M
Personal
Patricia Cronin
Making the

A Conversation withonumental

by Jan Garden Castro

Patricia Cronin’s three-ton marble mortuary sculpture Memorial to a Marriage is heroic in size,
scale, and theme. At its debut at Grand Arts in Kansas City on September 6, the artist and herpartner were doubled, their presence mirrored by their marble likenesses embracing in what
Cronin describes as “post-coital bliss.” The work takes its theme from Courbet’s 1876 painting
The Sleep, its style from 19th-century mortuary sculpture, and part of its process from 21stcentury technology. Memorial to a Marriage was permanently installed at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Its November 3 unveiling was presented by Deitch Projects, New York.
Memorial is a new sculptural direction for Cronin. Her work includes close-up, sensual, andexplicit drawings of women making love, shown from a participant’s point of view. Cronin also
draws on horses as a metaphor and symbol that she associates with girls, women, sexuality, and power. Since receiving her BFA from Rhode Island College in 1986 and her MFA from
Brooklyn College in 1988, Cronin has been featured in five solo exhibitions and over 50 groupexhibitions. The plaster model of Memorial was included in the recent exhibition “Family” at
the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Cronin is the recipient of
two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants. She is a visiting critic in the Graduate Art Program at
Yale University, and she also teaches undergraduate courses at the School of Visual Arts.
Jan Castro: What is the genesis of your latest project?
Patricia Cronin: For the last two and a half years, I’ve beenworking on Memorial to a Marriage. Carved in marble, it’s anover-life-sized double portrait of my partner and me in a loving
embrace. I’m interested in subverting the 19th-century figurative
style by injecting contemporary content. The project was funded
predominantly by Grand Arts, the Kansas City-based foundation.
They pick a few artists a year, ask them what their dream piece
would be, and then pay most fabrication costs.
When I was selected by Grand Arts, I had just finished
Memorial to a Marriage, 2000–01. Carrara marble, 83 x 40 x 27 in.

a series of bronze horses, and I started looking around New York
City at all of the public equestrian monuments. In these war
memorials, the men were specific, the horses were particular, but,alas, the women were all allegorical. I loved these sculptures but
found them lacking. I tried to find images of women in public
places that were particular. In Manhattan, there are Eleanor
Roosevelt, Golda Meir, Joan of Arc, Alice in Wonderland, andMother Goose. The same artists who made war memorials also
made cemetery art, most famously Augustus Saint Gaudens who
made the Adams monument (commissioned in 1886) in Rock
Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC. Soon, I was researchingcemeteries and the “Garden” or “Rural” Cemetery Movement,

as it was known. Women, children, and men are rememberedspecifically there.
I looked at 19th-century American idealizing sculpture
as a model, especially Harriet Hosmer, but also Daniel Chester
French, William Reinhardt, Edmonia Lewis, William Wetmore
Story, Hiram Powers, and others. These artists were making
sculpture for the new nation, even though Powers and Story
stayed in Italy. Most people believed you had to be trained inEurope to make “real” art employing the popular themes of thetime: literary figures, biblical subjects, Greek myths, or historicalfigures. So artists would get patrons to finance a “good start”—atrip to Italy, much like Grand Arts did for me.
JGC: Where did you go?
PC: First I went to Paris to research the Père Lachaise, Montparnasse, and Montmartre cemeteries, then to Italy, to Pietrasanta,
where Michelangelo lived when buying marble, and to the next
town north, Carrara. I selected a 21-ton block of Carrara Bianco
P marble. One of the most exciting weeks in my life was up in
the quarries. Strangely enough, they don’t allow women in thequarries, and they wouldn’t sell me a block that large and ship itto the U.S. unless I picked it. So we had to get special paperwork
signed and stamped to allow us access. To me, this was like Rosa
Bonheur getting permission to wear pants in the slaughterhouses
to draw the carcasses.
JGC: How did you develop the marriage theme?

