by Steve Szilagyi
A curious part of getting old is seeing people you knew in life turned into bronze statues. You preserve a vivid impression of some laughing, breathing person; they disappear for a while; then they pop up again as a stolid, staring statue. The transition from flesh to effigy can be disquieting. Heroic idealization is out. Too many of today’s statues strain to show their subjects as ordinary people—mannequins on the brink of the uncanny valley. And just to make sure you don’t mistake them for anything grand or lofty, they are placed at or near ground level, so you can stare right into their cold, dead eyes. Where once a pedestal raised a figure into the air like a great, godly hand, many of today’s statues simply stand on the street like day laborers looking for work. The idea, I suppose, is to make them more like the rest of us—but really, what’s so great about the rest of us?
The question of who deserves a public statue creates argument—and even more so, the question of whose should be torn down. To set a figure above the crowd immediately raises people’s hackles. How dare you stand up there, staring down as if you were better than me? Yet some people are better than others, and Central Park’s Literary Walk reminds us of this without fuss. The statues of William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and Sojourner Truth stand on proper pedestals, so that you must raise your face to see them—and so become a child, and experience a child’s sense of awe.
Inviting selfies. For myself, I’m happy to acknowledge that Shakespeare, Scott, and Truth were better people than I. It’s a little harder to summon the same feeling when confronting statues of some contemporaries. There’s a pretty good statue of Willie Nelson in Austin. Set at a decently respectful height, the statue’s warm expression and relaxed pose invite selfies. Across town, Stevie Ray Vaughan cuts a stranger figure—stiff and off balance, as if uncertain whether he belongs in bronze at all. And in Seattle, there’s a grotesque representation of Jimi Hendrix, squatting just above the sidewalk, stroking his guitar. What will future generations make of this? Will they identify him as a cultural force, or simply see an open-mouthed wild man?
My generation has seen fit to honor many of its musical heroes with statues: the Beatles in Liverpool, Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas, and Freddie Mercury in Montreux, Switzerland. Johnny Cash even stands, looking properly monumental, in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol. Nor have we neglected our musclemen.
There’s a statue of Arnold Schwarzenegger outside the convention center in Columbus, Ohio, that celebrates its subject with gleeful shamelessness. The figure stands slightly larger than life, flaunting its monstrous biceps and bulging veins without a trace of irony. Critics have called it shallow and kitschy—and they’re not wrong. But our ancestors from the Pleistocene would understand it instantly. They would peruse those pecs and reverently utter the homo erectus word for “awesome” — and so, similarly, would the humanoids of 2,000 years in the future.
Transformed the world. Something similar can be said about the much-maligned Rocky statue of Sylvester Stallone outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. After being shuffled around the city like an unwelcome guest, Rocky has been settled at a spot in front of the museum, but away from the steps he made famous. Both Schwarzenegger and Stallone are placed on modest pedestals: high enough to keep them clear of the crowd, low enough to admire the thick, sculptural modeling of their bodies. Neither statue has the psychological depth that ancient Greek or Roman sculptors gave their athletes. But their subjects deserve our honor and respect. Despite all their bad movies, Stallone and Schwarzenegger transformed our world. By their example, they launched the fitness revolution of the 1970s and ’80s and got millions of people moving, lifting, reshaping their lives.
Few athletes have as many statues as boxer Joe Louis, who will soon have three in Detroit alone. I’m sorry to note that all the full-figure Louis sculptures viewable online seem to rest on mediocre pedestals. Detroit’s giant effigy of Louis’s fist has no pedestal at all—it hangs between the legs of an awkward pyramidal truss and would have looked a hundred times cooler atop a proper pedestal. (I sometimes wonder if the urge to erect statues of Louis owes anything to the subconscious association with his nickname, “the Bronze Bomber.”)
But one generation’s celebrities are the next generation’s “Who dat?”
For instance, how many of the million or so revelers who gather at the feet of the George M. Cohan statue on Times Square at New Year’s Eve know who he was, or can hum a few bars of “Give My Regards to Broadway”? Yet Cohan’s statue is magnificent, and stands at the perfect height. His figure is relaxed, well-dressed, and oozes confident charm. Future generations may not know who he was, but they’ll know that he mattered. Not at all like the statue of Jimi Hendrix, squatting near the gutter on a Seattle sidewalk.
