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Celebrating the American Medal

      This year's Coinage of the Americas Congress was the occasion for a multi-faceted celebration of the history and art of the American medal. The weekend of November 8 and 9 saw the Society's headquarters filled with people from a variety of backgrounds, brought together by their interest in the medal. Thanks to the generosity of the Gilroy Roberts Foundation and individual donors, the weekend offered a great variety of attractions and was publicized well beyond the usual outlets for ANS promotion, with people drawn by advertisements in the New York Times and other media.
      On Saturday, a formal symposium was held, which followed the format that has evolved for the COAC series since 1984. Eight speakers presented the results of their research on aspects of the history of the American medal. The schedule permitted time for numerous questions and comments from the large group in attendance, and discussions were pursued over lunch and coffee breaks. Written versions of the papers, with appropriate catalogues, will be published next year in the conference proceedings, to be edited by the chair of this year's COAC, Alan M. Stahl, the Society's Curator of Medals.

Three Exhibits Open

      The conference was followed with the opening of three exhibits of modern medals. Stanley Merves , Trustee of the Gilroy and Lillian P. Rogers Trust, introduced the show "A Life in the Arts: Medallic Works of Gilroy Roberts." This is a traveling exhibit of the American Numismatic Association, curated by Robert Hoge, the ANA Curator, and installed by James Taylor, ANA's Director of Education. On display are a wide variety of materials, including preparatory drawings, models, and trials, which illustrate the work of Gilroy Roberts through his career as Chief Engraver of the United States Mint and then as head of the engraving department of the Franklin Mint.
      The other two exhibits bear a joint title "Two Sides: Art Medallions from Both Sides of the Atlantic." They comprise works by members of the American Medallic Sculpture Association and the British Art Medal Society, both of which groups are celebrating their fifteenth anniversaries this year. The British exhibit also features work by students of English art schools, produced as part of the BAMS Student Medal Project. The work on display illustrates many aspects of the contemporary medal, with assembled pieces in a variety of materials taking their place beside more traditional cast and struck pieces.
      The joint exhibit is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue, available for $10 from AMSA, 56 North Plank Road, Suite 1-685, Newburgh, NY 12250. The American component was selected from works submitted from AMSA members by a jury including AMSA past-presidents Bud Wertheim and Amanullah Haiderzad and, as ANS representatives, Alan Stahl and seminar alumna Sarah Lawrence. The British medals were selected by BAMS under the leadership of Philip Attwood, of the Department of Coins and Medals, British Museum. The chair for the exhibit was Jacqueline Lorieo, and Jan Loomis produced the catalogue. Registration and installation was overseen by ANS Curatorial Assistant Elena Stolyarik.
      The three exhibits will be on view at the Society's headquarters through January 4, 1998. The Roberts Foundation grant has allowed the ANS to bring back our former Education Officer Connie Wiesman to organize and conduct group visits to these exhibits. She has scheduled a number of adult education and specialized interest groups for programs centered on various aspects of the exhibition and welcomes inquiries from coin clubs and other groups for the remaining open dates. Connie can be contacted at the ANS at (212) 234-3130, ext. 217.

Workshop and Demonstration

      On Sunday, November 9, many of the participants reassembled for a workshop and demonstration on the techniques of medal production. The morning began with a showing of the film "The Medal Maker." Originally produced by the ANS in 1929, the film has been recently restored by Mike Craven, a California film restorer. It is available from Craven Home Videos, P.O. Box 4012, Hollywood, CA 90078. An earlier version of the restoration was shown at the ANS last February at the Saltus Award Meeting, and the final release reflects the comments of those who viewed it then. The showing of the video this time was introduced by Dick Johnson, who did the research and wrote the script of the voice-over delivered by former U.S. Mint Chief Engraver Elizabeth Jones.
      Virginia Janssen then opened the workshop with a slide presentation comparing the processes recorded in the film with other techniques of die preparation, including direct die engraving as taught by the Scuola dell'Arte della Medaglia of the Roman Mint, where she received her training. She illustrated her discussion with stages in the preparation of a die for a medal to be struck to commemorate the conference itself. Her side of the medal plays on the name Coinage of the Americas with the conjoined images of the head of the Statue of Liberty with an Aztec carved head showing comparable characteristics. Janssen carved the image and lettering in a plaster model to produce a final epoxy disc, which was transferred to a die using the Janvier lathe process.
      The presentation was then taken up by Ron Landis, Chief Engraver of the Gallery Mint Museum in Eureka Springs, AR, who used a video of his workshop to explain the techniques of die engraving with the use of punches which he used for making the other side of the special medal, which features conjoined eagles. He continued the demonstration with other aspects of die engraving and made a letter punch and part of a die at the request of members of the audience. He was assisted by the Gallery Mint Museum's Coiner Joe Rust, who illustrated the entire process of medal making from the pouring of ingots, through the rolling and blanking process, and the lettering of planchet edges. He concluded by striking specimens of the special medal for those in attendance on their reconstructed version of an eighteenth-century screw press.
      The demonstrations by Janssen, Landis, and Rust were accompanied by lively questions and discussions by the other participants in the workshop, which touched on many points relating to the study of ancient and modern coinage as well as medals. The models and dies used in the creation of the special medal were donated to the Society's collection, where they can be used to illustrate the processes.

