THE NEW CRITERION, December 2024
On American medallic art
How did America’s Gilded Age leave its most enduring mark? Through its architecture? Its institutions? By the numbers, the age’s most lasting currency has been its coins and medals. Consider the penny. The sculptor Victor David Brenner designed the Lincoln cent in 1909. Since then, the U.S. Mint has produced nearly five hundred billion pennies featuring Brenner’s obverse design. On August 6, 2012, one such coin minted in 1909, a rare variety featuring Brenner’s initials, touched down on the planet Mars as a passenger on the Curiosity mission. Since the lander used the penny as a calibration target, what is surely mankind’s most remote work of bas-relief sculpture became covered in Martian dust. Closer to home, but equally remote and dust-covered, there is probably a Lincoln cent in the pocket or couch cushion of every American. The New York Times Magazine recently saw fit to publish a cover story slamming the penny’s obsolescence, but no consideration was given to the astonishing success of its design. In the history of the world, no other work of sculpture has been as ubiquitous.
The Lincoln cent is one of the last circulating examples of President Theodore Roosevelt’s direct efforts to extend his era’s aesthetic aspirations to the art of American coinage. Brenner’s penny, with its crisply articulated profile of the sixteenth president, based on an 1864 photograph by Mathew Brady, was the first American coin to depict a historical figure. It replaced James Barton Longacre’s comparatively primitive Indian Head design of 1859—of which the numismatist Cornelius Vermeule (the father of the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule) said, “Great art the coin was not.”
The penny became the most widespread example of the transformation of American numismatics in the early twentieth century. “I think the state of our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness,” Roosevelt wrote in 1904 to his treasury secretary, Leslie Mortier Shaw. “Would it be possible, without asking permission of Congress, to employ a man like Saint-Gaudens to give us a coinage that would have some beauty?” A year later, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Dublin-born pioneer of the American Beaux-Arts, working with Adolph A. Weinman, designed the medal for Roosevelt’s second inauguration and established a unique working relationship with the president. “I am very, very proud at having Saint-Gaudens connected in any way with my administration,” the president wrote to the cosmopolitan artist Francis D. Millet, who had suggested the commission and was pushing for an overhaul of American coinage. Roosevelt called the medal “the most satisfactory thing imaginable.” Now in his first full term, the president set his sights on the one-cent piece and gold coinage, to which changes could be made with less legislative oversight compared to other denominations. “I suppose I shall be impeached for it in Congress,” he wrote to Saint-Gaudens, who had been running up against the mint’s uninspiring designs for decades, “but I shall regard that as a very cheap payment.”
The U.S. penny aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover in Gale Crater on Mars. Photo: Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), courtesy of NASA.
Roosevelt pitted Saint-Gaudens against Charles E. Barber, the U.S. Mint’s chief engraver, who had designed much of the “atrocious hideousness” then in circulation. Dying of cancer at his studio in Cornish, New Hampshire, Saint-Gaudens completed his Indian Head gold eagle (pulled together from other designs) and his double eagle in 1907, in the last year of his life. With a walking Liberty based on both the Nike of Samothrace and his own William Tecumseh Sherman monument in New York’s Grand Army Plaza on the obverse, and an eagle flying above a radiating sun on the reverse, Saint-Gaudens’s luminous double eagle in particular reflected the luster of its material and became one of the country’s most revered coins. Roosevelt’s beautification of America’s gold coinage not only set a new standard for numismatics. It also reinvigorated the gold standard. The novel design, striding forward, stood in direct opposition to the bimetallism advocated by William Jennings Bryan bearing his populist “cross of gold.”
Sculptors close to Saint-Gaudens, along with others who like him studied and exhibited in Paris, such as Brenner, soon set upon redesigning America’s other coinage: in addition to the Lincoln cent, there was Bela Lyon Pratt with his Indian Head quarter eagle and half eagle in 1908; James Earle Fraser with his Buffalo nickel in 1913; Adolph A. Weinman with his Mercury dime (which in fact depicted a winged Liberty) and walking Liberty half dollar in 1916; Hermon Atkins MacNeil with his standing Liberty quarter dollar that same year; and Anthony de Francisci with his Peace dollar in 1921. The historian Roger W. Burdette covers these developments in Renaissance of American Coinage, his three-volume series on early twentieth-century numismatics. Thayer Tolles writes about the Barber–Saint-Gaudens rivalry in Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Michael F. Moran focuses on the Roosevelt–Saint‐Gaudens collaboration in his book Striking Change.
