Hildreth Meière Documentary Series - Watch Trailer
Hildreth Meière Documentary Series - Watch Trailer
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Commissioned by: Mayers, Murray & PhillipMedium: terra cotta reliefExecuted by: RambuschNonextant
Detail of map from Official Guide Book – New York World's Fair 1940 showing location of Mayer, Murray & Phillip's Medicine and Public Health, Science and Education Building Complex
To-scale model of the Medicine and Public Health, Science and Education Buildings with the placement of Meière's murals indicated as follows: (1) Modern Medicine (2) Primitive Man and Modern Man (3) Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine and the Dragon of Ignorance (4) Comte de Rochambeau (5) Tadeusz Kosciuszko (6) The Family (7) The School (8) The Picnic (9) Man between the Past and the Future
(2) Medicine and Public Health, Science and Education Building Complex filmed by Hildreth Meière, 1939. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Above the entrance facing the Avenue of Patriots, Meière depicted Primitive Man and Civilized Man above an inscription from Sophocles, “Many wonders there are but naught so wondrous as man.” Rambusch executed the figures in the thirty-by-fifteen-foot composition in terra cotta relief.1
Primitive Man and Civilized Man
Meière appreciated the opportunity the fair gave mural painters “to show what they could do” on building exteriors. “Working for this Fair has been, for me, a great creative experience.”2
On the facade between Meière’s murals of Modern Medicine and Primitive Man and Civilized Man are three large sculptures by Edmund Amateis. He used “American mythological figures to represent virtues: Humility (the Devil ‘chastising Texan Strap Buckner’), Efficiency (Paul Bunyan), and Benevolence (Johnny Appleseed),” xroads.virginia.edu.
Hildreth Meière, “Working for a World’s Fair,” Journal of Associated Alumnae of the Sacred Heart 4 (1939-40): 36.
