Public Art at Yale

Samuel Yellin was a master craftsman known for designing works of art out of a single piece of iron, instead of tacking pieces together. Yale has ten hand-forged gates by Yellin—as well as numerous examples of decorative ironwork, from door handles and hinges to radiator grilles—the majority of them on buildings designed by James Gamble Rogers. The most spectacular is the wrought iron gate of the Memorial Quadrangle, forged at  Yellin’s metalworking shop in Philadelphia. It is divided into panels that contain shields, helmets, soldiers, weapons, and the crests of the five branches of the armed services.

Gift of Mrs. Stephen V. Harkness

Following the death of his daughter Mary Hartwell Lusk in 1871, long-time New Haven resident and Yale patron Simeon Baldwin Chittenden funded the building of a new university library in her memory. Its octagonal reading room, now a lecture hall, holds the structure’s crown jewel, the stained glass window Education, commissioned from Art Nouveau artist and decorator Louis Comfort Tiffany. Known for his mosaics, lamps, furniture, glass, and metalware, Tiffany sought to elevate the industrial arts through constant pursuit of beauty and refinement, often basing designs on floral forms and inventing new glassmaking techniques and colors to rival competitors like John La Farge. In this thirty-foot-wide window, Tiffany composed a visual sermon in keeping with the donor’s values, presenting a panorama of graceful allegorical figures that represent aspects of Art, Music (shown here), Science, and Religion.

Gift of Simeon B. Chittenden, M.A.H. 1871

Civic pride inspired towns across the nation to build Civil War memorials in the 1870s, making large-scale public sculpture a permanent feature in the American landscape. Yale joined this trend in 1874 with a bronze statue honoring Abraham Pierson (1641/5-1707), the college’s first rector (or president) from 1701 to 1707. Lacking a likeness of Pierson, Irish-born sculptor Launt Thompson used portraits of the rector’s descendants to compose an idealized face. The Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth may have posed for the work, lending it all the dignity and force that made Booth’s portrayals of Hamlet famous on the stages of New York and London.

Gift of Charles Morgan to Yale University, 1874

At twelve feet tall, Louise Nevelson’s Atmosphere and Environment XI looms over viewers, dominating its setting and dramatically reshaping perception of the surrounding space. The Russian-born artist’s earlier indoor wall sculptures were grids constructed of discarded wooden crates, filled with architectural fragments and other found objects and painted a uniform black. The surface of this cor-ten steel construction presents a similar web of suggestively shaped shadows, here semitransparent like a bank of windows which ultimately screens more than it reveals. The tension between the work’s curving natural forms and rigid rectangles abstractly implies an inner psychic conflict and the influence of surrealism. At the same time, the sculpture’s totemic monumentality and geometric composition echo forms common in Maya art and architecture, which Nevelson also admired.

Seymour H. Knox, B.A. 1920, Fund, 1971

Amid the tumultuous artistic revolutions of the early twentieth century, Eugene Savage remained an advocate of continuity, tradition, and a scholarly model of art-making. Trained in Rome and at the Yale School of the Fine Arts, he later returned to Yale as decorator of the newly built Sterling Memorial Library and as a professor of painting, serving on the faculty for twenty-eight years. Like his Latin American contemporaries Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Savage created murals in the 1930s as powerful public statements, but his large-scale works contain not political but academic messages, commending settings like the libraries of Columbia and Yale to elite and studious audiences. The central figure in Alma Mater thus embodies the University by dressing in the school colors and holding a book bearing Yale’s motto, “Lux et Veritas.” She stands under the tree of knowledge, and allegorical figures of Light, Truth, Science, Labor, Music, Divinity, Literature, and the Arts pay her homage.

John W. Sterling, B.A. 1864, Bequest

As a student and instructor at the progressive Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s, Josef Albers began exploring the relationship between perception and geometry. When the school was closed by the Nazis in 1933, he moved to the United States and eventually settled with his wife and fellow artist, Anni, in Connecticut, teaching art at Yale from 1950 to 1960. In Repeat and Reverse, Albers used stainless steel bars to reproduce a line drawing of an optical illusion. Although the corners of this flat sculpture appear to project and recede, the suggested volumes contradict one another, trapping the eye in an endless circuit along the shiny lines. Like his famous series of paintings Homage to the Square, this work demonstrates the complex perceptual effects that can stem from relatively simple visual forms. It was one of several sculptures created specifically for the exterior of Yale’s then new Art & Architecture Building at the invitation of architect Paul Rudolph.

