The Color Scheme
For the color-effects it was felt that just the right man must be found or the result would be disastrous. The choice fell on Jules Guerin, long accepted as one of the finest colorists among the painters of his time.
He followed the guidance of the natural conditions surrounding the Exposition, the hues of the sky and the bay, of the mountains, varying from deep green to tawny yellow, and of the morning and evening light.
And he worked, too, with an eye on those effects of illumination that should make the scene fairyland by night, utilizing even the tones of the fog.
The Planting
There was no difficulty in finding a man best suited to plan the garden that was to serve as the Exposition"s setting. For many years John McLaren had been known as one of the most distinguished horticulturists in this part of the world. As superintendent of Golden Gate Park he had given fine service. Moreover, he was familiar with the conditions and understood the resources and the possibilities. Of course a California exposition had to maintain California"s reputation for natural beauty. It must be placed in on ideal garden, representing the marvelous endowment of the State in trees and shrubs and plants and flowers and showing what the climate could do even with alien growths.
The first step that McLaren took was to consult the architects. They explained to him the court plan that they had agreed on and they gave him the dimensions of their buildings. Against walls sixty feet high he planned to place trees that should reach nearly to the top. For his purpose he found four kinds of trees most serviceable: the eucalyptus, the cypress, the acacia and the spruce. In his search for what he wanted he did not confine himself to California. A good many trees he brought down from Oregon. Some of his best specimens of Italian cypress he secured in Santa Barbara, in Monterey and in San Jose. He also drew largely on Golden Gate Park and on the Presidio. In all he used about thirty thousand trees, more than two-thirds eucalyptus and acacia.
Preparing the Landscape
Two years before the Exposition was to open McLaren built six greenhouses in the Presidia and a huge lath house. There he a.s.sembled his shrubs, his plants, and his bulbs. In all he must have used nearly a million bulbs. From Holland he imported seventy thousand rhododendrons.
From j.a.pan he brought two thousand azaleas. In Brazil he secured some wonderful specimens of the cineraria. He even sent to Africa for the agrapanthus, that grew close to the Nile. Among native flowers he collected six thousand pansies, ten thousand veronicas and five thousand junipers, to mention only, a few among the mult.i.tude a flowers that he intended to use for decoration. The grounds he had carefully mapped and he studied the landscape and the shape and color of the buildings section, by section.
The planting of trees consumed many months. The best effects McLaren found he could get by ma.s.sing. He was particularly successful with the magnificent Fine Arts Palace, both in his groupings and in his use of individual trees. About the lagoon he did some particularly attractive planting, utilizing the water for reflection. There was a twisted cypress that he placed alone against the colonnade with a skill that showed the insight and the feeling of an, artist. On, the water side, the Marina, he used the trees to break the bareness of the long esplanade. And here and there on the grounds, for pure decoration, he reached some of his finest effects with the eucalyptus, for which he evidently had a particular regard. As no California Exposition would be complete without palm trees, provision was made for the decorative use of palms along of the main walks.
About two weeks before the opening, the first planting of the gardens was completed, the first of the three crops to be displayed during the Exposition. The flowers included most of the spring flowers grown here in California or capable of thriving in the California spring climate.
In June they were to be re-placed with geraniums, begonias, asters, gilly-flowers, foxglove, hollyhocks, lilies and rhododendrons. The autumn display, would include cosmos and chrysanthemums and marguerites.
The Hedge
As the work proceeded, W. B. Faville, the architect, of Bliss and Faville, made a suggestion for the building of a fence that should look as if it were moss-covered with age. The result was that developing the suggestion McLaren devised a new kind of hedge likely to be used the world over. It was made of boxes, six feet long and two feet wide, containing, a two-inch layer of earth, held in place by a wire netting, and planted with South African dew plant, dense, green and hardy and thriving in this climate. Those boxes, when piled to a height of several feet, made a rustic wall of great beauty, Moreover, they could be continuously irrigated by a one-inch perforated line of pipe. In certain lights the water trickling through the leaves shimmered like gems. In summer the plant would produce ma.s.ses of small purple flowers.
McLaren found his experiment so successful that he decided to build a hedge twenty feet high, extending more than a thousand feet. He also used the hedge extensively in the landscape design for the Palace of Fine Arts.
The Sculptors
The department of sculpture was placed under the direction of one of the most distinguished sculptors in the country. Karl Bitter, of New York, whose death from an automobile accident took place a few weeks after the Exposition opened. He gathered around him an extraordinary array of co-operators, including many of the most brilliant names in the world of art, with A. Stirling Calder as the acting chief, the man on the ground.
Though he did not contribute any work of his own, he was active in developing the work as a whole, taking special pains to keep it in character and to see that, even in it its diversity, it gave the impression, of harmony.
Calder welcomed the chance to work on a big scale and to carry out big ideas. With Bitter he visited San Francisco in August, 1912, for a consultation with the architectural commission. Minutely they went over the site and examined the architectural plans. Then they picked the sculptors that they wished to secure as co-operators.