PC: The title Memorial to a Marriage is taken from the Lincoln
Kirstein book about Saint Gaudens’s Adams Memorial. Henry
Adams commissioned the sculpture of his wife Clover Adams, aphotographer who committed suicide by drinking developing solution. It’s a wonderful book—their sophisticated Transcendental
Bostonian lives were intellectual, romantic, and tragic.
Second, my partner and I cannot get married. We havewills, health-care proxies, powers of attorney, and all of the legal
forms one can have, but they all pertain to what happens if one of
us should become incapacitated or die. It’s not about our life together; it’s about the end of it. So I thought, what I can’t have inlife, I will have forever, in death. Jessica Hough, curator of “Family” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art this summer,
wrote in the catalogue: “Cronin’s ambitious sculpture celebrates
and makes official in death her ‘marriage,’ which cannot be madelegal in life.” I am using a national form, that is, American 19thcentury ideal sculpture, to address a federal failure.
JGC: Your figures give us a model richer than institutional
paperwork. Were you at all concerned with creating too ideal a
portrait?

Clockwise from left: Memorial to a Marriage. Plaster, 2/3 to scalemaquette. Memorial to a Marraige. Plasticine clay. 2/3 to scalemaquette. Harriet Hosmer, Beatrice Cenci, 18575. Marble.

PC: Obviously, I think there’s no such thing as “too ideal.”
JGC: What was the modeling process like?
PC: The sculpture was made in my studio in a 19th-century
way—modeling in clay and plaster. I started with photographsand drawings of my partner and myself. Then I hired two individual models with similar body types and hair textures. In clay,
I modeled it at two-thirds scale because I couldn’t get a life-sizedversion out of my studio. Then I refined the plaster: plumped up
the mattress, made the curls in the hair a little curlier, refined thetoes, the toenails, the fingernails.
In earlier times, the sculptor would send off the plaster to the carvers in the workshop. The carvers would carve themarble using a pointing machine identical to the plaster and sendit back to the sculptor to finish. Rodin, Saint Gaudens, and Daniel
Chester French didn’t carve. They were modelers. The Piccirilli
family of six brothers did the actual marble carving for Saint
Gaudens and for French, the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, DC. They carved many monuments in Woodlawn
Cemetery.
Instead of a team of carvers, we fabricated this pieceusing the newest digital technology, a five-axis milling machineat Johnson Atelier in Mercerville, New Jersey. They bought abrand-new machine from Milan specifically to carve this piece—
it’s the second one built in the world. The machines are called
CNC—Computer Numerically Controlled carving machines. The
coupling of 21st-century technology with marble, one of the oldest artists’ materials, is really fascinating, especially if you thinkthat bringing back 19th-century forms is important. First, we
3D-scanned my two-thirds scale plaster to program the millingmachine to do complex carving. The whole process has been an
incredible education.
JGC: How long did it take the machine to carve?
PC: It took about three months. We had a couple of problems
with a rubber seal and water in the ball bearings. But they guesstimated that it would have taken a year to carve by hand. I met
the mathematician who came over from Milan to calibrate themachine. It’s been a real team effort to replicate my plaster.
JGC: It sounds exorbitantly costly.
PC: Yes. Usually public sculpture of this scale is financed by an
institution, a municipality, or a wealthy collector.
JGC: What were the final stages?
PC: Finishing the marble. We carved out the undercuts thatthe machine couldn’t reach, making sure they were round—for
instance, the way the back sinks into the mattress—then rasping, finishing, and polishing. It was nice to get back into it aftermodeling the clay, carving the plaster, and having the machinemill most of the sculpture. This is where Canova would comeback into it to work on the finishes himself. Whether something isshiny or not—those are choices he made. You can highlight someareas and tone down others. The marble is quite responsive.
JGC: Are you teaching yourself or have you worked in marble
before? What is your learning curve?
Four views of the computerized carving process used for Memorial
to a Marriage.

The Domain of Perfect Affection, 1999. Wax and pine table, 40 x
48 x 30 in.