All of these sculptors applied the lessons of the Beaux-Arts to American coinage, with stylized forms and deep reliefs modeled through classical training. At the same time, but in efforts far less appreciated today, these sculptors also turned their attention to the design of American medals. As larger, non-circulating, non-stackable objects that can be treated more like sculpture, medals can often display even more artistic innovation than coins due to their wider expressive range.
Medallic art, now regarded by some as a division of “exonumia” (for “outside of coins”), has a lineage that goes back to the portrait medals of the Italian Renaissance. Working in Ferrara for the Este court, Antonio di Puccio Pisano, better known as Pisanello, inaugurated the tradition of European medals in the fifteenth century by casting over two dozen of his designs, drawing influence from Roman and Etruscan bas-relief portraiture. Known as medallions in their largest sizes, through their association with currency—as coin-like objects that could be held or worn—such medals were created to reflect the value of those depicted. Through its exhibition and acquisition of the Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher Collection of portrait medals, New York’s Frick Collection has recently done much to reveal the breadth of European medallic art history while giving these at-times-overlooked objects a renewed evaluation on the level of painting and sculpture.
For many observers, medals have fallen somewhere between fine art and coinage, with the obverse not knowing what to make of the reverse. But medals should please both concerns. Their size, forms, and patinations all contribute to their artistry, while their shape, marks, and serialization still speak to the technical world of coins (usually with much greater rarity than currency). Examples of medallic art can be found in major museum collections alongside the other art and sculpture of their designers. Nevertheless, their exchange still tends to be facilitated by coin dealers (many now working through eBay) and numismatic auction houses such as Stack’s Bowers, which hosts regular sales of medallic exonumia labeled under “numismatic Americana.” The study and conservation of medals has centered around the American Numismatic Society, founded in New York in 1858, while medallic artists have historically been associated with the National Sculpture Society, the National Academy of Design, the National Arts Club, the Grolier Club, and the Century Association.
Society of Medalists issues. Photo courtesy of medallicartcollector.com.
Through its use in commemoration—in impressing tangible monuments into fine metal—a rich medallic tradition speaks to the health of a culture. Medals leave a lasting record of a civilization’s military, athletic, artistic, scholastic, and agricultural achievements. They reflect the values placed on events and figures. They speak to the weight of their depictions through their tangible mass. They also reveal a particular artistry in their deployment of letters, numbers, and symbols as they tell a concise story, usually in two acts, through the flip of their front and back faces—their heads-and-tails designs.
Unlike many other works of art, medals are also intended for personal contemplation. They are meant to be given, held, collected, and privately revered. At the same time, minted in multiples, medals are enduring and accessible to a wider audience. Through their reduction of works of sculpture to portable size, they provide unique access to artistry, with sculptors exploring the objects’ diminutive possibilities. As I sought out a handful of American art medals while laid up with a broken ankle, in their tactile presence, I discovered nothing less than a museum in miniature.
The modern medal presents its miniature world by way of a key French invention: the Janvier Reducing Machine. Patented by the French engraver Victor Janvier in 1899, this pantograph lathe can scan a much larger sculptural prototype and reduce its forms with astonishing accuracy onto a steel die, which is then used to strike a coin or medal. The Janvier machine was not the first pantograph lathe in existence, but its great efficiency and accuracy meant that coin designers and medallic artists could for the first time impose their sculptural vision without the imposition of engravers and diesinkers.
The first Janvier came to America not through the U.S. Mint but rather through a private New York firm that went on to play a central role in twentieth century medal production: the Medallic Art Company, popularly known as MACO. In 1902, an engraver named Henri Weil became familiar with the Janvier machine’s operations while in Paris and imported one for his work with Deitsch Brothers, a ladies’ handbag company, at first to create medallic ornaments for its leather designs. When such ornaments soon fell out of fashion, Weil began promoting his reduction services to sculptors and, along with his brother Felix, spun off operations into a stand-alone company. So crucial was the arrival of this Janvier—and so resistant was Barber as the government’s chief engraver—that Saint-Gaudens’s Benjamin Franklin bicentennial medal, his double-eagle design, and Brenner’s Lincoln cent were all only able to be finalized once they had passed through initial reduction stages with Weil in New York.
