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Fountain of TimeOctober 2013

Few cities in history may have ever experienced such a rapid revolution in

culture, population, landscape, notoriety, or any other aspect of life as Chicago

during the nineteenth century. From its beginnings as a modern settlement in the

1830s, being little more than a mid-western Yankee town, through its pivotal role as

a major center for transportation and trans-American connection, Chicago by the

end of the nineteenth century had become one of the most occupied and known

centers of the world, rivaled in the United States only by New York City. This

revolution culminated with Chicagos gaining the right to host the heavily sought

World Fair in 1893, which it named the Columbian Exposition. The Fair brought to

Chicago the crossing of peoples from around the world and their ideas both of a light

and dark nature.

Among all this commotion there lived a quiet American artist, born at the

very site of the Chicago World Fair thirty-three years before its grand opening. His

name was Lorado Zadoc Taft and by the time he was fourteen years old he had

decided that he would become a sculptor. A point of distinction for his time, Lorado

Taft was not caught up in the furor of modern art as were many of his

contemporaries but found reason and meaning in the classical works of the past.

While Tafts Chicago was becoming accustomed to the wonders of technological

advancement, it also turned its eyes from the deep-seated meaning of everyday life

to pleasures that were more immediate. For Taft, this transgression of virtue

included many of his fellow American sculptors who grew up in a land of no

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significant artistic past or any promising creative future. America, as Taft outlined in

his History of American Sculpture,was a land always looking across the Atlantic in

envy and awe at the works of European craftsmen who had the luxury of living

among the lasting works of historys greatest artists. Despite the rapidly increasing

attention to art in America, a single artist could never be as revered as he would be

in Europe due to the landsincreasingly massive population and confusing mix of

cultures, where people existed as groups and cities, not as individuals. For this

reason many of the American artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries made their art to stand out and to shock the public but then left little room

for true meaning and thought in their works.

Always privileged and educated, Lorado Taft never waivered in his path

toward creating works of art as a true reflection of man and his progression through

the ages an outlook readily abandoned by other American artists at the time.

Perhaps, none of his other sculptures conveys this resistance quite as well as the

Fountain of Time, created in 1920, which fittingly resides at the West end of the

Midway Plaisance in Chicago, Illinois.