In our weekly series, One Special Thing, the Globe arts staff highlights something timeless — movies, books, TV shows, albums, paintings, plays, symphonies, dishes — that we return to in good times and bad. Something we’re just dying to tell you about. The only parameter is passion.
Edmonia Lewis grew up on a Native reservation in Canada, was nearly lynched while at Oberlin College when falsely accused of poisoning her fellow students, and went on to be one of the most in-demand sculptors in late-19th-century Rome. What else could there be, you might wonder, to so credulity-straining a life story? A lot, it turns out. Lewis, an American sculptor with Black and Indigenous heritage, started life in 1800s America with three strikes already against her (being a woman was no advantage either, you could probably guess). Despite it, talent won out, and she became famous for her classical figuration, mostly in marble, and mostly of well-worn American stories that she tweaked toward Black or Indigenous points of view. “Hiawatha’s Marriage,” her 1870 re-engineered view of Longfellow’s wildly popular poem, humanized the Native American characters in the story, and gave them agency and presence; she made the story hers, and in so doing, made it theirs too.
You can see that piece and dozens more at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, where “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone,” the first remotely comprehensive display of her work is on view until June 7. What you can’t see, though, at least in any real way, is her masterwork: “The Death of Cleopatra,” a 3,000-pound hulk of marble infused with more drama than the premiere of the third season of “Euphoria.” A snake curls around the dying queen’s arm, its poison bite having punctured her skin. She slumps into her throne, her head falling to one side in dignified surrender. The detail is uncanny, and the emotional power stirring. This is an end of her choosing, a rejection of the advancing Roman army’s conquest Instead of bondage, she chooses the release of death.
It’s represented in the Salem exhibition, a little uncermoniously, by a life-size cardboard cut-out. The marble original is too brittle to travel, and lives permanently at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. To be fair, it has more than enough mileage on it already. But its journey is in many ways Lewis’s own.
“Said in Stone” is explicitly a recovery effort. Lewis’s fame faded in the late 19th century as aggressive strains of Modernism like Cubism and Surrealism made her classical pursuits seem quaintly outdated. She died in obscurity and solitude in London in 1907, all but forgotten. The exhibition is the first ever to gather so much of Lewis’s life and work together in one place, an endeavor the curators paid for with years of research and untold frustration. Cleopatra — noble, tragic — sat at the center of the endeavor, their North Star; but in so many ways, fragile, too.
At the height of her fame, Lewis had the piece shipped from Rome in 1876 for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. It had taken four years to complete. As in her other work, Lewis had transgressed the boundaries of neoclassicism, bypassing melodrama in favor of a vividly uncomfortable realism. Lewis presented Cleopatra — provocative and even a little lascivious, with one breast fully bared — as a woman fully in her powers who had made her own choice. When it went on view, some were shaken by its graphic representation of death. William J. Clark, an artist, called it “absolutely repellent,” and said its “ghastly characteristics” put in question whether or not it could be considered art at all.
It’s hard to say whether such criticisms were the reason for the piece’s long journey into obscurity, or even Lewis’s own fade; but after Philadelphia, where it failed to sell, it started to drift. After a showing at the Chicago Interstate Industrial Expo — a considerable downgrade from the showcase of the Centennial — it landed in a local saloon, where a racehorse magnate named “Blind John” Condon bought it for peanuts to serve as the centerpiece of a suburban Chicago racetrack (his favorite horse was named Cleopatra, hence the connection).
It sat outside for decades in the elements, snow and rain and heat. Time marched on, though the piece stood still as the track was redeveloped into a golf course in 1911, a Navy ordnance site in 1942, and finally a USPS bulk mail storage center in 1971. Decades later, nobody bothered to wonder where it had come from, or why. At nearly two tons, it seemed no one could be bothered to move it. It became something less to appreciate as art than a hassle to negotiate as the property changed hands.
Some time after the USPS took over, though, it was hauled to a storage yard of an excavating company, where the damage from the elements were joined by a web of graffiti. Harold Adams, a local firefighter, found it there at one point and, meaning well, brought his son’s Boy Scout troop in to paint over the graffiti and damage. It was a well-meaning gesture, and a conservator’s nightmare: Marble is famously porous.
It was in this ungainly state that it was finally taken in by the Forest Park Historical Society in 1988, and real questions about its origins finally began. The society couldn’t afford to restore it and had nowhere to display it, but arranged to have it kept in a storage room at a local mall while it began its research. Frank Orland, the society’s chief, examined the sculpture closely and found Lewis’s signature still intact, inscribed in its base.
He contacted the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which connected him with George Gurney, a sculpture curator at the Smithsonian. Gurney had been researching historical exhibitions when he came across a photograph of the piece in Philadelphia. Battered and paint-crusted, he could still see: This was it.
The Historical Society gave the piece to the Smithsonian, which started restoration work in the early 1990s in Chicago; the piece was too unstable to be moved. Its feet had been broken off, and its left hand was gone. The nose and chin were missing, and the paint had soaked in. Using modern technology, the piece was restored and made, remarkably, all but whole. But not entirely. Gurney chose not to restore the faces carved into the queen’s throne, a permanent scar left as proof of its remarkable journey.
I’ve seen it in person, and it’s powerful beyond Lewis’s intentions; it has the rare presence of artistic intent coupled with the pernicious forces of notoriety and fame. How could the 3,000-pound masterpiece of a renowned artist vanish, swallowed by time? Because fame is a fragile pursuit, easily shattered and blown to the wind; the weather-worn faces on the throne are a potent reminder of just that.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.