The obverse of the James H. Hyde Medallion on the Janvier reduction machine at the Medallic Art Company. Photo courtesy of the American Numismatic Society.
In the nineteenth century, private firms such as Gorham in Providence, Davison’s in Philadelphia, Green Duck in Chicago, Whitehead & Hoag in Newark, and Tiffany in New York were producing a wide selection of commissioned medals. With the Janvier, however, the Weils could appeal directly to sculptors and a growing interest in medallic art for art’s sake. Numismatic societies in Europe were already promoting their own art medals—works created for aesthetic appreciation instead of any particular commemoration, and usually produced through subscription rather than commission. Such organizations included the Art Union of London, the Société hollandaise-belge des Amis de la médaille d’art in Brussels, the Österreichische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Medaillenkunst und Kleinplastik in Vienna, and the Société des Amis de la médaille française in Paris. By the turn of the century, as these medals were collected and exhibited in the United States, artists and patrons looked to create an American counterpart.
Through his work on the Lincoln cent, Henri Weil befriended the Lincoln collector Robert Hewitt Jr. Together with Charles de Kay, the poet and newspaper editor who helped found several New York cultural institutions, in 1909 Hewitt and Weil launched the short-lived Circle of Friends of the Medallion. With two medals a year, each inserted in the binding of a booklet issued to some five hundred subscribers through 1915, the series alternated between historical and philosophical subjects and involved the work of prominent sculptors including John Flanagan (Hudson–Fulton Celebration, cof 1, 1909), Brenner (Motherhood, cof 4, 1911), and Louis Potter (Abdul Baha, cof 7, 1912). The Ocean (cof 8, 1913), by Sigurd Neandross, is arguably the most striking and strange of the series for its contrast between obverse and reverse: on one side, a top-down image of two figures caught in a maelstrom; on the other, a sea-god with his mouth on the water’s horizon line. In its swirling energy and centripetal force, the design makes the most of the medal’s circular shape.
Due to a financial dispute between Deitsch and the Weils, the edge marks of the Medallic Art Company only appear at the beginning and end of this series, as much of the production for the Friends of the Medallion went to Joseph K. Davison’s Sons in Philadelphia. In 1919, an investor named Clyde Curle Trees entered the MACO partnership and expanded the New York company into a fully fledged private mint that could attract sculptural talent while also producing much of the last century’s run of American medals.
In the late 1920s, Trees commissioned a film featuring the sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser called The Medal Maker. The film depicted Fraser in her New York studio creating the Special Medal of Honor for the National Sculpture Society (her design is used for the award to this day). At a “sculptors dinner” in 1937, MACO first screened this movie for some seventy-five attendees, whom the company squeezed in among the machinery in what was at the time its Manhattan workshop, a small, two-story building at 210 East Fifty-first Street, just east of Third Avenue, which still stands.
The dinner and movie celebrated American medal-making at the height of its achievements. Medallic Art created a bas-relief plaquette with a profile of Saint-Gaudens by John Flanagan as the night’s parting gift for each guest—although a visit by the New York Police Department, on the trail of a murder suspect allegedly “dressed like a sculptor,” left another impression on the diners as they were detained for questioning.
In the 1990s, by then operating out of South Dakota and Nevada, MACO unearthed this film and brought in Elizabeth Jones, the former chief engraver of the U.S. Mint, to add her narration to the silent documentary and the events surrounding its first screening. The American Numismatic Society hosts a remastered version of this documentary on YouTube as one of the assets the society acquired through its purchase of MACO’s extensive archives and intellectual property—the largest acquisition in the organization’s history—following a series of bankruptcies of the 113-year-old company in 2018.
The Medal Maker imparts a special appreciation for the many steps required to bring a medal from inception to completion—a remarkable combination of art, craft, and machinery all working together at the highest levels. In the film, Fraser begins her medal with pencil sketches. She distills the design down to its essential symbols and letterforms: for the obverse, a male nude, representing the master sculptor, forming the hoof of Pegasus with a mallet and chisel; on the reverse, the lettering of the award along with an image of a flame.
