BORGLUM, GUTZON

born March 25, 1867, St. Charles, Bear Lake, Idaho, U.S. died March 6, 1941, Chicago, Ill. in full John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum American sculptor who revived the ancient Egyptian practice of carving gargantuan statues of political figures in natural formations of rock. He sculpted the gigantic heads of four U.S. presidents on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. The son of Danish immigrants, Borglum studied art in San Francisco and then, from 1890 to 1893, in Paris, at the Acadmie Julian. Both his painting and his sculpture were admitted to the officially recognized salon there, and while in England (18961901) he received important commissions and royal recognition. In 1901 Borglum established himself in New York City, where he sculpted a bronze group called The Mares of Diomedes, the first piece of American sculpture bought for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Versatile and prolific, he sculpted many portrait busts of American leaders, as well as such heroic figures as the twelve Apostles for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in New York City. But he soon turned toward what his wife, a scholar in cuneiform and other Middle Eastern scripts, described as the emotional value of volume. From a six-ton block of marble he executed a colossal head of President Abraham Lincoln that was placed in the Capitol Rotunda at Washington, D.C. This suggested to some Southern women the idea of commissioning a similar head of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. But Borglum was moved to begin instead a titanic sculptural procession of Lee and his staff and soldiers marching across the face of Stone Mountain in Georgia. He began cutting away rock in 1916 and was able to unveil the head of Lee in 1924, but disputes with his patrons led Borglum shortly thereafter to abandon the enormous work, which was completed by others. In 1927 Borglum was engaged by the state of South Dakota to turn Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills, into another colossal monument. That year he began sculpting the 60-foot-high heads of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt on the face of the mountain, and in 1929 the U.S. government began financing the project, which would become a national memorial. Borglum brought all his engineering prowess to bear on this project, and he invented new methods that took advantage of the capacity of dynamite and pneumatic hammers to carve large quantities of stone quickly. Washington's head was unveiled in 1930, Jefferson in 1936, Lincoln in 1937, and Roosevelt in 1939. The work was completed in 1941, the year of Borglum's death, although the last details were completed by his son, Lincoln Borglum. See also Mount Rushmore National Memorial.