Papers Given in the Symposium

      The symposium on "The Medal in America" held on Saturday, November 8, reprised that held on the same theme ten years ago which had been accompanied the opening of the Society's exhibition "The Beaux-Arts Medal in America." The proceedings volume of the 1987 conference is still available by mail order from the ANS for $15 (plus $1.50 postage), and the prize-winning catalogue of that exhibition by Barbara A. Baxter is available for $25 (plus postage).
      The first speaker in this year's symposium was John Adams, veteran of the first COAC conference and author of the indispensable United States Numismatic Literature. This year, he examined one of the most intriguing series of North American medals with his paper on "The Peace Medals of George III." Through his exhaustive examination of examples in public and private collections and in auction catalogues, he has assembled a corpus of these pieces which includes examples in several sizes and methods of manufacture, bearing reverses of the standard heraldic type and the enigmatic "lion and wolf scene." Through extensive archival research he has been able to document the time and place of the bestowal of these pieces and thereby fit them into their historical context.
      Chris Neuzil delivered a paper entitled "A Reckoning of Moritz Furst's American Medals." Again, the careful compilation of a corpus of known specimens was the basis of his discussion, which treated the medals of a mint engraver whose name is well known to American numismatists but whose work has received little serious attention. Neuzil has been able to compile surviving examples of Furst's work to create a chronology of his career and estimate the number of pieces created during his lifetime and in collections today.
A joint paper by Paul Rich and Guillermo de los Reyes entitled "Masonic Medals and American Myth" presented information on a class of medals which constitute one of the most prolific manifestations of medallic production and use in American history, but about which little has been written which is accessible to numismatists. An overview of the uses of the medal in various aspects of Masonic ritual and commemoration provided a typology for such "jewels" as they are known to initiates. The authors then examined specific themes and subjects of Masonic imagery which have appeared on other numismatic objects and have become part of the basic repertory of American symbolism.
      "The World's Columbian Exposition Commemorative Presentation Medal" was the paper delivered by Thayer Tolles, Assistant Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tolles used unpublished sources including the sculptor's diaries and correspondence to trace the creation of the medal for the 1893 exposition by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. She concentrated on the controversy which surrounded the proposed reverse of the medal, which featured a fully nude male youth in a frontal pose. Opposition to the design as an offense to public decency, combined with the antipathy between Saint-Gaudens and Mint Engraver Charles E. Barber, resulted in the issue of Saint-Gaudens' obverse muled with a new reverse by Barber. Tolles pointed out that the issue of this medal prefigured the later conflicts on the minting of Saint-Gaudens' designs for the eagle and double eagle gold coins.
      Barbara A. Baxter, now at the Baltimore Museum of Art, returned to the ANS ten years after her Beaux-Arts exhibition to focus on one of the leading artists of that era in her talk "A. A. Weinman, Classic Medalist." Using sketches from the Archives of American Art, and preparatory material donated to the ANS by Robert A. Weinman, Baxter traced the artistic development of Weinman, seeing in his work the most elegant and rigorous expression of American numismatic classicism, which would see its culmination in his 1916 dime and, especially, his Walking Liberty quarter dollar.
      Scott Miller, a member of the Society's Committee on Medals and Decorations which hosted this year's COAC and set the program for it, spoke on "The Medals of Emil Fuchs." He examined the career of this prolific and influential sculptor, contrasting the artist's celebrity as a portraitist of the highest ranks of English and American society with the obscurity of his biography and scant attention to his work in later years. Among the pieces Miller discussed were the three medals Fuchs made for the ANS, including his Hudson-Fulton medal of 1907, among the most widely distributed medals in American history.
      Susan Luftschein, of the Parsons School of Design, broke the sequence of monographic studies of medallic artists with her discussion of patronage and reception in "Charles deKay and the Circle of Friends of the Medallion: Aesthetic Taste in America." Luftschein is widely known for her book One Hundred Years of American Medallic Art, 1845-1945, a catalogue of the John E. Marqusee Collection, now in the Johnson Museum of Cornell University. In her paper, she examined how deKay, a prominent critic, developed the Circle of Friends of the Medallion as a subscription series to introduce the art of the medal into the homes and lives of American consumers.
      The program concluded with Robert Mueller, who spoke on "Manship's Medallic Mythology." Though exemplifying the Art Deco approach to the medal which followed and effectively ended the Beaux-Arts style, Manship can be seen as continuing the tradition in his use of classical mythology as the symbolic representation of modern concerns. Mueller's study of the use of mythology in these works is derived from the research he has done for his forthcoming book on Manship's medals.
      The proceedings of this year's COAC conference will be published as The Medal in America, volume 2, edited by Alan M. Stahl. The volume, which will appear in 1998, will be available from the ANS for $25 plus $1.50 postage and handling.