Finished at the finish line. My awareness of statues and pedestals was recently stirred by a far more modest figure than these: the statue of the late and legendary Fred Lebow, founder of the New York City Marathon, that stands in Central Park.
For most of the year, Lebow’s statue can be seen, set on a low block of stone, near the East 90th Street entrance to Central Park. Every October, it’s moved across the park to the marathon finish line at what used to be the Tavern-on-the-Green, where it watches the runners come home. I wasn’t thinking about statues the day I came across it; I was just out for a walk. But there he was: a man I remembered as he was in life—cheeks flushed from the cold, breath steaming on race mornings—now frozen like the Tin Man.
The shock of that realization gave way to disappointment. The statue is embarrassingly modest. It belongs to that school of sculpture that enshrines not only the man, but his laundry: every seam of his baggy clothes stands out.
If it were up to me, I’d have given him a statue that that captured not his modest appearance, but the movement he set into motion—the energy he helped pour into the culture – something like Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space: a figure in motion, dissolving into speed and spirit, forever surging forward.
Lebow isn’t the only person whom I have seen in both flesh and alloy. There’s the aforementioned Schwarzenegger, Hendrix, and the Beatles (I talked to Willie Nelson on the phone, but that doesn’t count); also Richard Nixon, Pope John Paul II, and Gerald Ford—some closer-up than others.
Baseball star Jackie Robinson has earned a number of bronze likenesses. Family members tell me I was once introduced to Robinson at a civil rights event. But I was too young to remember. (He gave my brothers and me a signed baseball, which we promptly lost.)
The fate of one Jackie Robinson effigy vividly demonstrates the perils of bringing statuary down to earth. In 2024, vandals destroyed a life-sized statue of Robinson in Wichita, Kansas. The Robinson figure was mounted at ground level, with the soles of its feet welded to some kind of hexagon. Vandals sawed the statue off at the ankles, leaving only the shoes behind in poignant remembrance.
City of Presidents. In 2000, the city of Rapid City, South Dakota — as if to spite me, personally — embarked on an endeavor to place bronze statues of every U.S. president here and there on its streets. At eye level. They have commissioned and successfully installed statues of every president up to and including Barack Obama.
Now, before you think that this idea totally smacks of small-down desperation, consider that Rapid City is the closest city to Mount Rushmore, and many of the tourists passing through already have a revealed preference for viewing presidents.
But the placement of the statues has resulted in some comic, and comically desolate juxtapositions. George Washington stands in front of a Starbucks, looking disappointed, as if he’d just learned that he has to make a purchase to use the restroom; and Richard Nixon sits in an armchair, legs crossed, fingers steepled, doing his best to pretend that he doesn’t mind spending eternity beside a fireplug at a dreary urban intersection, with litter blowing around his feet.
As statues have come down to earth, their execution has changed from the heroic to the mundane. Does street-level encounter demand an excess of surface detail? We see jackets, fingernails, and the very aglets of the shoelaces. We can see this on vivid display in the most aggressively detailed statue of all time: Frederick Hart’s Three Soldiers, set near Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial Wall on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Count the curls. From the moment Lin’s wall was unveiled, knuckleheads complained that it was too abstract, too bleak—despite the fact that to read the names, you had to push your way through crowds of weeping veterans. Conservatives called for something more “traditional.” And so, a few years later, a trio of bronze soldiers by sculptor Frederick Hart was added nearby. But there’s nothing traditional about Harts mannequins. Every bullet, every crease of clothing stands out in obnoxious relief, in a uniquely late-twentieth-century way. You can count the curls in the Black soldier’s Afro. “Take that, Maya Lin,” it seems to say.
There’s something of the shrunken head about the fussy, desiccated metal men of our time. It’s not just individual statues that disappoint. It’s the flight from the ideal—the reluctance, even embarrassment, about setting anyone visibly above the crowd.
