PPIE

As with the other three books in Paul Elder’s quartet of formal books on the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition (1915) consists primarily of tipped-in photographs with accompanying descriptive text. A. Stirling Calder, the “Acting Chief of Sculpture of the Exposition,” has name is on the cover, but his contribution consists of a ten-page Introduction. All of the other text is by author Stella Perry.

Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945) was an American sculptor and educator. He was the son of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, known for his sculptures in Philadelphia City Hall, and the father of Alexander Calder, inventor of the mobile. Calder created many pieces for the Fair, including the well-known “Star Maiden,” which curiously does not appear in this book. The model for Star Maiden was Audrey Munson, who was then at the height of her fame; it has been claimed that she posed for as many as three-quarters of the Fair’s statues. (In 1915, Munson also became the first woman to appear nude in a non-pornographic film.)

Stella George Stern Perry (1877-1956) was an American author, suffragist, and social reformer. She graduated from Barnard College, where she was one of four co-founders of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority. She wrote two children’s books for Paul Elder, Little Bronze Playfellows (1915), and Clever Mouse (1916).

Visitors to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition could not help but be awestruck by the monumental scale of the buildings. It was a Fair of Superlatives: the grounds covered 635 acres, the Palace of Horticulture was the largest dome then in existence (larger than St. Peter’s in Rome), the Tower of Jewels rose 435 feet high–forty-three stories!

The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition (1915), the third in the quartet of Paul Elder’s survey of the PPIE, is a photographic survey of the buildings and gardens.

Louis Christian Mullgardt (1866-1942) was an American architect associated with the San Francisco Bay Area’s Arts & Crafts period, often called the First Bay Tradition. He designed the Court of the Ages at the PPIE, and lobbied hard to save the Fair after it was over. He told the Commonwealth Club that “when the Exposition buildings are torn down, then we will have destroyed one of the greatest architectural units which has ever been created in the history of the world.” Based partly on his work at the Fair, he was chosen to design the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.

Mullgardt is listed as the author, though his content is limited to the dedication, and a half-page “reflection” and a ten-page introduction. The bulk of the book consists of 95 tipped-in photographs with descriptive texts by Maud Raymond and John Hamlin, who are credited only in the colophon.

Maud Mary Wotring was born in Ohio in 1867. She graduated from Hastings College in Hastings, Nebraska in 1890 and taught Greek and Latin at Longmont, Colorado. In 1895 she married Paul Raymond. She was active in Christian missionary work, and in 1913 published The King’s Business: A Study of Increased Efficiency for Women’s Missionary Societies. In 1928 she was still living in San Francisco.

John Harold Hamlin (1880-1951) was an author active from the 1920s into the 1940s. He wrote fiction, usually with a Western theme, for both juveniles and adults.

While Eugen Neuhaus’s Art of the Exposition viewed the Panama-Pacific International Exposition as a whole, in his companion volume Galleries of the Exposition, he focused on the paintings in the Palace of Fine Arts. Neuhaus’s goal is nothing less than a comprehensive guide to the galleries:

It is certainly no small task to enjoy a large exhibit like ours and to preserve one’s peace of mind. The purpose of these pages is to assist in guiding the uninitiated, in the his visit and in retrospect, without depriving him of the pleasure of personal observation and investigation. It is not to be expected that all pictures exhibited should be of a superior kind. If so, we should never be able to learn the recognize the good among the bad.

Unlike museums today, it would seem there was little or no interpretive material in the galleries themselves, else guides like Neuhaus’s would hardly be necessary. Neuhaus moves from the European galleries, organized by country, into the American ones, each devoted to a particular artist. He likes the Impressionists (“According to the form of their colour dots they were called pointillistes… The service of these men to art can never be estimated too highly.”) but not the modern Japanese artists (“Why they want to divorce themselves from the traditions of their forefathers seems incomprehensible.”).

Neuhaus reserves his highest praise for James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and William Keith (“some of his best things are gems in easy-flowing methods of painting which the best men of the Barbizon school seldom approached”).