The Sculpture at the End of the Fire

The Great Chicago Fire finally burned itself out on October 10, 1871. The exact northern end point of the fire is a matter of conjecture. Most detailed maps show it stopped at just about the spot where the Peggy Notebaert Museum is today.

If you’ve been on any of my Lincoln Park public art tours you’ll know that those tours always start very near that point. We begin at a remarkable silver obelisk-like sculpture standing on a small grass plot at the northeast corner of Fullerton Avenue and North Cannon Drive, just across from the lawn south of the Notebaert Museum.

The sculpture, by Ellsworth Kelly, has two names. Its official name is Curve XXII. But most people know it as “I Will.”

“I Will.” A Chicago motto. Some will tell you that it’s the motto that the people of Chicago adopted immediately after the fire, indicating that Chicago would rise again. But “I Will” did not get associated with the fire until 21 years afterward. It actually arose from a newspaper contest prior to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. According to the Chicago History Museum:

“In 1892, as planning and building the World’s Columbian Exposition advanced, the Chicago Inter-Ocean newspaper mounted a competition to identify a symbol that would embody the city’s spirit and energy. Thirty-three-year-old Charles Holloway won for his sketch of a woman wearing a phoenix with its wings outstretched for a crown and a breastplate that read “I Will.” His design, transformed into a plaster bust in 1893 by sculptor J. Fielde, combines the persistence and determination shown by Chicago after the fire of 1871. Chicagoans extended the “I Will” spirit beyond the fair and used it as a rallying cry to address some urban challenges in the last decade of the nineteenth century.” (1)

So, in fact, the motto was a latter-day populist catch-phrase, the call of a new generation to emulate the perceived spirit of its forebears. It’s unlikely that the Chicago Inter-Ocean expected the phrase to live on. But it has.

The plaster bust that Norwegian-American sculptor Jacob Henrik Gerhard Fjelde derived from Holloway’s sketch is in the collection of the Chicago History Museum:

Charles Holloway (1859 – 1941) himself was, among other things, a muralist. He painted the original mural on the proscenium arch of the Auditorium Theater. Variations of his “I Will” drawing “were used in advertisements and cartoons and it inspired the central figure in Henry Hering’s [1928] relief Regeneration on the Michigan Avenue bridge house,” according to art bloggers Wendy and Christine Badowski Koenig. (2)

So why, 90 years after Holloway’s sketch and  50-plus years after Regeneration, did a sculpture get planted on the spot where the Great Fire ended?

According to the Chicago Park District, “In 1976, after the Chicago Park District moved the Carl von Linné Monument from the corner of Fullerton Avenue and Stockton Drive to the Midway Plaisance, Cindy Mitchell, a founding member of the Friends of the Parks was determined to have a new sculpture installed in Lincoln Park. At that time, no new sculptures or monuments had been erected in any of Chicago’s parks for almost twenty-five years. The Friends of the Parks received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the project. A jury which included art patron Lewis Manilow, artist and collector Muriel Newman, and architect Walter Netsch selected Ellsworth Kelly, an American painter and sculptor known for minimalism and the expression of pure forms, to create the new Lincoln Park artwork.”

The group raised more than $100,000 for the project. Kelly did not accept a fee for his design and Paschen Construction donated its services in building the foundation and installing the monument. At the dedication on November 8, 1981, Kelly explained that he had watched the busy intersection, bustling with joggers, bicyclists, parents with strollers, and drivers and he selected a form that they could take in without breaking their pace.

Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015) studied art at the Pratt Institute and developed metalworking techniques as an army engineer in World War II. After the war, the G.I. Bill allowed him to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Kelly returned to America and began making his earliest freestanding sculptures in 1958. In the 1970s he began producing a series of totemic sculptures in aluminum and steel. Chicago’s Curve XXII was his first major commission for an outdoor sculpture. For decades, Kelly explored curving forms through his sculptures, paintings, and lithographs. Several examples of his explorations of the curve can be seen at The Art Institute of Chicago, including the large White Curve on the south wall of the Modern Wing Pritzker Garden and the six Chicago Panels in Gallery 261, the large open corridor on the way to Regenstein Hall.

The spirit and symbolism of the motto “I Will” have been pervasive. When the fourth star was added to the Chicago flag in 1933,  each of the points of the star was intended to represent a significant attribute of  the city, one of them the “I Will” motto. As recently as 2005, the motto morphed into “We Will,” the title of Richard Hunt’s monumental work on Randolph Street, just west of the Cultural Center. While the title of Hunt’s work pays homage to the old motto, the sculpture does not refer directly to the Great Fire (despite its looking like a large flame). Instead it represents Mr. Hunt’s sense that Chicago can and does get things done by working together toward common goals. (3)

Perhaps Kelly did not intend his Curve XXII to symbolize the end of the Great Fire. Perhaps it really was simply a diversion for “joggers, bicyclists, parents with strollers, and drivers.” But there it is at the place where the embers died. There the Friends of the Park did, indeed, place it. There it became known as “I Will.”  Places can gain power and meaning from the art that’s in them. Art can gain power and meaning from where it is placed. That we experience that power and meaning from a pure abstraction makes it all the more remarkable.

NOTES

(1)
http://digitalcollection.chicagohistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16029coll3/id/1946)
(2) http://chicagopublicart.blogspot.com/search?q=regeneration
(3) Undated interview of Richard Howard Hunt by Ed McDevitt

© Edmund J. McDevitt
January, 2019