Elusive Meaning

I’m drawn to water whenever I hear or see it – and this was a case where both factors came into play simultaneously.

After spending a couple hours enjoying the garden portion of the Roberto Burle Marx exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden last September, my family and I spent some time exploring NYBG’s other attractions on a leisurely stroll in the general direction of our car.

By intention, the course we followed was eventually to take us by the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, where the graphic-arts portion of the Burle Marx exhibition was staged. As we approached the building from the side, we reached a vantage point from which I could just see the top of a tall bronze sculpture and began hearing the faint sound of flowing water. Burle Marx had to wait a while: There was a waterfeature to see first.

Before long, we were face to face with the Fountain of Life, a work by sculptor Charles Tefft completed four years after the library opened in 1901. The tableau includes a chariot-riding sea nymph and her companions trying to control misbehaving seahorses (actually just regular horses with oddly webbed feet) while a merman and mermaid below are doing their best to avoid being trampled.

I’m a bit of a mythology buff and couldn’t attach the story line here to anything familiar – and have come up empty since. It may be a reference to the oft-strained relationship between Poseidon and his long-suffering wife Amphitrite, but my guess is that it’s likely to have been Teftt’s invention, inspired by elements of Italian Baroque fountain styles with a narrative he generated to bring drama and energy to the library’s forecourt.

It certainly succeeds on the drama/energy score: There’s a dynamism here that lifts the eye from the fountain’s massive basin and up through the twisting mass of the seahorses and finally to a boy riding a precariously perched dolphin.

For her part, the nymph is entirely imperiled, spinning off to the side and bringing a sense of impending disaster to the scene. I’m not sure what the title “Fountain of Life” is supposed to signify, but it looks good – which may have been all the sculptor was after.

There’s an odd story behind all of this: A fountain was intended to be part of the Beaux Arts-style library from the start. It appeared in the original plans in 1897, and the fountain’s base structure was operational by the time the library opened in 1901. No subject for a crowning sculpture had been specified, however, so NYBG set up a design competition in which all of the designs were ultimately rejected. Perhaps a bit chastened, NYBG enlisted the aid of the National Sculpture Society in staging a second competition early in 1903 in which Tefft’s proposal was selected from among submissions by 15 artists.

Whatever these convolutions signify, the sculpture was soon in place – and began the usual process of deterioration that comes with age. At some unrecorded point, for example, the merman and mermaid had been removed and were subsequently lost. But as the composition’s centenary approached in 2005, all was put right: The fountain systems were updated and the bronzes’ original sea-foam green patina restored, while the merman and mermaid were recreated from photographs and put back in place.

I can’t say I’m satisfied by the composition’s lack of the NYBG-specific, library-relevant meaning I was looking for, but I like the sculpture itself and have to say it works so well in the context of the building behind it that my complaints about its lack of a clear, baroque-style allegory are overtaken by its sheer visual drama. The Burle Marx exhibition may be gone now, but there’s so much going on around the grounds that NYBG is definitely worth a long visit.