Episode #80: Cursed Art: Saint-Gaudens's Adams Memorial, and "Black Aggie" (Season 9, Episode 4)

May 31, 2021 Jennifer Dasal

In our ninth season, in a topic suggested by you, our listeners, we’re uncovering the backstory behind some of the world’s most famed “cursed” objects in art, architecture, and archaeology. Today, we’re continuing with a highlight of American Renaissance sculpture with an “unauthorized” copy that chills many visitors: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Adams Memorial, and the so-called “Black Aggie.”

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Episode Credits:

Production and Editing by Kaboonki. Theme music by Alex Davis.

ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.

Additional music credits:

Recommended Reading

Please note that ArtCurious is a participant in the Bookshop.org Affiliate Program and the Amazon.com affiliate program, affiliate advertising programs designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to bookshop.org. This is all done at no cost to you, and serves as a means to help our show and, in the case of Bookshop, it also helps independent bookstores. Click on the lists below and thank you for your purchases!

Links and further resources

New York Times: Washington Journal; In a Public City, a Monument to Private Struggles

Atlas Obscura: Clover Adams’ Memorial: From a Husband Who Would No Longer Speak Her Name

Wall Street Journal: A Grave Marker Both Singular and Universal

The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. Jacob C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels

Cynthia Mills, Beyond Grief: Sculpture and Wonder in the Gilded Age Cemetery

Boston University: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life

Washington Post: ‘Black Aggie’: From Baltimore to Washington

William W. Stowe, “Henry Adams, Traveler.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 2, 1991, pp. 179–205.

Patricia Vidgerman, “Henry Adams in Japan.” Southwest Review, vol. 89, no. 1, 2004, pp. 147–159.

Cynthia Mills, “Casting Shadows: The "Adams Memorial" and Its Doubles,” American Art , Summer, 2000, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 2-25

Episode Transcript

One of the great things about working on ArtCurious is that I often get ideas from you-- my listeners. You suggest topics for episodes or even whole seasons, and books to follow up “ArtCurious,” the book version, of course. And one topic that has reared its head multiple times is the idea of urban legends in art, of artworks rumored to be full of ill-will towards their owners, haunted perhaps, or maybe… cursed. I’ve been asked about the so-called “Haunted eBay painting,” officially titled “The Hands Resist Him,” which is a 1970s painting by artist Bill Stoneham that is, to be sure, super creepy. Then there’s the so-called “Anguished Man,” a painting by an unknown artist in the U.K. with a searing, screaming visage that is truly creepypasta come to life. But I also keep getting asked purportedly haunted sculpture-- and one funeral monument always rises to the top of the list. What do you know, listeners ask me, about a copy of a sculpture by one of the most famous sculptors of 19th century America? What can you tell us, they beg, about the sculpture deemed “Black Aggie?”

Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. This season, season nine, is all about curses in fine art and archaeology, a topic that was suggested by you, our listeners. And today we’re continuing with the story of an unauthorized copy of a masterwork by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a piece colloquially known as “Black Aggie.” This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.

When we think of places that may be truly cursed or haunted, a graveyard or cemetery is certainly at the top of the list. After all, it’s the resting place of bodies and souls long gone--or not. And it’s similar to our discussion at the beginning of this season about the funeral complex in Xi’an, China, the home of the Terracotta Army. The dead beget the curse. But what’s interesting in the case of “Black Aggie” is that the original memorial itself, often called the Adams Memorial, isn’t deemed haunted or cursed at all. It’s a second grave, one housing a copy of the monument from the Adams Memorial, that seems to be the problem. But to get to Black Aggie, we’ve got to start with the Adams Memorial.

