When a version of Hiram Powers’ neoclassical statue, the Greek Slave, went on display at New York’s American Academy of Design at the end of August 1847, the reviews were rapturous. Powers, who had grown up in Vermont and Ohio, but was now living in Florence, was credited with having created a "marvelous image of grace and purity," having shaped a hunk of marble into a woman and, like Pygmalion, "given to her a soul."
The life-sized nude—shocking in itself for American audiences of the time—was said by Powers to depict a woman taken into bondage during the Greek war of independence against the Ottoman Turks, fought during the 1820s. More recent commentators have noticed that, viewed in the scope of Powers’ career, the artist’s interest seems to have been the female body. The narratives he employed, as with the Greek Slave, could be interpreted by the cynical as handy excuses.
Perhaps in part as a consequence of the permission Powers gave his countrymen to look at such a nude, the Greek Slave went on to become one of the most famous American works of art of its time, if not the most famous. But there was more to it. Even viewing the somewhat underwhelming original plaster cast currently the focus of a special exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, one can discern the reasons for Powers’ success.
The statue is an almost perfect exercise in what Edmund Burke described as the "beautiful"—feminine, smooth, inspiring an instinct of protectiveness—as opposed to the rougher, grander "sublime." The woman is attractive, and the first impression of her nudity rather arresting, until knowledge of the context, accentuated in the 1840s by shackling of the statue’s arms with actual chains, arouses one’s sense of justice.
The widespread critical acclaim soon encountered a complication. This was, after all, a statue of a slave… touring America… in the 1840s. While many critics ignored the irony, abolitionist writers—still considered a radical fringe—seized on the Greek Slave as an opportunity to press their case. Shortly after the unveiling in New York, an abolitionist newspaper in Washington, the National Era, published the following:
But, alas! In the midst of the pleasing emotions excited by this admirable work of art, there came sad thoughts of the wondrous hardness of that nature which can weep at sight of an insensate piece of marble … and yet listens unmoved to the awful story of the American slave! … Waste not your sympathies on the senseless marble, but reserve some tears for the helpless humanity which lies quivering beneath the lash of American freemen.
As the statue continued to tour eastern cities, other abolitionist writers made similar points, in some cases—as here, in a letter to Frederick Douglass’ paper—laying on the sarcasm pretty thickly:
We pity and love the poor outraged GREEK slave-girl; and while we pity and love her all the more for her chains, Oh! How heart and brain burn with hatred of the cruel TURK who does thus violate the sacred rights of human nature … And to the feeling heart and discerning eye, all slave girls are GREEK, and all slave mongers TURKS, wicked cruel and hateful; be their names HASSAM, SELIM, JAMES, JUDAS or HENRY; their country Algiers or Alabama; Congo or Carolina, the same.
It was unclear at the time, and it remains unclear today, to what extent Powers intended to reference American slavery. On the one hand, scant evidence exists to suggest he intended his statue to evoke thoughts of the Peculiar Institution. On the other hand, it beggars all belief that a man of Powers’ abilities did not notice, and even intend, the connection. And if he wished to protect the marketability of his work by declining to endorse such an obvious interpretation, he would not be alone among American artists of the era. Only a few years later Melville would publish his own subtle, terrifying commentary on realities of American slavery, Benito Cereno, disguised as a tale of adventure set a half-century earlier on a Spanish ship.
Questions of intent aside, the connection was made. It must have been a disorienting train of thought for a certain sort of white, liberal viewer, the sort inclined to disapprove of the institution of slavery while also disapproving of any extremism in opposing it. What a shock to muse that one’s own countrymen were, with one’s own tacit permission, behaving as savagely as the Ottomans—that, in effect, one was oneself an Ottoman.
The Smithsonian’s exhibit, Measured Perfection, makes reference to this controversy, though its focus is more on the techniques Powers used to make the Greek Slave. Considering that the exhibit is about a statue that famously evoked fierce emotions in its own day, this is a curiously flat display, and it borders on the perverse that one would mount a show on this subject without securing one of the marble versions. Powers made six full marble statues, five of which survive—and one of which even lives in Washington, recently acquired by the National Gallery as a part of the loot from the now-defunct Corcoran.
For those interested in the details of how Powers worked, first modeling in clay, then creating a plaster cast, and then using calipers and various tools to replicate the plaster in marble, there are worthwhile elements here. There is a video about how the Smithsonian plans to use 3D printing to make its own replica of the statue, cheekily displayed next to a patent application filed by Powers to prevent unauthorized replicas of his work. The exhibit also presents some titillating evidence that Powers may have "cheated" and used casts of a human model for at least parts of the project.
Most of which will be inside baseball to the bulk of visitors, and some of which—looking at you, 3D printing—hovers somewhere on the line between curatorial self-indulgence and a sense of desperation that people really won’t care about the art itself. The room has the feel of an undergraduate course designed to suit the recent research interests of the professor rather than reveal the most interesting or beautiful aspects of the subject matter.
Such a narrow take seems especially perverse for a subject such as this, a wildly popular artistic success, and the focus of so much controversy in its day—both for the rather silly, transient issue of its depiction of nudity, and for the serious, discomfiting sense of self-recognition that, for some, it caused: that they, the viewers, might be no better than the Turkish slavers who had put this modest young woman up on the block. The easy sense of superiority felt by a citizen of 1840s New York regarding an Ottoman subject in Istanbul depended on the racist fiction that black or brown skin rendered some people subhuman, and thus incapable of the dignity of Powers’ statue.
Remove that fiction, and an ugly truth was revealed: that in democracies, no less than in any other form of government, the politically powerful exploited those without power in order to achieve a better life for themselves. Very often the powerful achieved this by declaring the weak, as a matter of law, to be less than human and thus undeserving of any rights. It would have been especially worthwhile for the Smithsonian to focus its exhibit on this implication of Powers’ work, inasmuch as we have recently been reminded that—for all our national progress on racial issues—on this essential issue of exploitation, nothing at all has changed.