Bound and Determined: Helen Gertrude Sahler’s Spirit of Revolt
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the United States’ entry into the First World War. Although World War I began on July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, the U.S. did not intervene until unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans—among other factors—spurred America to join the Allied Powers, with Congress declaring war on April 6, 1917. American artists—who learned about the bloody conflict through the press—reacted to it in their work from almost the very beginning. A May 1915 newspaper review of a New York art exhibition proclaimed, “War Seen in Work of Women Sculptors.”
Included in that exhibition was this defiant figure, Helen Gertrude Sahler’s Spirit of Revolt. Sahler’s model, a young Dalmatian (from Dalmatia, part of present-day Croatia), fled his homeland just prior to the war to avoid military service. Of the composition, Sahler explained, “The struggle of the oppressed of all history—the youth, intelligence, and hope that fight for ideas were in the mind of the artist in shaping this figure of tense determination.” The composition is reminiscent of depictions of Prometheus, the Greek Titan whose punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mankind was to be chained to a rock and have his liver (which regenerated itself) perpetually devoured by a gigantic eagle. Spirit of Revolt became Sahler’s most popular work and continued to be exhibited through the war until the early 1930s. However, its association with the Great War gradually faded, and in 1921, one Kansas newspaper stated, “It typifies the sullen, brooding, discontented spirit of one beset by conventions and conditions he can neither violate nor accept.” The work is presently on view in the Museum’s Styslinger Gallery of American Art, where it is exhibited in front of George Bellows’ monumental painting The Barricade (1918), the artist’s bold reaction to news of an incident during the invasion of Belgium in August 1914, when German soldiers were reported to have used civilians as a human shield.