In the late 19th century-- at the height of what was called the American Renaissance in arts, architecture, and all things cultural-- a terrible yet commonplace tragedy occurred when a man lost his wife. The man was no ordinary man, though-- it was Henry Adams, a prestigious author and historian whose lineage directly linked him to two of the earliest presidents of the United States-- John Adams, and John Quincy Adams, his great-grandfather and paternal grandfather, respectively. Adams had made quite a name for himself as a professor of Medieval history at Harvard-- from which he retired at the ripe old age of 37-- before dedicating the remainder of his academically-focused life to American history’s earliest centuries, which makes great personal sense, considering his familial connection. His home, by all accounts, was a lively, warm one, overseen by Adams and his wife, Marian Hooper Adams, called “Clover” by her friends. Clover was not only a socialite and consummate host in Washington, D.C., where the couple resided, but she was also a keen photographer at a time when the medium was still brand-spanking new, and she specialized in portrait photography, shooting images of friends, politicians, and even pets, all with a fantastic eye for the artistic and a true dedication to learning and honing her technique. Clover even developed her own photographs, making meticulous notes on particular exposure rates and chemicals used during production, transforming part of their home into her very own darkroom. It seemed to have been a great focal point, no pun intended, of her life-- though her husband, Henry, requested that her hobby remain just that--just a hobby--and discouraged her actively from exhibiting or publishing her images. It’s one of the few stories left behind about this couple that isn’t all warm and fuzzy--Clover referred to Henry’s, quote, “Utter devotion” to her and he declared himself to be, quote, “absurdly in love” with Clover. But of course it’s impossible to know what goes on behind closed doors, or to know if love is even enough to save a life, because in December 1885, Clover Hooper committed suicide after swallowing some of the chemicals she frequently used to develop her beloved photographs. She had been in a severe depression for most of that year, ever since her father, whom she adored, died at the age of 75.

Now it was Henry Adams’s turn to be utterly distraught. In his grief, he destroyed most of Clover’s photographs, pictures of her, and correspondence between the two of them; his despair was so complete that he didn’t even mention her death in his own autobiography, a deliberate silence that rights rather loudly, a loss too heavy to be named. So it’s not surprising to find that Henry Adams felt his life to have been changed completely by his wife’s suicide, and he became restless, unfocused. As a coping mechanism, he began traveling widely, undertaking a trip to Japan with artist John La Farge, a friend and travel companion at various stages for the remainder of Adams’s life. While in Japan, Adams became fascinated by sculptures of a particular bodhisattva, or a Buddhist on the path to becoming a Buddha him or herself. For Adams, it was the figure of Kannon--known in Chinese as Guanyin or Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit. Kannon is the bodhisattva of compassion, a revered figure throughout Asia, sometimes depicted as a calm, peaceful woman dressed in flowing robes in a state of Nirvana or enlightenment, though Kannon/Guanyin/Avalokiteśvara can be depicted as either male or female. These figures truly spoke to Adams, who was drawn to the idea of being beyond life, beyond death, in a place where neither joy nor sorrow could touch you. Some sources note that it was in Japan that Adams became inspired to commission a Kannon-esque memorial to his dead wife, while others think that the trip to Japan was undertaken in search of inspiration for a monument in the first place. What is known, though, is that in 1886, just months after Clover died, Adams sought to replace her rather modest headstone with something far larger, and he sought help from Augustus Saint-Gaudens to make it all happen.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens had only just begun to come to prominence in the decade prior to his work for Henry Adams. Born in Dublin in 1848 but raised in New York City after his parents emigrated when Augustus was just an infant, he was apprenticed early on to a couple of stonecutters who specialized in creating cameos, those little profile portraits carved in relief onto stone or gems that were super popular in the 19th century, especially as jewelry. And it was through these apprenticeships that Saint-Gaudens realized that he had a talent for sculpture, a talent he honed while studying at the National Academy of Design and at the Cooper Hewitt. After traveling abroad and spending time studying art in both Paris and Rome in the 1860s and 1870s, he settled back in New York, where he made a number of crucial connections that would serve him well for the remainder of his career: Stanford White and Charles McKim, some of the most renowned architects of the era, who often sourced Saint-Gaudens to create monuments for their public buildings, parks, and other civic projects. It was also during the early 1870s that he met John La Farge, the painter who would later become a travel buddy for Henry Adams. And it may very well have been La Farge that suggested Augustus Saint-Gaudens as the right sculptor for Henry Adams’s job. Because by the 1880s, Saint-Gaudens had already completed a number of high-profile commissions, including the painting of a series of murals for Boston’s Trinity Church and a monument for Naval Admiral David Faarragut, which brought Saint-Gaudens a certain amount of celebrity after it was installed in Madison Square Park in New York in 1881. Saint-Gaudens was a big name, a good name for these kinds of projects, and so Henry Adams agreed: Augustus Saint-Gaudens was to be the creator of the Adams Memorial at the Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Coming up next: Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Henry Adams seek artistic inspiration for their monument in honor of Clover Adams. Stay with us.