Gift of the artist, made possible by a grant from the Graham Foundation, Chicago, 1963

Ukranian-born Alexander Liberman influenced American art and design for decades through his work as a sculptor, painter, and editor for fashion magazines like Vogue. His large-scale sculptures combine slices of inexpensive found objects, such as farm machinery and commercial boilers. Although each resulting geometric element has a distinct character, a solid coat of black paint unites them harmoniously, focusing the viewer’s attention on the interaction of their curved forms. Liberman worked on such projects without plans or preliminary drawings in order to make each abstract construction a unique compositional gesture.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Burton G. Tremaine, Jr., B.A. 1944, to the Yale Schools of Art and Architecture

Law Links Generations, by contemporary American artist Paul Jeffries, was the winning design in an international competition to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Yale Law Journal.Stylized human figures form the central segments of two symmetrical, interlocking bronze spirals, inspired by a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: “Law, like a great chain, links generation to generation, holding society together.” Jeffries’s hands-on hammering of details is evident in the smooth figures, while the overall compositional simplicity recalls his training under eminent modernist sculptors Henry Moore and Emilio Greco.

George Rickey’s earliest works of kinetic sculpture were mobiles in the manner of Alexander Calder, but in mature pieces like Two Planes Vertical–Horizontal II, the artist eschewed all representation and sought to isolate the concept of movement as the sole subject on display. Rickey’s interest in the lyrical dance between the physical forces of gravity and wind began during World War II through his job computing ballistics in B-52 bombers. He later carefully constructed his large-scale sculptures to be a delicate balance of counterweights that react to the subtlest atmospheric conditions to achieve constant non-motorized motion. In this piece, the burnished stainless steel plates shimmer to make more visible their slow and graceful rotations, and viewers are meant to sense the passing of time as they observe the unpredictable yet repetitive patterns of movement.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Shields, B.A. 1929, in 1970 

Bernar Venet created numerous Indeterminate Line works in the 1980s and 1990s by bending and twisting long square rods of steel with an overhead crane. Despite this unvarying method, these sculptures are symbols of individuality and freedom. The irregularities of the coil illustrate the weight and strength of the steel itself as it resisted the artist’s control, thereby defining artistic creation as cooperation between man and material. Venet’s early work in the 1960s explored the impersonal laws of physics and math to liberate art from aesthetic rules. This later piece grants the object independence in a new way by interpreting the imperfections in its graceful steel curves as moments of vitality and nonconformity to logical ideals.

Gift of Marion J. Lebworth, B.A. 1948, in honor of Henry Luce III, B.A. 1945W

The chance discovery of a piece of slate in 1946 inspired Belgian-born sculptor, painter, and photographer Raoul Ubac to explore this medium’s physical properties and sculptural potential. He became fascinated with its soft surface and easy response to the chisel, crafting it into stylized human torsos or abstract relief carvings such as Untitled. Close parallel incisions add a vivid texture to portions of his works and heighten the illusion of depth. Here the gray stone acts as a window to break the monotony of the brick wall, and its naturally smooth planes vaguely suggest objects in a busy landscape.

Gift of Mrs. David Thompson to Kline Science Library, 1968

Although this statue’s plaque and current location on Science Hill honor Benjamin Silliman, Sr. (1779-1864; B.A. 1796, M.A. 1799) as a pioneering professor of chemistry and natural history, its original viewers would have equally remembered Silliman for his passion for the visual arts. In addition to helping found the School of Medicine and the Sheffield Scientific School, Silliman brokered Yale’s acquisition of John Trumbull’s collection of paintings in 1832, thereby creating America’s first university art gallery, which he curated until his death in 1864. The portly eight-foot bronze figure of Silliman, shown lecturing on a crystal held in his right hand, is the first sculptural work by Yale School of the Fine Arts director John Ferguson Weir, a well-known painter of industrial scenes who learned to work in three dimensions specifically for this project.

Gift of the friends and students of the sitter, 1884

After winning the design competition for the New York Public Library in 1897, the prominent architectural firm of Carrère & Hastings employed a similar French-inspired Beaux-Arts style for Yale’s Bicentennial Buildings (Memorial Hall, Commons, and Woolsey Hall), completed in 1901. The firm embellished this complex in 1908 with the Ledyard Flagstaff, given in memory of a young alumnus killed in the Spanish-American War. Hastings again amended the space two decades later, collaborating with Yale School of the Fine Arts Dean Everett V. Meeks on a World War I memorial cenotaph and Corinthian colonnade with battle names across its entablature. The stylized Art Deco carvings on the sandstone and slate altar to liberty include eagles and ornamental garlands like those on the flagpole, here interwoven with tanks, guns, and other elements of modern technological warfare.

Flagstaff: Erected by members of the Class of 1898.
War Memorial: Erected by the graduates of Yale University

The moving parts of Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures decorate and energize public spaces across the world. As the painted steel plates of Gallows and Lollipops hover and seesaw around the tip of their red tripod base, they obey chance atmospheric stimuli to destabilize the grid of Beinecke Plaza. Developed in the 1930s, the mobile became Calder’s trademark, combining influences from the avant-garde artists of prewar Paris. While his primary colors follow the purist palette of Piet Mondrian, the animated geometric shapes resemble the abstracted objects and animals in the surrealist paintings of Joan Miró and Paul Klee. This work’s title converts the swaying arms into images both delightful and unsettling, suggesting the endless flux and precarious balance of forces at work within the unconscious mind.

Anonymous gift, 1975