PC: The learning curve is high. A very good carver from Russia
taught me as we went along. Each carver has his or her own specialty: roughing out, undercutting, decorative details, or polishing. I got a fast education.
JGC: Your work seems quite responsive to art history. Could
you discuss your critical influences?
PC: In graduate school at Brooklyn College, I studied with Philip
Pearlstein and Lee Bontecou, who have been enormously inspiring. If I had to pick somebody whose writings really influenced
me, it would be Linda Nochlin. She’s the top tomato of that pyramid as far as I’m concerned: “Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?,” “Eroticism and Female Imagery in NineteenthCentury Art,” and her essay on Gericault and the absence of
women in his work.[1] She also writes about contemporary art,
which makes her relevant to young feminists now.
Robert Rosenblum, who has written extensively on
19th-century art, sculpture, and animal imagery in art, has also
had a large impact on my thinking. I can’t say enough about Nochlin and Rosenblum. My partner, the artist Deborah Kass, has anobsessive relationship to art history—Modernism, in particular—that has informed my practice. For other art influences, I would
include Rosa Bonheur.
JGC: Yes, The Horse Fair.
PC: Of course. In 1999, I made a piece called The Domain of
Perfect Affection—little wax horse sculptures on a pine table.
The title is Bonheur’s name for her home, a chateau near Fontainebleau that she shared with her female companion and allof their animals. Cornelius Vanderbilt bought The Horse Fair in
1887 and donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
JGC: Another horsewoman.
PC: As was Harriet Hosmer, who came to Italy around the sametime. She would dress like a man from the waist up but would
still have to wear skirts in the studio, especially when people suchas Queen Victoria would come to visit. She is known as the first
professional woman sculptor, ever.
I’m not going to suggest that I’m her equal, but there aresimilarities. She was born in Watertown, Massachusetts; I wasborn in Beverly and grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts. Her big
break was Wayman Crow, the wealthy Saint Louis merchant who
became her patron. It seems that my big break is this project withGrand Arts, which was entirely funded by the Margaret Hall Silva
Foundation. Silva is part of a well-known Kansas City family.
And while Prospect Park, which is near my studio in Brooklyn, iscertainly not the Borghese Gardens, I have ridden horses there forfive years.
I also think the reality of Hosmer’s personal life influenced and is evidenced in her choices of subject, from Beatrice
Cenci to Xenobia to the Queen of Naples. Likewise, my specificity informs my conceptual and formal decisions. Bonheur andHosmer, in France and Italy around the same time, were big rolemodels for me. How come they are not better known? The first
generation of important American women artists has been totallyerased, such as Emma Stebbins who made Angel of the aters(1868) for the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. So has the first
generation of “independent women” artists. It’s a disgrace.
JGC: You seem to be re-discovering neglected sources. You givea nod, too, to Courbet’s painting The Sleep (1867) in Memorial toa Marriage.
PC: I love Courbet. I think he’s one of the most important French
painters. The Sleep might be the first painting of two women
depicted in post-coital bliss. I wanted that kind of intimacy in mypiece, but coupled with good old 19th-century American Puritanism. So it exists within the 19th-century American tradition,
which was never as sexy as the French or Italian.
Besides that, the major difference between my piece andCourbet’s is that mine is a portrait of two specific women in aparticular relationship, and the work is made for those two women. Courbet hired two models to make a painting for a wealthy
patron’s erotic enjoyment. Despite these differences, I love The
Sleep because it was the closest thing I had to identify with.
JGC: In your Memorial, how did you develop the elaborate
folds draping the women’s legs?
PC: I took the idea for the folds from Bernini’s The Ecstasy ofSaint Teresa (1645–52). His drapery seems to have no relation
to reality or gravity. I thought that what he was trying to convey
about her body couldn’t be expressed with her body in the 1600s,
so he let the surrounding fabric say it. Sadly, I still think that
adult intimacy and the seriousness of a life commitment in samesex couples can’t be conveyed explicitly in the early 2000s, over
400 years later, so I also am letting the fabric say it. I’m trying to
make an object that is as much about love as it is about politics.
JGC: Making this sculpture larger than life-size was a brilliant
strategy. How does Memorial to a Marriage connect with yourbody of work on themes relating to feminism, lesbian sexuality,and horses?
PC: The goal of my work is to go back, take very traditional
forms to which I have some relationship, and insert contemporary
content. I don’t think everyone has gotten to speak through themyet; they are still viable means of expression/communication.
The bronze horses that I made may allude to Degas, Eakins, andExterior and interior views of Tack Room, 1997-1998. Wood, leather,
metal glass, and found objects, 96 x 116 x 125.

