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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.