Who is this man?

 

   Take a look at the man above.
   Recognize him?
   I knew who he is supposed to be, because I read regular correspondent Tony Galati's email, sent in response to Thursday's post on the Dick Tracy statue. It's supposed to be Harry Truman. The statue is located at his presidential library and museum in Independence, Missouri. While there is, I suppose, a vague resemblance, and though Tony finds it "good," I would say more like "close but no cigar." There are photos to back me up.

     Maybe it has something to do with Truman himself. Another statue at the library, out in front, of Truman doffing his hat to visitors, which is fitting — the 33rd president worked in a men's clothing shop — is hardly better. 

     Maybe something about Truman's folksy charm resists monumental rendering — an enormous sculpture outside the Jackson County courthouse is also pretty bad. Although a fourth statue of Give 'Em Hell Harry, in the U.S. Capitol, is an improvement.

     Tony likes to visit presidential libraries — an enviable pastime for sure — and sent along snaps of several other presidential statues. He considers the George H.W. Bush statue at right "the best of the lot" and I agree. Maybe its something intrinsic to Bush's patrician looks — there is also a passable bronze of him outside the United States embassy in Berlin. Then again, Bush pere generally looks better and better as the years go on.
     Tony also likes the Gerald Ford statue, though deeming it "too thin." Sudden weight loss is a common flub when constructing statues — Roger Ebert's statue in front of the Virginia Theater in Champaign makes him so svelte as to be almost unrecognizable. 

     It's not like presidential statues can't be rendered effectively — Samuel Chester French's Abraham Lincoln comes to mind. (As opposed to the sitting Lincoln, who looks like he's waiting for a bus, sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, the man responsible for Mount Rushmore, whose all four faces, though substandard, at least have the excuse of being carved out of a mountainside. People treat Mount Rushmore like it's an American mecca. It's not. It's a tourist trap sprayed so thickly with the mist of unfocused patriotism that people can't see what it is).    
    As for Lyndon Johnson, Tony writes, "I don't know what they did to LBJ." That kind of modernist scuptural pointilism popular in the 1960s and 1970s. The statue of botanist Carl Linnaeus at the Chicago Botanic Garden suffers from the same stick-clumps-together-until-you-have-a-guy technique. 

    Anyway, Tony, thanks for the photos. Made me want to get on the road and visit some presidential libraries and museums. I've only been to two — the recently opened Obama Center, and the Kennedy Library over 20 years ago, when I was researching my hat book. I remember the staff being extremely helpful, and the museum being quite well done. I don't remember any statues of Kennedy. Probably just as well.