Remington, but they are the girl-postmodern version. If you lookclosely, they’re cast from Breyer toy plastic horses, which is a
$50 million a year industry supported by horse-obsessed girls.
I made editions of four different sculptures—Stallion,
Mare, Gelding, and Foal. I call them the four distinct sexual
statuses of a horse. I think every female executive in the U.S.
should have one on her desk. At first I made the original 10-inch
and 12-inch ones; now I’m working on a stallion that is 28 inches
high. I’m working my way up to the life-sized version. I reallywant this to exist as public art. New York City has an incredible
equestrian sculpture collection, but they are all war heroes onstallions. As Deborah Butterfield has said, “They need a mare.”
JGC: How do you see your work crossing media and the role ofsculpture in particular?
PC: I’m really a conceptual artist who uses traditional forms—
erotic watercolors, portraiture, bronze horses, landscape painting, mortuary/monumental sculpture—to address contemporary
ideas that I think need addressing. These usually involve female
subjectivity and autonomy, class, sexuality, power, and status. I
weave back and forth between painting and sculpture—as did Degas, Eakins, Sargent, and many artists from the 19th century. I am
lucky that my technical facility is up to my conceptual choices ofform. Or let’s say that if it isn’t, I learn fast.
JGC: You’ve also read Across An Untried Sea by Julia Markus,
about 19th-century women artists.
PC:Yes. I love that book, because the romantic and erotic attachments that these women had really explain their professionaland financial interdependence. While there are other books, both
fiction and nonfiction, from Hawthorne to James and more recent
biographies, this is the first one that doesn’t shy away from thereality of these women’s lives. And of course I loved when the
Crown Princess of Germany visits Hattie’s [Harriet Hosmer’s]
studio and remarks about her talent for toes.[2] Much to my glee,
people have remarked about the toes on my sculpture.
JGC: Will Memorial to a Marriage be able to withstand environmental pollution? One friend told me that due to pollution
most cemeteries no longer accept marble sculpture.
PC:Greenwood in Brooklyn has not let in marble statuary sincethe 1880s, but Woodlawn is into conservation, and they’rethrilled. They want to know if I want the snow brushed or blown
off. They have tours of the beautiful women of Woodlawn and thehistoric women of Woodlawn. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is buried
there.
JGC: MIT Curator Bill Arning has suggested that, historically,lesbian relationships leave no visible trace except for codedpassages embedded in diaries and the margins of photographs.
You’ve changed that history.
PC: What excites me about Memorial to a Marriage is that noNotes
1 The first two essays by Linda Nochlin are in Women, Art, and Powerand Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). See also Patricia
Cronin, “What a Girl Wants,” Art Journal Winter 2001, p. 90–97.

body’s ever done this before on this scale with this image. I reallyneeded it to exist.
Grand Arts has its own sculpture studio but also funds projects
created at other locations. Past artists include Glenn Goldberg,
Alice Aycock, Kimberly Austin, Beth B, Tim Rollins & K.O.S.,
Isaac Julien, Dennis Oppenheim, Troy Richards, Jamex & Einarde la Torre, Roxy Paine, ChanSchatz, and Chris Larson. In 2003,
the exhibition schedule features Sam Easterson, Ian Dawson,
Teresita Fernandez, Catherine Chalmers, and Allan McCollum. Interested artists may contact www.grandarts.com for more
information.
Jan Garden Castro is author/curator of Sonia Delaunay: La
Moderne and author of The Last Frontier and The Art & Life ofGeorgia O’Keeffe.

2 See Julia Markus, Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hiddenin the Shadow of Convention and Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2000), p. 27.