Decades ago, students attacked the ‘Iron Horse’. Now ride again.

The most famous animal sculpture in the college town of Athens, Ga., is – unbelievably – not a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall wrought iron horse, a unique labyrinth of undulations and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in in 1954.

When a crane first lifted Pattison’s horse from the basement of the Fine Arts Building in the spring, it was unlike anything the campus had seen before, with sharp ribs, flat, cubist planes, and square waves. – remove the tail and tail. It is known to be a horse, but not a famous equestrian sculpture. And the arts had a lot on campus.

Last spring, when the sculpture – titled “Iron Horse” and then “Pegasus” by the artist – was removed from a concrete block in a rice field outside Athens, it was identified under the name of the Iron Horse – was removed from a concrete block in a rice field outside Athens for safekeeping, went missing 32 times and gave birth. decades-the deep scars of etching and graffiti, and the bullet in his neck. His hooves were rusting the color of Georgia clay.

Statues on college campuses have long been a flashpoint for issues and debates that run through society. But why the students attacked the iron horse may remain a mystery.

“There’s a lot of mystery and misinformation around it all,” said Donald Cope, a designer and metal fabricator who spent six months restoring the sculpture to its original form with a conservator, Amy Jones Abbe, who both live in Athens. “It has this lore, it has an aura.”

He carefully repaired the rust and restored the missing parts (all but one, for which he could not find photo support), imitating the artist’s rugged welding. Before that, the iron horse has not been seen in its full form since the day it was released 70 years ago.

Scholars today have a hard time distinguishing between a large modern iron sculpture in the south that preceded it.

“If I was teaching at the University of Georgia and wanted to divide my class into modern and traditional art, I could use this piece as a perfect pivot point,” said David Raskin, professor of in contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Pattison taught in the 1940s and ’50s.

For hours after it was first installed on the University of Georgia campus, the sculpture stood unbruised on a patch of grass between the men’s dormitories. But curious crowds began to gather, and at night hundreds of students descended on the horse, marking it with graffiti (“What is this thing?”), smearing manure under its tail, and, among other insults, tied two balloons. between the hind legs. An old tire was on fire underneath and the fire department was called to put out the fire, and the crowd.

“Basically, I see the reaction to modernism, which is a problem that they don’t understand, that a lot of Americans don’t understand,” said William U. Eiland, who has been the director of the Georgia Museum of Art since from 1992 to 1992. 2023 and pushed for the protection of the sculpture for many years. “They reacted to the change.”

It was a “heavy moment” on campus, added Eiland, who wrote a biography of Lamar Dodd, head of the art department during that time. It was the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the Brown v. A Board of Education that would remove schools, and campus dress codes and women’s curfews. Does the iron horse represent something confusing or unknown? Are the cubist lines in Picasso’s famous painting, “Guernica,” the same as the horse, as some suggest?

Maybe. But many of those involved in the incident later said in the University of Georgia alumni newspaper that they were motivated more by the conflict between Pattison and the community. university community, reflected in the campus newspaper, The Red & Black.

Prank or Jealousy?

Pattison came to the university as an artist in residence in 1953 with a grant from the General Education Board, which was dedicated to improving education throughout the United States and was supported by John D. Rockefeller. Sr. The artist, who died in 1999, achieved widespread success with twelve works exhibited publicly in the Chicago area and part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He was initially well-received in Athens, with a newspaper reporting that his popularity had expanded the exhibition of his work at the new Academy of Georgia Museum of Art. Students watched him on the campus lawn as he hand-carved his first commission — an 8-foot-tall Georgia marble rendition of a mother and child, which was installed near the Fine Arts Building in autumn. But a student reporter, Bill Shipp, writing in the Red & Black, called the four totems of polished curves and stark planes “extremely difficult.” A cartoon of the sculpture ran with his story, with the caption: “It’s a bird! it’s a plane! No, it’s….”

Then one night, after Pattison returned from the spring semester of 1954, the modern marble encountered a can of green paint.

In a letter to the editor, Pattison said, “The green color in my marble sculpture does not hurt me as much as in the University where there is a shadow of sadness.” and ignorance and intolerance.”