To accept pedestals is to accept the notion that some people should be honored more than others: for their power, their talent, their courage, their character. It’s an idea that once felt natural, even necessary, to any culture that believed in aspiration. Today, it feels almost indecent. We still cast statues, but we hesitate to raise them. We place our heroes on the sidewalk, shoulder to shoulder with the tourists and pigeons, and tell ourselves we are being humble. But really, we are being small.
As John Updike put it in his essay “The Base Beneath the Figure,” the act of lifting a figure on a base, however slight, asserts that what stands upon it has been “set apart, made special,” and “deserves to be looked at.” To lift something physically is to lift it spiritually. And to refuse to lift it is, in the end, to refuse to lift ourselves.
By the way, I’d like to see a bronze statue of Updike where I once saw him standing, tall and statuesque, in front of the old New Yorker building on 25 West 43rd Street.
Yanked off their pedestals. Of course, not every statue deserves to stay standing. There’s an old, rough justice in seeing the monuments of tyrants brought down. I think of the statues of Lenin that once littered the Soviet Union—stern and brooding, dynamically pointing the way forward. I think of Marx, bursting out of a cloud of ugly hair. I think of the endless bronze parade of the Kim family in North Korea, forever striding forward in what look like Leonid Brezhnev’s old suits. What a sound those portly bodies will make hitting the pavement!
Then there was the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad: the ropes flung over its neck, the lurching fall, the arm still upraised as if waving goodbye. Whatever else it meant, it was unmistakably a moment of release.
Even in our own history, the urge was there. One of the early highlights of the American Revolution was the pulling down of King George III’s equestrian statue at Bowling Green in Manhattan. In more recent years, statues of Confederate generals have been yanked off their pedestals by angry crowds, facing little opposition.
My sympathies go out to the horses caught in these fickle tides of statuary history. It’s a pity we can’t just remove the rider and save the horse—alone on its pedestal, like the magnificent statue of Secretariat at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington (one of a surprising number of Secretariat statues in the U.S.).
Friendly poke in the stomach. Of course, every time I find myself making a grand pronouncement like “Statues belong on pedestals,” a small, snide voice in my head reminds me that one of my own personal favorite statues in the world doesn’t have a pedestal at all. It’s larger than life, but it stands on the floor.
At St. Pancras Station in London, you can walk right up to the bronze figure of Sir John Betjeman—poet, railway enthusiast, and savior of the station—and give him a friendly poke in the stomach. He’s not lifted on a pedestal or set apart behind a fence. He stands among the travelers, coat flapping, hat held to his head, looking up in wonder at the soaring Victorian ironwork he fought so hard to save.
And yet Betjeman doesn’t seem diminished by lacking a pedestal. Partly that’s because he’s not on the station’s ground floor, but up on the upper level, visible from below. In a way, St. Pancras itself is his pedestal—the vast, echoing cathedral of railways that his stubbornness preserved.
And then there’s my favorite public statue of all, tucked away in Gough Square, a mile or so south of St. Pancras: the bronze figure of Hodge, Samuel Johnson’s cat.
Particular tenderness. James Boswell records Hodge with particular tenderness in Life of Johnson. Johnson, no sentimentalist, once admitted he had owned cats he liked better. But when news came that a madman was shooting cats around London, Johnson spoke up sharply: “But Hodge shan’t be shot: no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.” That small, fierce defense became part of Hodge’s immortality.
Vladimir Nabokov, picking up the echo two centuries later, ended his novel Pale Fire with a tribute to Hodge—a deliberate act of mercy and affection after all the cruelty and madness the book had unfolded. In a world of schemes, betrayals, and ambitions, Hodge stands simply for loyalty, survival, and small, ordinary goodness.
In 1997, the Dr. Johnson’s House Trust raised a statue to Hodge: a modest bronze figure perched beside a dictionary and a pile of oyster shells, bearing Johnson’s epitaph, “A very fine cat indeed.” Sculptor Jon Bickley deliberately placed the bronze cat at shoulder height—“just right for putting an arm around,” he said.
We admire our heroes. We honor them. But no one really wants to put an arm around their statues. Hodge the cat, bronze and steadfast, asks nothing. And forgives everything.
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