Haunting the Stone

 The birth, death, and resurrection of Gutzon Borglum’s angels.

By Natalie Buttner 

Illustration by Audrey Wang

The ornate facade of St. John the Divine is populated by a lavish community of statues. Angels, apostles, patriarchs, and prophets wrapped in gray robes are frozen in place, enacting the more theatrical moments in Holy Writ. The style is inconsistent, indicative of a diversity of sculptors and visions for the Cathedral. The arched doors are centered on a marble statue of St. John himself, portrayed looking towards God’s Kingdom, which lies somewhere down West 112th street. 

Another set of figures often reside on the steps below them: smokers, Columbia students, beleaguered tourists, and those waiting for appointments at Mount Sinai. I find myself on those steps often. The Cathedral is a wonderful place for quiet contemplation and writing. And recently, I’ve been gripped by an investigation into a crime over 100 years old. 

In October 1905, esteemed sculptor Gutzon Borglum stormed up those same stairs and into the Cathedral. There, he smashed to pieces two marble angels of his own creation, commissioned by the church. Allegedly. 

The first victim was the The Angel of the Annunciation, who revealed to Mary that she would give birth to Jesus. The second was the Angel of the Resurrection, a representative of those involved in Jesus’ rising from the dead. The destruction of the Angels was chronicled in two articles published in The New York Times shortly after. “I felt like a murderer,” Borglum said in the Times article, “but that was the only thing to do under the circumstances.”

The problem with the Angels was their gender. They had women’s faces and breasts, though Borlum claimed to have obscured their womanly bodies with sculpted fabric, modestly draped. A member of the clergy pointed out that the Angels were meant to represent Gabriel and Michael, both male angels. The church requested that the Angels be remade in a more masculine portrayal. Borglum refused, and subsequently destroyed the sculptures to prevent them from being resold by the Cathedral. He remodeled the Angels in the image of men shortly after. 

“They belonged to me in the sense that they could not be sold for other purposes,” he said, “they did not belong to me in the sense that I could not take them away from the Cathedral.” 

Where did Borglum encounter his first angel? I have been an angel myself, in an annual Christmas nativity, with all the four-year-old girls in my congregation. The little boys were shepherds. The casting was certainly a moment of gender assertion, quickly challenged the next year when we were collectively promoted to farm animals. 

Squirming beneath my tinsel halo, just to the left of the perhaps age-accurate middle schooler playing Mary of Nazareth, I watched the Angel Gabriel emerge from a balcony above and behind the audience. The Angel of the Annunciation was always played by the teenage girl with the most vocal talent. She sang a stirring tune about virgin conception while her peers, who had fallen off the narrowing pyramid of nativity roles, accompanied her on the handbells. 

Borlum saw the artist as crucial to the discernment of the divine. He defended his right to determine the image of angels to an artists' salon, the summary of whose conversation was published in the short-lived Chicago art journal, Brush and Pencil:

“Do you mean to tell me, the Sculptor thundered, that poets, and painters, and sculptors, and their ilk, who dream dreams and see visions in their efforts, their passion to glorify life with the beautiful, the ideal, don’t know more about the angelic than the pastors of churches, who deliver monologues on duty and damnation, preach the crucifixion of the flesh, and sanctify death with the inventions of theology?”

Borglum’s rabid idealism made him the center of controversy time and time again. The sculptor was born to Danish Mormon polygamists in a Frontier place that we now know as Idaho, but was then Utah. He was raised primarily in Nebraska. Borglum learned to paint and sculpt in California, and later in Paris. After beginning his career in Europe, he returned to the United States, where he would spend the rest of his life chiselling out what he had been taught to believe was worth setting in stone.

After making a name for himself in New York, Borglum left 1915 for Georgia when he was asked to build a confederate memorial on Stonewall Mountain. The project was in part funded by the Ku Klux Klan, with whom Borlum had strong affiliations. After a conflict with the project’s sponsors, Borlum smashed his models for the memorial and fled the state. After this betrayal, his work on the mountain was blasted away. The memorial was completed in 1964. Many of Borglum’s ideas remain in the final carving, portraying confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson on horseback—figures that haunt Georgia to this day. 

However, articles about Borlum written after 1927 identify him only in relation to his most famous creation: Mount Rushmore. Borlum would spend the final 14 years of his life directing the construction of this colossal monument to American leadership, blasting away sacred Sioux land with abandon. 