Two months later, the Iron Horse was sitting on the grass.

But for Don McMillian, who was a veterinary student at the university at the time, and who bought the manure in a Studebaker Commander convertible, it was just an end-of-the-year joke.

“It’s not a big, deep, dark problem with art or anything like that,” says McMillian, now 91 and a retired veterinarian who lives in Jonesboro, Ga. (Tis, he says, the season of panty raids on campuses across the country.)

Pattison himself was offended. “I was shocked, to say the least, to see the painting on it, and to see the manure and the garbage around the place, and the things hanging there,” the artist said in a 1981 documentary William VanDerKloot about the sculpture aired on PBS. “It was something that destroyed me.”

The morning after the attack, university officials removed the sculpture from sight, and hid it behind an off-campus cage where it hung for five years until a faculty member found it. a horticulturist, LC Curtis, a permit to take him to his farm in Greene County, 20 years old. miles south of Athens. He placed it near Georgia State Route 15 for motorists to see.

And there the Iron Horse sat for decades, transformed from a pariah into a kind of icon, a place for selfies, a landmark for visiting football fans, a symbol for community – displayed on city murals, brochures, student bucket lists. McMillian, a veterinarian, visited for the first time a few years ago since 1954 to take his picture, he said.

For years, the university and the Curtis family have argued over the fate of the Iron Horse and its location. But for now it looks like his future is in the rice fields.

The Curtis farm was sold to the university in 2013 and renamed the Iron Horse Plant Sciences Farm, but the family retained ownership of the sculpture and the 400 square meters surrounding it. Last January, the family donated the sculpture to the university, on the condition that the school restore it and return it to the farm, said Alice Hugel, LC’s granddaughter. Curtis, who died in 1980. His mother, Patty Curtis, recently. married Jack, son of LC Curtis, when the family acquired the sculpture.

The university did not disclose the amount of the restoration, except to say that it was earmarked for private funds. Eric Atkinson, the school’s dean of students, said, “This restoration is an important step in ensuring the Iron Horse is part of the UGA experience.”

In late November, the Iron Horse was returned to the cornfield in a shiny new black color, sitting on a Georgia granite plinth.

But many believe it should be returned to a larger campus, where the artist intended and where it could be better protected. One advocate is the artist’s son, Harry Pattison, a working artist living in Bellingham, Wash., who was 2 years old when his father completed the Iron Horse. He said he had talked to his father several times about the fate of the sculpture before he died.

“Abbott wants it back to where it was,” Pattison said. “He thought that one day the university would want it.”

On the field, for decades, the sculpture has been exposed to the elements – and the high jinks of the campus. It has been colored at least twice by opposing football fans (and blackened by a secret Greek society, the Order of the Greek Horsemen, which considers the horse a symbol). The underwear is designed as a hood that opens at the bottom. Riding on top of a horse became a custom, which made gasoline obsolete. The first one carved has spots on the skin.

“It’s like a celebrity price for a horse,” said Alice Hugel, who, along with her mother, argued that it should remain at the farm, where it is still accessible. .

Raskin, a professor of art history, noted, “There’s something really cool about this horse on campus, even though it was controversial, it managed to focus people’s attention on modern art. , even in art.

Now, its conservators Cope and Abbe hope that the sculpture can enter a third phase of life where it is appreciated as a work worthy of a museum and not as an attraction on the side of the road.

“I hope people moving forward will have a different kind of appreciation for it, even if it’s from a place of attachment,” said Abbe, who has worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On a recent breezy afternoon, the Iron Horse stood serenely atop the hill, seemingly untouched since it was rebuilt nearly two months ago.

Olen Anderson, a senior at the university and member of the Order of Greek Horsemen, said the organization and alumni supported the restoration and offered money for the work if needed. “We feel very emotional about it,” he said. However, part of the group’s annual ritual is to climb on top of a horse for the cover of The Fraternity Way magazine. What about the keeper of the earth’s desire to be praised from the earth? “I think we will honor that. Because above all, we want it to last.”