calmed the controversy, and it was in the just-good-friends spirit of The Meeting of the Waters that the figures were unveiled in [May] 1940. In general reference it is simply the Milles Fountain.”
This was one of the last fountains where Milles – who was granted US citizenship by the government in 1945 in conjunction with a permanent studio at the American Academy in Trastevere in Rome – employed the mythology of liquid creatures before he also in his sculpturing began to look heavenward, bonding human visions with chants for an unknown god. The stargazing The Astronomer with his Roman hair and snoot, holding a divider in his right hand and a raised dodecahedron (a polyhedron with twelve faces) in the other, is most likely a self-portrait of sorts.
The Astronomer first appeared at the “World of Tomorrow”-themed 1939–1940 New York’s World Fair as a plaster model, standing near the colossal Perisphere. This white orb was a loud indication of where the world was at, and the mentality of the time: cloud formations were projected on its surface in the evenings as a skin-deep thrill, whereas industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss’s huge and Orwellian “Democracity” inside was a diorama of a tomorrow city, a totalitarian fantasy as dismal as Bowie’s “Future Legend”, and it was the most popular attraction at the fair.
“We have tried to look at what is interesting to us today, because just as Millesgården is a legacy that we supervise, we must constantly look ahead in order to make it interesting,” aired its new director Sara Källström during the press preview of The Sculptor Carl Milles 150 Years. To show how up to date the Milles Gardens is today, someone made a decision to crack that whip and give the past a slip.
With the exhibition comes a half-hour long video summary of a would-be roundtable discussion – which in reality is a sandbox tribunal conducted by a smug group of adults who wear the same stupid woke suit and express themselves through formulaic rants. These indoctrinated leftards are so clueless about their own and very real darkness that they actually think that they are within their rights to reduce Carl Milles to an outright “Nazi”.
“Our historical memory is under sustained assault by a significant swathe of our cultural elites. While many involved in this culture war appear to be focused on controlling the way we speak and think in the here and now, their main mission is to render toxic the legacy of Western civilisation. This ceaseless attack on our history threatens to distort society’s memory of the past and create a state of historical amnesia,” argues Frank Furedi in his piece in the online magazine Spiked on September 6, 2024. “This amounts to a self-flattering presentism. It diminishes society’s sense of historical consciousness and inevitably leads to a failure to grasp different historical moments in their specific contexts. The integrity of the cultural achievements of the past is increasingly treated with indifference.”
In the country where cowardice rules and far too many people have no essence other than their discourtesy, conformity and complacency, it comes as no surprise that a seated group of overprivileged Swedes, who would say whatever it takes to make them look superior, will present the usual stale air of fallacies, cavalier attitudes and unsound reasoning.
“The angels are in sorrow about the darkness on earth. They say that hardly anywhere do they see light, and that man seize upon fallacies, confirm them, and by this means multiply fallacies upon fallacies,” lamented Swedenborg in The Divine Love and Wisdom (1763), the Swedish mystic who Milles depicted early on in his own personal way in the mid-1920s as a granite effigy with the hands pressed together in a prayer, yet all the same embroiled in the gravitational force of gloom so severe that it crimps his forehead and bows him to the ground.
“[Carl Milles’s] final phase is deep pathos describing man’s position on earth and in infinite space,” implies Henrik Cornell. “This other world, which during the 1940s and 50s more and more stands out as the principal background of Milles’s work, is a land of pantheistic brotherhood filled with Christian feeling. It evades, however, the element of the Christian legends and expresses itself instead in a symbolism of humanistic conceptions.”
Milles’s friends used to say that he was “angel-haunted”. In Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), the bored and earthbound angel Daniel succumbs to the beauty of Solveig Dommartin’s desolate trapezist Marion (and who wouldn’t?) and this love for her brings forth a desire for a “now” rather than a “forever”, an urge to say “ah” and “oh” instead of “amen”: “No,” Daniel reasons in the film, “I don’t want to beget a child or plant a tree, but it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat, like Philip Marlowe, to have a fever and blackened fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind.”
