High Winds in Chicago

Chicago sculptors went into the courts last week to keep a cool million dollars from slipping through their fingers.

At stake was $1,200,000 of interest accumulated in a trust fund set up 50 years ago by an art-loving Chicago lumber merchant named Benjamin F. Ferguson. Ferguson's intention had seemed clear enough: "The erection and maintenance of enduring statuary and monuments, in whole or in part of stone, granite or bronze in the parks, along the boulevards or in other public places." Chicago's Art Institute got the job of picking appropriate subjects and sites.

For years the Institute doled out Ferguson's fund to adorn Chicago with a dozen statues, among them symbolic figures representing The Republic, Equestrian Indians and the most famous, Carl Milles's Fountain of the Tritons, next to the Art Institute itself. By the early '30s, city planners had begun losing their enthusiasm for heroic busts and bronzes, and the Art Institute took the precaution of getting a court to rule that "monuments" in the context of Ferguson's bequest could also mean "buildings." This year the Art Institute leaned on the old court ruling and announced that it would use the Ferguson fund accumulations to finance a new Art Institute office building. This, explained the Institute, would free some 65,000 sq. ft. in the Institute's cluttered Michigan Avenue headquarters, and give Chicago more museum room.

Chicago's sculptors rallied to stave off the threat to a potential source of work for their profession. The city's chapter of Artists Equity thumbed through the city's records and found that "excluding cannons, boulders, flag poles, totem poles, chains and fire relics," there were only 68 works of sculpture for Chicago's 6,020 acres of parks with their 205 miles of boulevards and drives. Then, because Illinois Attorney General Latham Castle showed no inclination to contest the Art Institute's decision, Artists Equity moved to substitute its President Haydon and vociferous Chicago Sculptor Milton Horn to argue the case for statuary.

Last week, in a 45-minute hearing before Circuit Judge Cornelius Harrington, Equity protested: "The attorney general has clearly disqualified himself by stating that he is not opposed to this suit." But the court quickly squashed the sculptors' hopes. "What's wrong with that?" the judge asked. His decision: the sculptors had no case. Artists Equity announced that the sculptors would appeal but the Art Institute's Director, Daniel Rich, moved confidently ahead. "We want to build a building," he explained, "a monumental building with bronze sashes and doors, which will be in memory of Benjamin Ferguson."

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