View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.
a[Duranteas] guidebook is a perfect walking-tour accompaniment
to help New Yorkers and visitors find, identify and better
appreciate statues famous and obscure (honoring, among others, the
afather of gynecologya and the general who had an unremarkable
military and business career but composed taps, the bugle call). .
. . Durante winsomely places 54 monuments in historical and
artistic perspective. We learn that a trumpet is an allegory for
announcing fame, that the monument to Admiral Farragut in Madison
Square Park altered the course of American sculpture, that the
figure with the winged hat atop Grand Central Terminal is Mercury
and that the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center was reviled when
it was unveiled in 1937 because it supposedly resembled Mussolini.
Letas hope Ms. Durante follows up in the other four
boroughs.a
--"The New York Times"
aOutdoor Monuments of Manhattan is a primer on getting to know
our city's monuments. . . . Each entry has a uniform structure. It
contains a photo, vital stats (year dedicated, size, materials), an
aAbout the Sculpturea section, and an aAbout the Subjecta section,
as well as a carefully chosen boxed quotation culled from an old
book or newspaper that pertains to the subject. . . . Outdoor
Monuments of Manhattan is well written, well researched, well
thought-out, funny, and often refreshingly original, and will help
any interested New Yorker know about the wondrous monuments that
dot the city.a
--"New York Sun"
aAnyone whose curiosity has ever been piqued by the peculiar
mixture of historical statues that ornament the grounds of Central
Park will find Outdoor Monuments byDianne Durante a satisfying
read. . . . The entries provide background on each workas origin,
explaining, for example, how a statue of the medieval Polish king
Jagiello came to be in New York alongside more predictable
allegorical and American patriotic figures. A brief history of the
subject is also provided, including enough lively anecdotes and
obscure facts to entice all readers.a
--"Sculpture Magazine"
a[Durante] tackles her task in the manner of a walking tour. . .
. The language of the book is friendly and chatty, as if the author
were in front of you, conducting an on-site lecture. . . . The
purpose of the book is to encourage people to go and see the wealth
of outdoor sculpture in Manhattan, and the book treats this purpose
with the enthusiasm the subjects deserve.a
--"The Art Book"
Stop, look, and discover--the streets and parks of Manhattan are
filled with beautiful historic monuments that will entertain,
stimulate, and inspire you. Among the 54 monuments in this volume
are major figures in American history: Washington, Lincoln,
Lafayette, Horace Greeley, and Gertrude Stein; more obscure
figures: Daniel Butterfield, J. Marion Sims, and King Jagiello; as
well as the icons of New York: Atlas, Prometheus, and the Firemen's
Memorial. The monuments represent the work of some of America's
best sculptors: Augustus Saint Gaudens' Farragut and Sherman,
Daniel Chester French's Four Continents, and Anna Hyatt
Huntington's Jose Marti and Joan of Arc.
Each monument, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, is
located on a map of Manhattan and includes easy-to-follow
directions. All the sculptures are considered both as historical
mementos and as art. We learn offurious General Sherman
court-martialing a civilian journalist, and also of exasperated
Saint Gaudens' proposing a hook-and-spring device for improving his
assistants' artistic acuity as they help model Sherman. We discover
how Lincoln dealt with a vociferous Confederate politician from
Ohio, and why the Lincoln in Union Square doesn't rank as a
top-notch Lincoln portrait. Sidebars reveal other aspects of the
figure or event commemorated, using personal quotes, poems,
excerpts from nineteenth-century periodicals ("New York Times,"
"Harper's Weekly"), and writers ranging from Aeschylus, Washington
Irving, and Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi to Mark Twain and Henryk
Sienkiewicz.
As a historical account, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A
Historical Guide is a fascinating look at figures and events that
changed New York, the United States and the world. As an aesthetic
handbook it provides a compact method for studying sculpture,
inspired by Ayn Rand's writings on art. For residents and tourists,
and historians and students, who want to spend more time viewing
and appreciating sculpture and New York history, this is the start
of a unique voyage of discovery.
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