In December, 1912, Bitter and Calder made another visit to San Francisco for further conferring with the architectural commission, bearing sketches and scale models. Bitter explained his plans in detail and asked for an appropriation. He was told that he should be granted six hundred thousand dollars. The amount was gradually reduced till it finally reached three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.
It was at this period that Calder submitted his plan for the Column of Progress. He had worked it out in New York and had the scale models made by MacNeil and Konti. It won the approval of McKim, Mead & White, who declared that it made an ideal feature of the approach from the bay side to their Court of the Universe, then called the Court of the Sun and Stars.
The next few months of preparation in New York meant getting the sculptors together and working out the designs. The first meeting of the sculptors took place in January, 1913, in Bitter"s studio, with a remarkable array of personages in attendance, including D. C. French, Herbert Adams, Robert Aitken, James E. Fraser, H. A. MacNeil, A. A.
Weinman, Mahonri Young, Isidore Konti, Mrs. Burroughs and several others. In detail Bitter explained the situation in San Francisco and outlined his ideas of what ought to be done. Already Henry Bacon had sent in his design for his Court of the Four Seasons and sculptors were set to work on its ornamentation, Albert Jaegers, Furio Piccirilli, Miss Evelyn Beatrice Longman and August Jaegers, a time limit being made for the turning in of their plans.
Developing the Sculpture
In June, 1913, Calder returned to San Francisco to stay till the Exposition was well started. On the grounds he established a huge workshop. Then he began the practical developing of the designs, a great ma.s.s, which had already been carefully sifted. Hitherto, in American expositions the work had been done, for the most part, in New York, and sent to its destination by freight, a method costly in itself and all the more costly on account of the inevitable breakage. San Francisco, by being so far from New York, would have been a particularly expensive destination. From every point of view it seemed imperative that the work should be done here.
In a few weeks that shop was a hive of industry, with sculptors, students of sculpture front the art schools, pointers, and a mult.i.tude of other white-clad workers bending all their energies toward the completion on time of their colossal task. A few of the sculptors and artisans Calder had brought from New York. But most of the workers he secured in San Francisco, chiefly from the foreign population, some of them able to speak little or no English.
The modeling of the replicas of well-known art works were, almost without exception, made in clay. Most of the original work was directly modelled in plaster-staff used so successfully throughout the Exposition. For the enlarging of single pieces and groups the pointing machine of Robert Paine was chosen by Calder. It was interesting to see it at work, under the guidance of careful and patient operators, tracing mechanically the outlines and reproducing them on a magnified scale. For the finishing of the friezes the skill of the artist was needed, and there Calder found able a.s.sistants in the two young sculptors, Roth and Lentelli, who worked devotedly themselves and directed groups of students.
In all the sculpture Calder strove to keep in mind the significance of the Exposition and the spirit of the people who were celebrating. With him styles of architecture and schools were a minor consideration, to be left to the academicians and the critics. He believed that sculpture, like all other art-forms, was chiefly valuable and interesting as human expression.
The Decorative Figures
Less successful on the whole than the blending of sculpture and architecture were the individual figures designed to be placed against the walls. Some of them were extremely well done. Others were obvious disappointments. The unsophisticated judgment, free from Continental bias, might have objected to the almost gratuitous use of nudity. For a popular exhibition, even the widely-traveled and broad-minded art lover might have been persuaded that a concession to prejudice could have been made without any great damage to art.
In the magnificent entrance to the grounds it was deemed fitting that the meaning of the Exposition should be symbolized by an elaborate fountain. So in the heart of the South Gardens there was placed the Fountain of Energy, the design of A. Stirling Calder, the athletic figure of a youth, mounted on a fiery horse, tearing across the globe, which served for pedestal, the symbolic figures of Valor and Fame accompanying on either side. The work, as a whole suggested the triumph of man in overcoming the difficulties in the way, of uniting the two oceans. It made one of the most striking of all the many fountains on the grounds, the dolphins in the great basin, some of them carrying female figures on their backs, contributing to an effect peculiarly French.
The Column of Progress
The Column of Progress, suggested by Calder and planned in outline by Symmes Richardson, besides being beautiful symbol and remarkably successful in outline, was perhaps the most poetic and original of all the achievements of the sculptors here. It represented something new in being the first great column erected to express a purely imaginative and idealistic conception. Most columns of its kind had celebrated some great figure or historic feat, usually related to war. But this column stood for those st.u.r.dy virtues that were developed, not through the hazards and the excitements and the fevers of conquest, but through the persistent and homely tests of peace, through the cultivation of those qualities that laid the foundations of civilized living. Isidore Konti designed the frieze typifying the swarming generations, by Matthew Arnold called "the teeming millions of men," and to Hermon A. MacNeil fell the task of developing the circular frieze of toilers, sustaining the group at the top, three strong figures, the dominating male, ready to shoot his arrow straight alit to its mark, a male supporter, and the devoted woman, eager to follow in the path of advance.
The Aim of the Sculptors