St. Martin in K.C.

Kansas City, Mo. last week unveiled its handsomest sculptural adornment, a towering group surrounded by fountains on the paved mall near the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art. The bronze statues, paid for with money from schoolchildren and local organizations, were dedicated to Kansas City's greatest philanthropist, German-born William Volker, a household-goods merchant (picture frames, window shades) who became a multimillionaire, gave away an estimated $10 million in charity before he died in 1947. As the last work of the late great Swedish-born Sculptor Carl Milles (TIME Color, June 27, 1955), the memorial was also a tribute to the sculptor, who more than any other believed art should be public and placed in the sunlight to be enjoyed.

Sculptor Milles began what turned out to be his last work in Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1950, finished five years later in Rome, called it "the most difficult statue I have made." Milles early turned down the suggested subject for the memorial, a figure of the Good Samaritan, in favor of St. Martin of Tours, a 4th century Roman soldier. Something of a Samaritan himself, St. Martin, in the depths of the drastic, winter of 332 A.D. in France, cut his cloak in two with his sword and gave half to a freezing beggar. To give full scope to his heroic theme, Milles carved a 14-ft.-high figure of St. Martin on horseback splitting his cloak, and the beggar, hand upraised, at the base of the pedestal.

Life-loving Milles could not resist adding grace notes of Puckish humor to the attendant figures, two angels and a faun. To visitors who came to see the all-but-complete figures in the studio, Milles did his tongue-in-cheek best to explain away the oddities: "Why is there an angel playing the flute? Horses love music, didn't you know? Why did I put the angel on one side? Don't you think God sends his people down to see what we are doing? The other angel has a wristwatch; I don't know why, but he has it. Why is he scratching his leg? Because there are so many mosquitoes on earth. What is the faun doing? He is watching the angel. He has never seen an angel either."

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