Statues

Dedicated last week were two big statues of two big men:

P: While hordes of moppets in San Francisco's Chinatown did a thriving business shining shoes, promising to turn over their nickels to the China war relief fund, their elders gathered in St. Mary's Square to gaze at a massive, glittering simulacrum of Dr. Sun Yatsen, the Christian scholar and republican hero who ended Manchu rule in China in 1912. Nearly 20 feet tall on its pedestal, the figure has head, hands and feet of red granite, body of stainless steel, cold-hammered to the shape of a military tunic and mandarin's skirt. Materials were provided by the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) in the U. S. Labor was WPA. The sculptor, who claimed to be the first to use stainless steel as a sculptural medium, was Beniamino Bufano, tough, visionary little Italian whose greatest ambition is to build San Francisco a 180-ft. statue of St. Francis of Assisi (TIME, Feb. 15). Many an old Chinese who suns himself daily in St. Mary's Square can remember Sun Yat-sen during his residence in San Francisco about 30 years ago; Sculptor Bufano can remember living in his Canton household for several months in 1922.

P: In London's Whitehall, day before Armistice Day, no unseemly shrieks (see p. 25) disturbed the ceremony as curtains parted to reveal the late handsome Field Marshal George Alexander Eugene Douglas, Earl Haig in conservative bronze. Conservative was the mildest word many British artists had for this third effort of Sculptor Alfred Frank Hardiman, A. R. A., who has been badgered for eight years about his designs. His version of the field marshal's cavalry horse was once described by Lady Haig as "monstrous." She also considered it unnatural that the field marshal's head should be hatless. From the ceremony last week, performed by the Duke of Gloucester in the presence of 2,000 military and 2,000 ex-service men who were lucky enough to live through Haig's battles of the Somme and Passchendaele, Lady Haig was absent.

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