'Drape the Gross with Grace'? the Auckland Athlete Statue and Its Critics

'As a piece of art to be admired, it destroyed its own ends, as citizens could not now look at the figure, lest their motive be questioned.' 1 So claimed William Campbell, pastor of the Church of Christ, in a petition presented to Auckland City Council in January 1937. 'piece of art' concerned was the bronze figure of an athlete, erected the previous June at the main entrance to Auckland Domain (figs. 1, 6). So inflamed were local passions - Campbell's petition bore 1,152 signatures - that press coverage temporarily vied with that accorded to the lifting of League of Nations sanctions against Italy following the Abyssinia invasion. And like another notable sculpture controversy that hit New Zealand exactly twenty years later - the British Council exhibition of Henry Moore - the 'Athlete affair' proved a cartoonist's and doggerelizer's delight (fig. 2).2The artist of the Athlete, Richard Oliver Gross (1882-1964), was New Zealand's leading inter-war sculptor. English-born, he emigrated to New Zealand in 1914 after an interim period in South Africa, where he assisted with the architectural carvings of Herbert Baker's Union Buildings, Pretoria (1908-13). Unlike his near contemporary fellow expatriates, William Wright (1886- 1943) and Francis Shurrock (1887-1977), both of whom had studied under Edouard Lanteri at the Royal College of Art, and went on to teach at the art schools in Auckland and Christchurch respectively, Gross was heavily reliant on his selfemployed earnings. Far more prolific than the other two, Gross was the first Auckland sculptor to set up a foundry for casting small bronzes. He was a highly literate, expressive, if ultimately rather bitter correspondent and polemicist in the columns of Art in New Zealand and the New Zealand Herald, passionate about environmental as well as artistic issues. He served as president of the Auckland Society of Arts (ASA) from 1936 to 1945, and published five slim volumes of poetry in the 1950s.3 In his monograph, New Zealand Sculpture: A History, Michael Dunn asserts: 'today, it must be realised that to [Gross] more than anyone else belongs the credit for building a professional image for New Zealand sculpture. He was a sound craftsman, a ceaseless worker and an active spokesman for sculpture over a period of fifty years.'4Gross's most ambitious work was an equestrian bronze, Will to which is placed atop his Wellington Citizens' Memorial (1929-32, fig. 3). Cast in Britain because of its size, at the 1930 Royal Academy summer exhibition it was prominently displayed outside Burlington House prior to its shipment to New Zealand. Writing in the Sunday Times, Frank Rutter declared: 'To symbolize Peace, in its essence a negative idea, is a difficult task for painter or sculptor; but The Will to Peace is a positive aspiration [...] clearly expressed in the soaring lines of Mr. Gross's statue.'5 Such acclaim would have counted for much in a New Zealand art world that measured success in terms of prestigious offshore recognition, and the clipping of Rutter's review remains proudly preserved in the Gross family archive.Yet for all his achievements, Gross seems fated to be remembered solely for his controversial Athlete (fig. 4). New Zealand Herald later observed: 'no statue before or since has been exposed to as much [...] civic or public criticism as [...] the 1936 nude'.6 Recently, Hamish Keith, in his cursory treatment of Gross in Big Picture: A History of New Zealand Art Since 1642, amusedly notes that 'regular prayer meetings' endeavoured 'to persuade the Lord to intervene and take the work away'.7 While Auckland City Council, rather than the Lord, was primarily addressed, the Auckland Star confirmed that 'miniature Hyde Park meetings have been held outside the Domain Gateway'.8 Precedents such as Eros on Alfred Gilbert's Shaftesbury Memorial (1885-93, Piccadilly Circus, London) - in its pose like a lither, slenderer and younger brother to the well-developed Athlete9 - and the British Medical Association building sculpture by Jacob Epstein (1907-08, Strand, London)10 had provoked comparable reactions of moral outrage, which were enthusiastically reported in the press. …

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