Exhibit traces history of Lincoln Memorial

WASHINGTON — Though partisan warfare has resumed after a brief truce, Washington remains aglow with the aura of a historic and inspiring president; a man who came to the White House from Illinois to guide an imperiled America through a time of crisis.

We speak, of course, of Abraham Lincoln. Thursday is the 200th anniversary of his birth, an occasion that seems to have escaped the notice of no one. The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the American History Museum and the Library of Congress all have new Lincoln exhibits already up or starting this week. But the show that best examines the maintenance of Lincoln's reputation for posterity is the National Gallery of Art's "Designing the Lincoln Memorial: Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon," opening on Honest Abe's birthday.

The Lincoln Memorial is now so iconic a landmark that you can't imagine Washington without it. But its genesis was slow and controversial, and not just because Lincoln himself was a controversial figure in his time who presided over a divided nation.

Several campaigns to immortalize him in stone failed in the decades after his assassination in 1865. One design called for an 80-foot-tall tiered structure of bronze and granite. Statues of noted abolitionists were to have joined allegorical figures of virtue — 36 figures in all — on the way to the top, where the president would sit at his desk, signing the Emancipation Proclamation. This proposal died in the 1880s due to a lack of funds. By the time the Lincoln Memorial we know today was dedicated in 1922, the president it honors had been dead a year longer than he'd been alive.

Part of what revived the Lincoln Memorial project early in the 20th century was a perceived need for a new symbol of American unity. What is now the National Mall was just a latticework of railroad tracks. Planners, accepting the premise of the "city beautiful" movement — basically, that beautiful cities would produce a civil, responsible citizenry — exhumed Lincoln as the man who saved the union, not as the Great Emancipator. Inscribed on the monument's interior are the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural Address, but not the Emancipation Proclamation nor the 13th Amendment.

That's regrettable to say the least. But what angered some observers in 1913 was Bacon's Greek temple design. To the critic and historian Lewis Mumford, the memorial was pure propaganda, a "sedulously classic" expression of America's arrival as an international power.

"Who lives in that shrine, I wonder," Mumford wrote in 1924. "Lincoln, or the men who conceived it? The leader who beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War, or the generation that took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean?"

Frank Lloyd Wright was less poetic, calling the memorial "one of the most ridiculous, most asinine, miscarriages of building materials that ever happened."

There was more enthusiasm for French's stern figure of Lincoln, 28 feet tall if ever he were to rise from the grand Roman chair French put him in. Working from Leonard Volk's 1860 life mask of Lincoln, French had previously sculpted a standing Lincoln for the Nebraska State Capitol. The Lincoln that gazes out over the reflecting pool is a masterful likeness.

But, er, about that reflecting pool — French had no idea it would throw the light up at Lincoln's face as it did, giving him an almost comical expression of surprise. French lobbied to have electric lights installed to restore the contemplative presidential visage he had long labored to replicate.

Our sad, sober, honorable 16th president deserves no less.

If you go
"Designing the Lincoln Memorial: Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon"
Where: National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW
When: Through Feb. 12, 2010
Info: Free; 202-737-4215; nga.gov