Sports Statues Don't Have to Be Ugly

"Of all the public indignities great athletes are subjected to, from the meme to the boo to the hurled bottle, undoubtedly the worst is the bad statue. A bronze figure in a stadium plaza is so much more permanent than an insult, and the irony is that a Dwyane Wade or a Michael Jordan has to accept the thing as a compliment. The statue's intent is to immortalize. Instead, it kills its subject dead."

"Only one truly great bronze rendering of a renowned athlete has been produced in recent decades, and viewers of the U.S. Open tennis tournament-happening now until September 7-can see it daily. Just outside the stadium that bears his name, an abstract Arthur Ashe surges from the earth like a lightning bolt striking upward instead of down. The sculpture, unveiled by the artist Eric Fischl in 2000 and titled Soul in Flight, is worth pausing to look at."

"Any discussion of why so much sports art is so clumsy begins with the fact that rendering the human form in motion using fixed material is not easy. The British art historian Kenneth Clark once wrote that the body, "that forked radish, that defenseless starfish," is an awkward vehicle for the expression of energy. Yet somehow, in a medium of heavy copper, Fischl captures the lithe, swaying, physical vitality of Ashe, as well as the high-mindedness of the man who was committed to social causes."

Public statues of athletes often fail by freezing dynamic lives into awkward, lifeless likenesses that feel like permanent indignities. Eric Fischl's Soul in Flight, an abstract bronze of Arthur Ashe outside the U.S. Open stadium, succeeds in conveying upward motion and moral dignity. Sculpting a body in motion from static metal is difficult, and Kenneth Clark described the body as an awkward vehicle for expressing energy. Fischl's work captures Ashe's lithe physicality and social-mindedness, illustrating how a monument can embody an internal force meeting an external shape, unlike many ponderous athlete statues.

Read at The Atlantic