One of the strongest influences the sculpture will have will be in the
direction of a new impulse to inventive decoration. This field has
remained relatively undeveloped, partly owing to our fondness for the
portrait idea, but the direction is legitimate and worthy. Architecture,
which is the growth of a selective precedence, must be continually
supplied with new impulses - new blood to re-energize, rehumanize its
conventions - and on the other hand, all such new impulses must be
trained into order with architecture. Within the last few years a school
devoted to the development of this, as it might be styled, applied
sculpture, has been maintained by a group of public-spirited architects
under the management of the Society of Beaux Arts Architects and the
National Sculpture Society of the United States of America.
The Star Goddess on the colonnades of the Court of the Universe amounts
to a definite creation of a new type of repeated architectural finial -
a human figure conventionalized to be come architecturally static - yet
not so devitalized as to be inert. Based on another style of
architecture the finials of the cloister of the Court of Ages serve a
correspondingly related purpose, and the crouching figures on columns in
this court are excellent examples of decorative crestings.
The groups of the Nations of the East and the Nations of the West are
new types in motif and composition of arch-crowning groups - to be seen
in silhouette against the sky at all points.
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