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Fountain of Creation – by Lorado Taft

The Founatin of Creation was planned as a counterpart to the “Fountain of Time”.
Although the Fountain of Time was completed, Fountain of Creation was never completed.

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Lorado Taft, has a number of public sculptures in Chicago. Around 1917, he proposed to the city a pair of huge fountains, one at each end of a strip of public park known as the Midway Plaisance on the Chicago’s south side. On the western edge, the Fountain of Time and at the eastern edge would stand the Fountain of Creation. Although the Fountain of Time was completed, The Fountain of Creation was never completed.

 

The Fountain of Creation is inspired by the Greek mythological story of Deucalion and Pyrrha.
Excerpt from the marker..
The ancient Greek myth of Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, the only survivors of a great flood, inspired this central portion of the unfinished Fountain of Creation. An oracle instructed the couple to throw their mother’s bones over their shoulder in order to repopulate the earth. They threw stones, the bones of mother earth, which sprang to life.

 

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Taft’s clustered figures emerge from a stony background in poses that recall motifs from Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture, specifically the Battle of Lapiths and Centaurs reliefs at the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

Taft planned 38 monumental figures and figure groups for the “Fountain of Creation”. But only four were carved in stone.
Two flank the entrance of the UIUC Main Library [daughters of Pyrrha], and..
two are on the south side of Foellinger Auditorium [sons of Deucalion].
In addition, a scale model of the central group for the “Fountain of Creation” is at the Krannert Art Museum

 

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Fragments from Lorado Taft’s “Fountain of Creation”
Sons and Daughters of Deucalion and Pyrrha
Daughters: East side of the Main Library
Sons: South side of Foellinger Auditorium
At University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Lorado Taft created the statues, and Walter Zimmerman, a Chicago sculptor, carved them in 1933 out of Indian limestone…
Pyrrha was the daughter of Epimetheus and Pandora. Pyrrha, the first mortal-born woman married her cousin, Deucalion, and survived the Flood with him. Her daughters were Pandora and Thyla; each had children by Zeus. The sculptures of “Daughters of Pyrrah” stand in front of the east entrance of the Main Library at UIUC. There are companion sculptures, “Sons of Deulcalion,” which can be found on the south side of Foellinger Auditorium. The statues were a gift in 1937 from Mrs. Ada Taft.

 

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