To start the process of transforming her drawing into three dimensions, Fraser smooths out a round, ten-inch cake of oil-based plastiline on a shellacked wooden board. (Other metallic sculptors might similarly begin with a concave plaster disk.) Onto this soft cylinder Fraser enlarges and transfers her sketches with dividers by incising the clay with a wooden stylus. She then adds clay pellets and smoothes them over with her fingers, slowly building up the surface relief. In the meantime, posed in front of her worktable, Fraser’s studio assistant does double duty as her live model, here shown wearing leopard-print briefs as he holds a hammer and chisel in a frozen pose.
Once the obverse relief is finished, looking like a much larger version of the front side of her proposed model, Fraser adds letters to her reverse design. While some medalists use molds to create lettering, or in earlier times would have stamped small letters directly onto a die, Fraser instead rolls out thin ropes of clay and shapes her letterforms on the large disk by hand. By tradition, medallic lettering appears uppercase, although this was one of those rules that the sculptor Paul Manship went on to break.
With the clay patterns for the two sides of the medal complete, Fraser’s studio assistant (now wearing clothes) prepares to cast each in plaster. He fashions a thin strip of metal around the clay to form a fence. He then spatulates, or stirs without introducing bubbles, a mixture of plaster and water, which he brushes and pours over the clay. This plaster creates the first negative impression of the design. Since air bubbles are the enemy of an accurate transfer, the assistant blows on the drying plaster to pop them. A vibrating table can also be used to shake air bubbles to the surface.
The plaster warms from the chemical reaction as it dries. Once it has cooled, the assistant lifts the plaster off the clay. Fraser repairs any infidelities in this cast so her assistant can create a second set of plaster patterns, this time as positive impressions of the negative. To keep the wet plaster of this next positive cast from sticking to the negative mold, like buttering a pan, the assistant brushes a thin layer of vegetable oil on the dry plaster surface (in later years, this became a spray of silicone).
Again, once this new positive plaster is dry and separated from its negative pattern, Fraser makes final fixes and adjustments to these impressions. The next step involves transferring the positive plaster patterns back into negative form, but this time into a much more durable material. In the film, Fraser turns to the traditional technique of casting her plasters into metal at New York’s Roman Bronze Works. By the 1930s, for this step, many other medallic artists and mint designers had switched over to using what are known as galvanos. These copper encrustations are formed on the surface of the plasters—which have been soaked in beeswax and dusted with copper—through electrolysis. The process, done on site at the medal press, creates negative impressions of plaster patterns that are accurate down to the molecule.
The shipping & receiving dock of the Medallic Art Company ca. 1947–51. Photo courtesy of the American Numismatic Society.
Whether cast or electroformed, these metal transfers, called die shells, provide the final patterns for the creation of the small medallic dies—the forms that are used to shape the medals under intense pressure. Earlier medals, including Renaissance portrait medals, were usually cast in a foundry. Later on, once machinery could impose the pressures necessary to strike the blank bronze disks called planchets, die presses similar to coinage mints became the standard for medal production.
The final step in getting Fraser’s design into these medal presses is to use her large die shells to serve as the models for the smaller steel dies. For this process, The Medal Maker shows the Janvier Reducing Machine in action. As the die shell slowly rotates on one side of the machine, a tracing point reads the shell like a phonograph record. Attached to this point by a beam, and calibrated to reduce the die-shell forms by a factor adjustable from ten-to-one to three-to-one, a lathe cuts into a rotating steel cylinder called the die blank. As oil is played over the turning steel to remove metal shavings and lubricate the cutting bit, the process gets repeated three times with ever finer tools. Once this engraving is complete, the steel dies are heated, or “annealed,” to harden them.
Only now are Fraser’s designs ready to be struck into medals, as the Janvier reduction process has sculpted her forms in minute detail, allowing for the creation of what will become sculptures in miniature. Planchet disks, the medals’ raw material, are cut from strips of bronze by a four-hundred-ton press and annealed with a blowtorch to soften them (such heating has an opposite effect on bronze compared to iron). The planchets are then placed by a machinist one by one in the thousand-ton press—its gears and belts filling the workshop—where they are struck and annealed over a dozen different times. Through repeated striking and annealing, the bronze reliefs finally take their form on each side of the medal.