Welcome back to ArtCurious.

For his inspiration for the Adams Memorial, Augustus Saint-Gaudens followed Henry Adams’s wishes to connect to something with a quote “Asian” feel, as his trip to Japan had warranted, and John La Farge even brought Augustus Saint-Gaudens to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to show him a particular image of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, in the collection-- though this might be a false lead, since this specific work didn’t end up in the MFA’s collection until 1911, though it appears to have been swirling around the Boston/Salem area in the 1880s in the hands of private collectors. Still, the comparison between the heavily-draped, weighty figure of Kannon and the figure that would soon encompass the Adams Memorial can’t be overlooked. Neither can the influence of traditional funerary monuments such as those at the famed Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where Saint-Gaudens had lived prior to settling back in New York. And you can even peek glimpses of the artist’s fascination with Renaissance sculptors, especially Donatello and Michelangelo, whose works he greatly admired. Together, they all lead up to a really fascinating figure in Saint-Gaudens’s hands: a calm figure that exudes neither sadness, nor happiness, not peace, not despair, and one that is neither male nor female, Western, or Eastern. Saint-Gaudens, to his credit, provided a figure that is very appealingly “in the middle,” a monument unlike any ever seen before. And it’s quite the monument, too, in terms of size-- the seated figure is larger than life, over six feet in height, with downcast eyes, full, sensual lips, and a hooded robe obscuring our view of anything else that could be used to identify, or categorize this figure. And that’s apparently what Henry Adams really wanted. When the work was finally completed and installed at Rock Cemetery in 1891, Adams declared himself pleased with the final result but refused to inscribe a name on the monument-- neither to refer to the title of the work of art itself, nor to carve Clover’s name-or his own surname, Adams--onto it. Combined with the fact that there’s a little bit of a barrier of trees and shrubs hiding direct access and sightline to the gravesite, it’s no surprise that the Adams Memorial is a bit of a mystery, and obviously people didn’t really know what to call it. Saint-Gaudens apparently gave it an official title, which is the rather unwieldy The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. No wonder it commonly became nicknamed Grief, which some attribute to that most quotable of American authors, Mark Twain, who visited the cemetery in 1906.

Because of a lot of different factors--from the reputation of the Adams political dynasty, to the tragic story of Clover Adams’s death, and from the involvement of the highly esteemed Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his mysterious, unknowable sculpture, the Adams Memorial, as it is most frequently called today, rather quickly became a word of mouth sensation, and tourists at the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th, with several Washington-area publications, particularly travel guides, suggesting it as a stop on many cultural tourism itineraries. Apparently this greatly infuriated Henry Adams, and with good reason-- his wife’s final resting place was meant to be just that--restful--and here were hordes of tourists traipsing around all willy-nilly. But he couldn’t stop the public interest from growing, and the Saint-Gaudens sculpture became one of the most lauded in the U.S. So much so, in fact, that others literally wanted it to be their own. In his letters, Henry Adams noted his disavowal of any money-making ventures off of the Adams Memorial, noting that all the credit should always go to the artist and that not even a photograph would be sold to capitalize upon it. But in a 1907 letter to Edward Robinson, who was soon to be the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Adams noted, quote, “Even now, the head of the figure bears evident traces of some surreptitious casting, which the workmen did not even take the pains to wash off." Unquote. In other words: someone was out there, making a copy of the bronze monument, and attempting to profit off of Saint-Gaudens’s hard work. And one of those copies would go on to become even more famous, more well-known, in some circles than the original monument itself.