His conviction regarding the gender presentation of the Angels of Resurrection and Annunciation was not born out of a progressive reimagining of the cannon, but his belief that people had roles and limitations. “I can’t think the man idea into those angels, especially into the Angel of the Annunciation,” he said to the Times. “It seems to me that it is repugnant to every gentlemanly sense to conceive of a man performing that role. The idea is such a delicate one that I made the figure of even the woman shrink back after she had told the Virgin.”Borlum brought a shard of an angel's face to the interview where he made his case for the female angel. “In the angel idea there is something pure and spiritual and clearly beautiful which is more compatible with a woman than with a man.” Borglum said to The New York Times. “And so artists, unanimously, so far as I know, while repressing sex, have inevitably given to angels the face, the form, and the indefinable atmosphere of woman.”

In his biography, Give the Man Room; The Story of Gutzon Borglum, Robert J. Casey and Mary Borglum write that the smashing of the Angels was a myth, souped up by the New York City tabloids. There is no mention of the smashed Angels in the signs that accompany his other statues in St. John. In the biography, admittedly co-authored by his widow, Borglum simply edits the soft clay of the statues with harder features. The authors assert that any portrayal of Borglum as an artist with a fearsome temper confused the sculptor, who simply saw himself as “saltily vigorous in defense of what he decided was right.” 

I formed and reformed my understanding of my suspect: Borlum the impassioned artist, Borglum the killer, Borglum the misunderstood, Borglum the bigot, Borglum the mover of mountains. 

After a tour of the Cathedral, I ask my group’s guide, Gary, about my crime scene. He leads me to a set of 20 Borglum angels. The angels are androgynous, a mishmash of stereotypically male and female traits: long hair tied back, masculine clothing, soft facial features.

Gary is clearly impressed with Borglum’s cunning, sidesteping the controversy over whether angels should be male or female in a move that appears to be progressive. Gary is also in a rush to leave the cathedral, and I let him go, leaving me in confusion. Here are 20 aggressively androgynous angels, but where are the offensively feminine angels? Or the masculine angels replacing the 20 Borglum destroyed?

Standing face to face with the angles, I dream of an easy out. I crave what others have craved before: someone to come down from the sky and tell me the truth. I imagine the ghosts of Borglum’s women angels descending to give me the tale of their death, raising their voices accompanied by a holy host of handbells. 

…

Someone is singing in the nave of the cathedral. A man in a wheelchair sits with his head bent low over a huddle of memorial candles. His tune is cheerful; the scene is unbearably drear. The acoustics of the cathedral carry his mournful voice all the way to where I am racing around the chapels, a screenshot of the ebook of A Guide to the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in the City of New York in hand. 

With the help of my written guide, I do my best to locate the Angels of the Annunciation and Resurrection, tucked into the upper wall of the Chapel of St. Savior. They have thick beards and are dressed in masculine robes. Wherever the feminine angels lie—shattered and plowed into the earth, or within their new masculine counterparts—these are the angels that remain with us. 

Above the altar at the end of the Chapel of St. Savior is another statue that has caused gender-chaos in the church. Christa depicts a female Jesus Christ, a woman’s naked body with arms splayed open in the crucifixion. She was sculpted in clay and cast in bronze in the mid 1970s by Edwina Sandys for the United Nations’ Decade for Women. When the statue was first displayed in the Cathedral in 1984, the church received so much hate mail accusing the statue of desecration that Sandys was ultimately asked to take the statue back. But what was once sacrilege has become more acceptable. Christa returned to the Cathedral in 2016.

In the Chapel next door, Borglum’s statues of important British Theologians line the walls. But the centerpiece of this chapel is Keith Haring’s Life of Christ triptych. The altarpiece was his last piece, finished just weeks before he died of AIDS in February of 1990. Haring’s angels are androgynous figures too, flitting about the sky. Like Borglum’s angels, these ones capture an image of holy messengers. They are hopeful, brave angels, imagined as Haring approached death. 

At night, when the memorial candles have drowned in their own wax, the statues wait together unbothered by the dark. I imagine Sandys’ Christa, Haring’s Life of Christ, and Borgulm’s Angels are all friends, evidence from the violent struggles of the past over what should be remembered, and what does or doesn’t get to be imagined as divine. They await the controversial angels of the present, who perhaps are still being immortalized in strong materials by flawed artists trying, and failing, to deliver truth.