The artist symbolizes the spirit of life as a winged Nordic female. This statue served as a working model for a larger sculpture contained within the Spencer Trask Memorial at Saratoga Spings, New York. Unfortunately, the spirit of death was also abroad in the year of 1914. Probably the most enduringly grievous casualities of the First Great Fratricidal War were psychological. The West suffered a loss of idealism and collective self-confidence, expressed most acutely in the visual arts.
All art is a form of propaganda.
Art, along with politics and religion, disseminates an ideology, whether the artist is conscious of it or not. Art which idealises Nordic beauty and moral values strengthens our community. Nihilistic art weakens it. Today few writers pay explicit tribute to the Northern aesthetic, but thousands of pornographers and admen pay an implicit and backhanded tribute to Northern beauty by exploiting the ideal for fun and profit. If any are created they will have to search long, hard and deep for their ennobling inspiration and character forming ideals.