Public art can creates a sense of place in a city. Can you imagine Paris without the Eiffel Tower? Here is a little history on the Eiffel Tower, which was lambasted before its completion, and look at what it became: Various pamphlets and articles were published throughout the year of 1886,le 14 février 1887, la protestation des Artistes. The Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel, published in the newspaper Le Temps, is addressed to the Worlds Fairs director of works, Monsieur Alphand. It is signed by several big names from the world of literature and the arts : Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas junior, François Coppée, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, William Bouguereau, Ernest Meissonier, Victorien Sardou, Charles Garnier and others to whom posterity has been less kind. Other satirists pushed the violent diatribe even further, hurling insults like : this truly tragic street lamp (Léon Bloy), this belfry skeleton (Paul Verlaine), this mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed (François Coppée), this high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney (Maupassant), a half-built factory pipe, a carcass waiting to be fleshed out with freestone or brick, a funnel-shaped grill, a hole-riddled suppository (Joris-Karl Huysmans). Once the Tower was finished the criticism burnt itself out in the presence of the completed masterpiece, and in the light of the enormous popular success with which it was greeted. It received two million visitors during the Worlds Fair of 1889.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Jun 2014 15:10:05 +0000
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