Processional

Abbott Pattison (1916–1999)

Dedicated 1973

Bronze

Located in the School of Social Service Administration
969 E 60th St

Commissioned in honor of Alton L. Linford, former Dean of the School of Social Service Administration

Hanging on a beige white brick wall in the Mies van der Rohe–designed Social Service Administration building, Abbott Pattison’s welded bronze sculpture Processional is a set of seven abstracted human figures, five adults and two children, lined up horizontally in a procession, as the name suggests. Pattison used a Cubist language, welding together broad, bronze planes and abstracting organic human figures into geometric, multi-faceted ones. The contours of Pattison’s bronze figures, though abstract, stand out from Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, which consists mostly of orthogonal glass, steel, and bricks. As if dancing on the strictly rectangular brick wall, the figures add movement and a lively tone to the immaculate Modernist building.

Processional was dedicated in 1973, in honor of the former Dean of the School of Social Service Administration, Alton L. Linford. Linford is credited with being the main driving force in in commissioning the new Mies building for the SSA in 1965. After his retirement in 1969, his colleagues decided to commission this sculpture dedicated to him. The seven figures in the sculpture stand in a procession as if moving from left to right, which is said to symbolize social workers dedicating themselves to walking into the community and joining hands with children, the elderly, and others in need.

Pattison’s sculptural career vacillated between the classical and the abstract. His earlier bronze figures before the 1960s have clearly recognizable human forms, but he moved away from the classical in the 1970s, transforming his sculptural figures to faceted abstractions. Nevertheless, his abstract sculptures retain what Chicago Tribune art critic Alan G. Artner called “a human heart.” Straddling these very different art forms, Pattison sought to retrieve the lost attention of human figures in the contemporary art scene. Processional is one of these works: it visibly defies the logic of clear representation in classical sculptures, yet the human figures remain easy to discern.

Pattison has artworks in several other Mies van der Rohe buildings, each piece designed differently according to its location. For Processional, he used welded bronze with high purity copper, whose copper–red coloration would stand out against the beige brick wall of the Mies building. In addition, he welcomed the green patina that the bronze would eventually acquire over time as part of the sculpture’s natural life. Processional was entirely hand–crafted by Pattison himself, a procedure he insisted on in all his larger public art commissions. Pattison was particularly incensed by the commission of the 1967 Picasso sculpture located in Chicago’s Daley Plaza, where Picasso himself only made a one–foot tall proposal model to the city, and the actual fifty–foot sculpture was ultimately produced by a separate fabricator. Pattison also made a smaller scaled proposal for Processional, but instead of turning it in for an exact scaled–up fabrication, he insisted on making the finished piece by himself. He believed that the artist embellishes new ideas on the artwork during the process of scaling up. As a result, his finished works were never exact copies of his proposals.

Written by Meng-Hsuan Lee, MA in Humanities, 2016

Artist profile

Abbott Pattison

(American, 1916–1999)

Biography

Abbott Pattison was a Chicago–born sculptor most known for his abstract, bronze sculptures. Pattison had close connections with his birthplace, where more than twenty of his works are located (including Processional, which is sited in the Social Service Administration Building at the University of Chicago). He also taught in the School of the Art Institute from 1946–52 and lived in Winnetka, Illinois for thirty–five years, until he moved to Maine in 1993.

Despite his strong connections with Chicago, his career was marked by constant movement. He received his initial training at Yale University, where he received both a Bachelor of Arts in 1937 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1939. After serving in U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to Chicago and resumed his sculptural career. Since the early 1950s, he worked and taught extensively across the U.S. and Europe, such as serving as sculptor in residence in the University of Georgia and working in France and Italy. His career in Florence, where he maintained a relationship with a bronze-casting facility, had a special impact on him. Ever since his residence in Florence in 1950s, he returned to the city every couple of years to cast sculptures and immerse himself in Renaissance art. “Greek and Renaissance ideas have been inescapable influences,” he once noted in an interview.

Pattison held many one-man exhibitions across the country, mostly in Chicago and New York. His works are permanently collected in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum in New York, and the Israeli State Museum, among many others.