Tour the Garden: ‘The Walking Man’ embodies the sculpture garden’s historical, artistic context
As chancellor from 1960 to 1968, Franklin D. Murphy conceived of and curated UCLA’s Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. The bucolic hills and surrounding pathways, completed by architect Ralph Cornell in 1967, serve as a community hangout and the backdrop for some of the finest sculptures of the 20th century. Daily Bruin columnist David Egan explores the world of the sculpture garden and leads a tour of five artistic gems on North Campus.
Auguste Rodin's headless "The Walking Man" lunges with its emphasis on the lower half of the body. (Christine Kao/Daily Bruin staff) 72 sculptures, 5 acres of land and 101 years of art history.
Welcome to the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden.
The stars of the garden have shifted over the decades, said Cynthia Burlingham, the Hammer Museum deputy director of curatorial affairs. Sculptures by David Smith, Henri Matisse, Barbara Hepworth and Anna Mahler have gained popularity at various moments in the past five decades, she said. While the UCLA-owned collection was originally managed by the Wight Gallery, it is now overseen by the Hammer Museum. With its oldest work being Auguste Rodin’s “The Walking Man,” Burlingham said the sculpture garden is a historical collection.
“It’s a closed collection largely because of the limited space,” Burlingham said. “As far as the balance of landscape and art, it really works. … The last work that was added was the Deborah Butterfield sculpture, and that was added in the very early ’90s.”
The garden was specifically designed to display sculptures, and before the 1967 remodel, the area was a parking lot referred to as the Fair-weather Parking Lot because of how muddy it became after it rained, Burlingham said. The garden, she said, is arranged in a tripartite plan – the plaza in front of the Broad Art Center, the rolling hills and the north side’s long alley. Murphy and Cornell initially modeled the placement of sculptures with true-to-life cutouts, she said. One of Burlingham’s favorite moments in the sculpture garden, she said, is the way Rodin’s “The Walking Man” is poised over the stairs leading people onto the grass.
“A lot of (Rodin’s) sculptures embodied a force or power that’s a little bit, almost submerged,” Perlman said. “That piece, by being headless, is taking the mind out of the mind-body equation, trying to represent all action.”
Without a head, there is no face broadcasting emotion, forcing viewers to focus on other details, said fourth-year art student Edward Salinas. “The Walking Man” is gendered, Perlman said, with a masculine, repressed power one could assess from a critical angle. It is the one male nude out of 11 nudes in the garden. As with Rodin, who has been considered a founder of modern sculpture, Perlman said the sculpture garden represents a different era of modernist or classical values. Salinas said the realism and physical definition of “The Walking Man” is less prevalent in contemporary sculpture, which tends to be more abstract.
“If you put today’s (sculpture) class, their sculptures, in that same garden, … the contrast would be incredible,” Salinas said. “It would be so different. It would be a whole new conversation of the sculpture garden.
Comparing contemporary art with the sculpture garden in one class, Perlman said students placed a flagpole atop Broad Art Center with a giant yellow windsock hand-shaped flag. For Perlman, students today seem more interested in the political content of their work and questions of identity, and a flag could be used for such cultural and political discussions. Perlman said his discussions of the Broad Art Center and the sculpture garden with classes also center around the role of art in a university.
“(With) the sculpture garden being at the north end of campus, some students think of art and art majors as sort of fringe – the edge, so it’s appropriate it’s on the edge of campus,” Perlman said. “But you could also go with a metaphor that it’s some essential or important passageway to the rest of the humanities and even, ultimately, to science.”
There are, in fact, five passageways to the sculpture garden, Burlingham said, with no gates or open and closed hours. She said the sculpture garden is on campus for people at UCLA and in Los Angeles, with no prescribed way to enjoy it. As for the future of the sculpture garden, Burlingham said she generally hopes there is always a space on campus that combines art and nature, as there has been since 1967.
“(The sculpture garden) could be very different,” Burlingham said. “You could change it all the time. But it represents a moment in time and the advantages and disadvantages of that moment.” — David Egan, Jan. 17, 2022
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
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