Milles’s terrestrial angels wear skates, or a wrist watch (while being bothered by a mosquito bite); they blow a flute from the wrong end just for the fun of it, or are immersed in serious book-reading, resting on a comfy cloud pillow. Derek Jarman used these kinds of anachronisms and cheerful misplacements in his feature film about the greatest painter of the late 1500s and early 1600s, Caravaggio (1986), in which contemporary sounds and gadgets turn up as items perfectly merged with the early Roman Baroque.
“In Milles’s work the urge to live is unlimited.” That is a very beautiful and correct statement by his biographer Cornell and is just as valid for the final pieces that Milles completed during the first half of the 1950s. “The largest work is the Fountain of Faith, which shows the meeting after death of the people who he knew,” says Berglund. “It came at the end of his life, in 1952, but was a work in progress since 1932 – typical of Milles to change and let it grow and grow.” The Fountain of Faith, in Falls Church in Virginia, is something of Milles’s tour de force and consists of thirty-seven figures who he had encountered in his life somehow. The one part of this fountain that can be enjoyed at the Milles Gardens is The Vagabond, a very friendly and erudite recluse who lived in a cave in Auvergne in the southeast of France and who Milles visited several times because he appreciated him so much.
In Rodin’s marble The Hand of God (ca 1907), man is like a sprout resting in this palm as a modest hope of what we can be. In Milles’s high-pillar piece that goes by the same name and was executed in Rome between 1949 and 1953, the man (though he is tiny built) is quite as large as the hand – and Milles’s scapegrace is partly humbled by the big skies, partly directing his hands as to swagger, “Come on, come on!”
When American writer Hudson Strode visited Milles on his Edenic Lidingö grounds for a book called Sweden, Model for a World (1949), the sculptor told him about a little silver pewter fountain he had in progress for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston: “It will be very beautiful, I think. It represents the Tree of Paradise [1950] when the angels deliver us in the crown of the tree, and we are very astonished as we look around. And this you have never seen before: the water will just drop down from the tree – just dropping water, which is so beautiful to listen to. The Arabians used this idea for their small marble fountains, where each drop gives out a different sound.”
As the five inspired artist types in the Aganippe Fountain – and the naiad Aganippe herself, chilling like a goddess by the poolside – were embodied at the foundry, Carl Milles was a dying man at the age of eighty. The fountain was an indoors installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946 but was moved to Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina in 1982. There is a slimmed-down version of the fountain at a terraced section of Millesgården called “Little Austria” which Milles created in an attempt to alleviate his wife’s incurable homesickness.
Seven years after Carl Milles had taken his final steps into the big skies, Charles Laughton recited a letter written by Milles on The Dinah Shore Show. The British-American actor presented it as “one of the finest pieces of literature that has ever been written about faith and prayer”. It is in fact not, but Laughton’s rendering of it sounds as fantastic as The Song of the Water Sprite – Milles’s last piece that as a clay model accidentally disintegrated into nothing when it fell on the floor of his studio at the American Academy in Rome and only exists as a sketch on paper: a lyre-playing sprite on a fish, harnessing the elements in the most particular way, flowing through the water as a bearer of something precious.
“Last night, in the silence which pervaded the darkness, I stood alone and heard the voice of the singer of eternal melodies,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore in Sadhana (1913). “When I went to sleep I closed my eyes with this last thought on my mind, that even when I remain unconscious in slumber the dance of life will still go on in the hushed arena of my sleeping body, keeping step with the stars. The heart will throb, the blood will leap in the veins, and the millions of living atoms in my body will vibrate in tune with the note of the harp string that thrills at the touch of the master.”
Orpheus enchants us with the eternal melodies of his stringless lyre. For Milles knew that as long as the heart will throb and the blood will leap, different wings will grow in place of the old ones.
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| Carl Milles in the largest of his studios at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, as he is putting the finishing touches on the eight metres high centrepiece figure for the Orpheus Fountain in 1934. Photo: Richard Askew/Cranbrook Archives. | |
The Sculptor Carl Milles 150 Years at Millesgården in Stockholm through September 28, 2025.