Unlike with a smaller and flatter coin, which is usually struck only once and then considered complete, bronze medals go through a variety of finishing stages after repeated striking to create their handcrafted patinas. Following the die press, patineurs blast fine sand over the surfaces of the medals to give them a microscopic roughness. They then expose the medals to chemicals such as ammonium sulfide that react with the bronze in various ways. Bronze medalists have dozens of patinations to choose from, with the surface treatment just as artistically determined as the relief itself. Once the bronze is darkened, the patineur often brushes and brightens the higher surfaces of the relief with a pumice solution to create contrast with the darkened areas and emphasize the three-dimensional forms. A spray of lacquer then locks these handmade finishes in place.
Afinal segment of The Medal Maker features Daniel Chester French receiving Laura Gardin Fraser’s Sculpture Society medal as Adolph A. Weinman, James Earle Fraser (Laura’s husband), Hermon Atkins MacNeil, and Herbert Adams look on. With the exception of French, who died in 1931, just after this film was created, all of these sculptors went on to play significant roles in the Society of Medalists, a follow-up to the Friends of the Medallion and America’s longest running series of art medals, which MACO inaugurated under the advisement of the philanthropist George D. Pratt at the same time this film was made.
With 128 regular issues created over sixty-five years—two a year, each roughly three inches in diameter, available at the start for eight dollars annually by subscription, always (for its first decades, at least) by a different sculptor—the Society of Medalists tested the limits of medallic art while presenting a who’s who of twentieth-century American sculpture. Beginning in 1930 at the height of the Depression, continuing through the Second World War, and running through the full length of the Cold War, only ending in 1995, the series reflected the concerns, manners, and mores of American society in miniature. Obliquely at times, more directly at others, its artists found remarkably varied ways to convey meaning in objects meant for the palm of the hand. The definitive book on both the Friends of the Medallion and the Society of Medalists is American Art Medals, 1909–1995, by David Thomason Alexander.
Paul Manship, Hail to Dionysus, 1930, Bronze, Society of Medalists Issue 2.
The issues quickly revealed how the Society of Medalists looked to exceed the accomplishments of the Friends of the Medallion, in particular through a range of patination. Sculpture is an art form in two dimensions as much as three. While almost all composed in bronze, the society’s medals employed a variety of surface treatments, which could range within a single design and across MACO’s reissues struck at its Danbury plant. At their best these surfaces accentuated the subjects of the compositions: the golden mist of Laura Gardin Fraser’s Hunter–Ruffed Grouse (SOM 1, 1930); the wine-dark red of Paul Manship’s Hail to Dionysus (SOM 2, 1930); the green rustication of Hermon MacNeil’s Hopi Prayer for Rain (SOM 3, 1931). In Aesop’s Fables, by Edmond Amateis (SOM 21, 1940), mirrorlike silver plating reflects the relief of a dog who loses his food while contemplating his own image. Frank Eliscu’s Sea Treasures (SOM 70, 1964) features a green patina and bowl-like design that appear to submerge its depiction of marine life and diver. The experimental nature of the series only expanded in its later years, in particular teasing out the relationship of the medals’ obverse and reverse. Just as the two figures of Robert Ingersoll Aitken’s Omnia Vincit Amor (SOM 15, 1937) appear to embrace through the surface of the medal, Cat and Mouse by Robert A. Weinman (SOM 115, 1987), the son of the Gilded Age sculptor and thirty-ninth society medalist, appear to chase each other around a block of Swiss cheese.
In an article of January 8, 1931, titled “God of Wine Stirs Medalists’ Society,” The New York Times noted how this “society was formed more than a year ago for the promotion of art by distributing small pieces of bas-relief sculpture, to make it possible for the man of small means to have works of art in his home.” Manship was then quoted in comment on the controversy he had caused by choosing Dionysus for his theme at the height of Prohibition: “The medal is not conventional. It is subtly humorous, and is symbolic of a present-day attitude toward certain restraints of the times. Thus it is commemorative of an era.”
Today, as I happily discovered, this Manship medal, as with most of the society’s issues, remains remarkably available for the work of one of the last century’s great sculptors. Turning one over in my hands, appreciating its triumphantly sly design, I could not help but feel like a medalist myself.
