In November 1916 the Art Institute marked the appointment of an up-and-coming sculptor to its school’s faculty by placing one of his pieces on the city’s most prominent site–its own front steps. The statue, The Sower, by Czech immigrant Albin Polasek, already had an international reputation: Polasek had created the plaster model for it in Italy in 1912 as part of a prestigious Prix de Rome fellowship; in 1913 it had been cast in bronze and earned an honorable mention at the Paris Salon. It was a classical figure of a man caught in full stride as he scattered seed on the earth, a sort of Greek god Johnny Appleseed, seven feet tall, anatomically perfect, and totally nude.
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The statue had its defenders–the art community stepped up to denounce the “prudery”–but the clout was on the other side, with deputy police superintendent Metellus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser, head of the Chicago board of censors. Up to this time, Major Funkhouser (his rank was in the national guard) had busied himself bowdlerizing silent films and conducting raids on the city’s red-light district. Now–as recalled by Polasek’s wife Ruth Sherwood in her 1954 biography of him, Carving His Own Destiny–with local farmers objecting that they never worked without their pants, Funkhouser “ordered the trustees of the Art Institute either to supply the statue with the missing garment or some substitute, or to remove it from Michigan Avenue.” By December the statue had been moved inside, where it appeared briefly in an exhibit of Polasek’s work before disappearing into storage. An Art Institute spokesman says it was seen “infrequently” afterward, though it was taken out for the Century of Progress World’s Fair.
Then, about a year and a half ago, Roger Vandiver, the Botanic Garden’s sculpture curator, was talking over a business lunch with Stephanie D’Alessandro, a curator at the Art Institute. D’Alessandro had asked if the garden might be interested in a figurative sculpture. “We didn’t know of [The Sower’s] existence,” Vandiver says, and there were no precedents: the garden owns about 30 sculptures, but nothing like a classical nude. Still, he passed the query on to the garden’s sculpture committee, which was interested enough to take a look. In February 2004 its members gathered in a frigid warehouse where one side of The Sower’s crate had been removed, exposing enough of the figure–massive and black in the dim interior–to dispel any doubts. “It was overwhelming,” Vandiver says.