It makes sense that General Felix Agnus would have found great interest in the Adams Memorial, because before Felix Agnus became a silversmith for Tiffany and Company, before he rose through the ranks of the Union army during the Civil War, and long before he would go on to a successful career in newspaper publishing at the Baltimore American, he was a sculptor in his native France, which he studied keenly until the outbreak of the Franco-Austrian War in 1859, when he abandoned his art education to fight in the French Army. Agnus spent the majority of his adult life in the U.S., and living in Baltimore allowed him close access to Washington D.C., which is just about an hour’s car ride today. I imagine that, in his off time from his publishing duties, that the erstwhile artist must have roamed the monuments and institutions of the nation’s capital to fulfil his cultural needs-- after all, the Smithsonian Institution had only just been founded in 1846, and surely the Frenchman, who was educated near Paris, missed the incredible sculptures dotting his homeland. So it’s not surprising to note that Felix Agnus was taken by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s work for the Adams Memorial-- remember that pretty much anyone who visited D.C. at this time were, after having been directed to see this slightly spooky monument by every guidebook and newspaper. And in 1905, having just purchased a family plot in a cemetery just outside of Baltimore, the wealthy Agnus wanted to leave his legacy--and purchased his own version of the Adams Monument, a copy, for all intents and purposes, that had been casted by the artist Edward Ludwig Albert Pausch, a Danish-American artist who, like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was in the big sculpture and monuments game. You can probably imagine that this didn’t go over very well with Henry Adams when he received a letter in1908 confirming this news, and it didn’t go over well with the widow of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had died the year before, in 1907. Together, Adams and Saint-Gaudens’s widow (who was named Augusta, by the way… what are the odds?!) tried to take legal action against Agnus, who claimed to have been hosed by an unscrupulous monument dealers, as the late art historian Cynthia J. Mills wrote in her fantastic 2000 article, “Casting Shadows: The "Adams Memorial'' and Its Doubles.” The widow Saint-Gaudens and Henry Adams attempted to sue and to garner protection for intellectual property years before it became hot to do so, but there was a problem: Augustus Saint-Gaudens never copyrighted his work, so even though it really wasn’t cool that folks could come and make casts of the bronze and profit off of it, there was pretty much nothing that could be done, though Augusta Saint-Gaudens suggested that Agnus file a suit against those sneaky art dealers who sold him the unauthorized copy--and then promptly destroy or return the fraudulent copy. Interestingly, Agnus actually followed this advice, and won his lawsuit, for which he received a claim of over $4,500, which would be the equivalent of over $120,000 today--not small change. But Agnus truly got his cake and ate it, too, because he didn’t follow through with Augusta’s other suggestion: he kept the sculpture. And when Felix Agnus died in 1925, he was buried in that family plot under that big ol’ monument in the Druid Ridge Cemetery of Pikesville, Maryland, right outside of Baltimore. And that’s how “Black Aggie”--the nickname for this particular copy--was born.

Up next: Black Aggie isn’t just some knockoff of a famed monument. Some say she’s cursed, bringing death and bad luck to those who visit her after dark. Don’t go away.

Welcome back to ArtCurious.

Cynthia Mills notes that within the decade after the death of Felix Agnus, reports began to surface of eerie sightings or ghostly experiences around Agnus’s grave, especially in relation to the sculpture that was now popularly deemed “Black Aggie.” Aggie’s eyes would glow a ghastly red at the stroke of midnight, some said; the statue’s inherent evilness was explained by the grass that refused to grow in its shadow (never mind that grass typically needs some sunlight to grow, but I’m no horticulturist…). If those red-beaming eyes looked deeply into your own, you’d be struck blind. If you were a pregnant woman, you’d suffer a loss of your baby. Black Aggie became the centerpiece of childhood dares, teenage pranks, and fraternity initiation rites, with the rites in particular being especially treacherous for poor freshmen, who seemed to fall victim to Aggie’s cold, powerful grasp more often than not--strangled or crushed alive by her heavy stone hands. Now, just why Black Aggie could have possibly so haunted or cursed was never truly determined, though some argued that a witch was buried under her instead of Felix Agnus. Mostly, it’s just that the sculpture, when seen in the dark of night is just… creepy. And that creep factor is enough to keep people coming back, and back, and adding more and more tales to the ever-growing urban legend.

