Visitors to a French museum will on Monday be confronted with an unusually arresting image not witnessed for more than 120 years: that of the most iconic of American monuments towering over the central Paris skyline.
A new exhibition at the the Musée des Arts et Métiers in central Paris retells the story of Liberty Enlightening the World, better known as the Statue of Liberty, that ultimate symbol of the United States that was in fact designed and built in France.
The show, which runs until March 2005, marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who designed the monument, and assembles some 50 photos left to the museum by Bartholdi’s widow in 1907, as well as two models of the Gaget et Gauthier atelier where the Statue of Liberty was built.
The imposing 46m-high statue, which first rose up in the New York skyline in 1886, was originally intended to mark 100 years of Franco-American friendship since the Declaration of Independence, but came to symbolise the values of freedom and democracy around the world.
The exhibition retells the story of Liberty’s construction in the 17th arrondissement from 1875 to 1884, of its journey across the Atlantic, and of its re-assembly and inauguration in New York. Bartholdi commissioned the pictures to record the project’s progress, but also to help raise money.
A venture between the French, who designed and built the statue, and the Americans, who did the pedestal, the work was short of cash despite the fund-raising efforts of the Franco-American Union, which gathered some 600 000 francs through individual donations.
Bartholdi was reduced to charging the public to see various disembodied bits of the statue — the hand holding the torch was exhibited in Philadelphia, and the head in Paris. Visitors to the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition could also buy a miniature replica of the statue.
And it was only after a passionate editorial in the paper The World by its proprietor, the newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, that the American people stumped up the necessary dollars for the Liberty to be removed from its 200 packing crates and reassembled.
The project was innovative technically as well as commercially: Bartholdi asked Gustave Eiffel, who would later be responsible for the monument that symbolises Paris as much as Liberty symbolises New York, to design an internal iron ”spine” to support the copper sheeting used to form the statue’s exterior. The use of rivets was also revolutionary at the time.
On Independence Day July 4, 1884, Bartholdi was photographed posing at the foot of his masterpiece, erected in Gaget et Gauthier’s courtyard essentially to prove it would stand. The statue was then disassembled and carried first by train to Rouen, and then on the freighter Isere to New York, where it arrived in June 1885.
Following Pulitzer’s appeal, the statue — standing 93m high with its pedestal — was inaugurated by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, only the pedestal is open to the public. – Guardian Unlimited Â