Melting Lee
As communities across the United States deinstall monumental sculptures of Confederate generals from their public squares, community leaders face the twin moral and practical dilemmas of what to do with these oft-enormous objects. Facing that same challenge, Charlottesville’s City Council recently approved what I think is one of the best possible solutions.
In a proposal entitled “Swords to Plowshares,” The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has devised a plan to melt down the city’s very large equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee and reuse the bronze for new works of public art. After the sculpture was commissioned in 1917, the patron, his agent, and the sculptor spent months searching for discarded Confederate cannon to incorporate in the equestrian statue (though it’s unclear if they were successful): the cannon used to defend slavery repurposed as a monument to the Lost Cause. Now, in this next chapter of the object’s history, the monument to white power will become a materialization of democracy in action.
Figure 1. Robert E. Lee Memorial rolling out of Charlottesville, Va., on a flatbed truck July 10, 2021. Courtesy Natalie Krovetz.
It is no surprise that this creative solution has generated consternation among defenders of the Lost Cause narrative. But it has also caused some anxiety among scholars who condemn white supremacy yet who are squeamish about the prospect of destroying any kind of public art. This hesitancy demands a response. I offer it in this article.
That I support this proposal might come as a surprise to some, given that I am an art historian. But I come to this view not despite my training, but because of it. Two considerations are central to my position. First, the Lee Monument is not particularly valuable as a work of art; its loss will not be consequential. More importantly, regardless of its artistic merits, this object’s significance is chiefly embedded in its history rather than its form. And when executed, Sword to Plowshares will transform a nominally important local object into a nationally important example of art’s role in the continuous project of making American democracy. This monument’s greatest contribution to the history of American art, in other words, will be its destruction and rebirth.
Figure 2. Scene at the unveiling of the monument to General Robert E. Lee at Richmond, Virginia, drawn by Thure De Thulstrup from a photograph, published in Harper’s Weekly June 14, 1890. Courtesy Richmond Nineteenth-Century Print Collection, Virginia Commonwealth Library, Richmond, Virginia.
Let me unpack my first claim: that the equestrian Lee is not particularly valuable. Art’s value is most often rafted on one of three conditions: antiquity, rarity, or excellence. On all three counts, Charlottesville’s R. E. Lee monument fails. Installed less than a century ago, it is not that old, even in light of our country’s and community’s relative youth. (It’s not even half the age of Jefferson’s Monticello, for example.) It is also hardly rare as an object type. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s work has identified hundreds of Confederate monuments scattered across the South. Lastly, the statue’s formal quality was questioned even by the generation that produced it. The patron first approached the nationally prominent sculptor Daniel Chester French, who in declining suggested the less prominent Henry Merwin Shrady, who died mid-way though the project. Shrady’s model was not approved of by the patron’s agents for its likenesses of either Lee or his horse, Traveler. The project was then resurrected by Italian sculptor Leo Lentelli, loosely informed by Shrady’s model and, when installed, was criticized for its proportions — a critique so widespread that it was addressed at its unveiling. So, it is neither old, rare, or excellent. In short, it is not particularly valuable as art.
There is, however, a fourth means by which an object of art, especially public art, has value: it invites a dialogue about a community’s values. In some cases, as in the Charlottesville Lee, the art asserts a collective memory. Other public art, consider Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, challenges that same memory. Public art intending to manifest collective memory or values no longer embraced by the community can and should be removed. Remember, for instance, the July 9, 1776, destruction of the equestrian statue of George III from a public square in New York City. Just days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, George III no longer served as a proxy for the collective identity of New Yorkers. The same can be said of Lee today.
Figure 3. Kehinde Wiley (American, b. 1977). Rumors of War, 2019. Bronze, stone (pedestal), 328⅞" H × 305⅞ W × 189⅝" D (835.34 cm × 776.92 cm × 481.65 cm). Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Purchased with funds provided by Virginia Sargeant Reynolds in memory of her husband, Richard S. Reynolds, Jr., by exchange, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, Pamela K. and William A. Royal, Jr., Angel and Tom Papa, Katherine and Steven Markel, and additional private donors, 2019.39. Photograph by David Stover, copyright Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
As I and others have argued elsewhere, the Lee monument and many others like it were commissioned and installed by whites across the Jim Crow South to materialize their political authority. The works were powerful markers: monumental manifestations of the myth of the Lost Cause and, simultaneously, celebrations of the victory of white supremacy over Black resistance.
“Recycling this longstanding marker of white supremacy demonstrates a profound symbolic commitment to the ongoing work of disassembling the structures of white supremacy.”
Through the first half century of its life, the Lee monument worked to remind African Americans in Charlottesville that they were not welcome in “public” amenities, including the library that was funded, built, and opened adjacent to — and in concert with — the Lee Monument. After the 1960s, once Jim Crow segregation was overturned, the social practices of diminishment founded on deeply entrenched assumptions of racial inferiority persisted. In that era, the monument stood as the backdrop to Black political resistance and community resilience.
Over the summer of 2017, the defense of this monument by white nationalists culminated in the Unite the Right rally, with international reverberations. Indeed, it was the catalyst for local, national, and global debates over defending or overturning — at times even just seeing — racism at work in everyday lives and landscapes. The recent removal of the equestrian Lee in Charlottesville has been an important step toward realizing the country’s founding claims that all Americans are created equal. While we still have a long journey ahead, Charlottesville’s public spaces are now freer from overt intimidation.
Figure 4. Robert E. Lee Memorial, Charlottesville, Va., Nov. 28, 2017. Courtesy Sanjay Suchak.
“Swords to Plowshares” will take the now removed monument — possibly once Confederate cannon — and reimagine its materiality in the form of new art installations informed by broad and collective community engagement. Doing so will inaugurate a powerful new chapter in the history of this object and offer an international model for community reconciliation through art.
If simply relocated, as some proposed, this monument to Jim Crow segregation would take its place in a long line of otherwise discarded political art. Melting and reimaging it as a range of new public works instead is an important signal that Charlottesville has begun to take seriously its commitment to inclusion. Recycling this longstanding marker of white supremacy demonstrates a profound symbolic commitment to the ongoing work of disassembling the structures of white supremacy. It is also an important signal to African American Charlottesville that the larger community takes seriously their pain and prioritizes their healing. In an important gesture that improves upon simple removal, reimagination means that this art has agency, realizing in real time and space a more democratic community.
It is no accident that this application comes primarily from the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the director of which is herself an art historian. Through this proposal, the Charlottesville Lee monument will live long in the history of American art, not so much for the importance of its maker or the excellence of its production or design, but for the ways that its history maps the history of racial (in)justice.
Citation
Louis P. Nelson, “Melting Lee,” PLATFORM, April 11, 2022