The popularity of Black Aggie was, for many years, the biggest issue--not her supposed abilities to curse, maim, or kill. As word spread of this haunted monument spread from Druid Ridge Cemetery and into the wider world, it captured more and more attention, including news coverage--which begat a vicious circle of more visitors who’d then generate more stories and more news coverage. Over those first few decades, the small town of Pikesville, right outside of Baltimore, became overrun with tourists, daredevils, and the curious-minded who wanted to experience the badness of Black Aggie for themselves, or at least to scare their pals in the process. And those brave enough to make a visit to Aggie in the shadows of a moonless night wanted to leave behind proof of their valor, so damage to the monument spiked way up, mostly in the form of graffiti, though also occasionally through those who tried to take a chip from its base-- or more. In 1962, a groundskeeper at Druid Ridge found that one of Black Aggie’s arms had been sawn off during the night, and it was later discovered in the trunk of a car owned by a sheet metal worker who wildly claimed that it was Aggie herself who came alive and cut off her own arm before handing it to the man for… safekeeping, I guess? Obviously, this man went to jail for desecrating a private monument. But the damage was, quite literally, done. And though the watchmen and grounds crew of Druid Ridge Cemetery tried their best to police the monument, their efforts were simply met with more and more trespassers flooding the area to test their mettle against Black Aggie. So, in the mid-1960s, the descendents of General Felix Agnus decided it was all too much, and with a misguided notion that the monument had been a true Saint-Gaudens cast or replica, they donated Black Aggie to the Smithsonian Institute in 1967.

But the story of Black Aggie doesn’t end here-- and naturally this also means that the urban legends surrounding her don’t, either. After folks at the Smithsonian determined that the work was not an authorized copy of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s original Adams Memorial but a poor reproduction, they put the work into storage, where it would stay for thirty years. With the sculpture being hidden away from the public eye, you’d think that all those ghost stories would die down a bit, but the opposite occurred. Instead, there was a spike in inquiries about Black Aggie--where did she go? Why wasn’t she on view at one of the Smithsonian’s myriad museums? And why would anyone go out of their way to hide her if she wasn’t cursed? It was a conspiracy, of course-- and in a 1976 article for Baltimore’s Evening Sun newspaper, one reporter mused that it was better to be safe than sorry in case Black Aggie really was a cursed sculpture, writing, quote, “Maybe, just maybe, they’re not taking any chances.”

Black Aggie didn’t end up staying in deep storage forever. The story of her current--perhaps final?--resting place was actually uncovered by a college student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, whose long interest in Aggie stemmed from her days as a ghost story-loving Girl Scout. For a column in UMBC’s student newspaper, The Retriever Weekly, reporter Shara Terjung called governmental organizations until she reached a contact at the General Service Administration in Washington, D.C. who knew where the once-infamous sculpture: in a courtyard behind the Dolley Madison House near Lafayette Square, only blocks away from the White House.

Since its relocation to its current home, there haven’t been any purported supernatural experiences or ghostly phenomena reported-- at least not in the Washington Post or the Baltimore Sun, as there once was. Black Aggie is more of a curiosity than anything, a reminder of how urban legends can crop up anywhere, even from an unauthorized sculpture from American’s golden age of art, it’s so-called Renaissance. But even so, you’re not going to find me traipsing around the Dolley Madison House after dark to spy upon Black Aggie’s face to check for those red-glowing eyes. I’ll leave that to the more intrepid--or perhaps foolish--among us.

COMING UP NEXT TIME, it’s the great Spanish painter Diego Velázquez’s only surviving nude, and the sight of it drives viewers to madness. This is a fun one-- don’t miss it.

Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our audio production services are provided by Kaboonki, the silliest name in superb podcasts and video. Let them help you too at kaboonki.com. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.

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Check back with us in two weeks when we explore the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful with potentially cursed art and artifacts.