LE COQ d’OR
by Joan K. Yanni
The shining, golden Le Coq d'Or (subtitled Chanticleer Greeting the Sun...from Chanticleer's Point of View, Causing the Sun to Rise) is the work of Warren Wheelock, an American sculptor, painter and designer. It is a delightful bronze sculpture, with a small but glorious rooster perched atop cubist architectural elements and singing, his head proudly raised toward the sky. The influence of 1920s Art Deco can be seen in the design of the shaft, with its mechanistic circles and repetition of horizontal bars.
Wheelock (1880-1960) was born in Sutton, Massachusetts, the descendant of a prominent New England family that included Eleazer Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth College, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1902 to 1905 and taught drawing there for the next five years.
Wheelock began his career as a commercial artist and painter. He became interested in sculpture when he settled in the Blue Hills of North Carolina around 1910. He built himself a log house, then began to experiment with the beautiful woods found in the mountains. His first piece was made for his cabin—a model for an andiron titled Fire Dog. In the early 1920s he began work on Le Coq d'Or. After creating numerous sketches of his subject, constantly eliminating non-essentials, he carved a small applewood version of the work about
8 inches high. The final, 29-inch bronze sculpture was made from a second applewood model, the same size as the finished version, honed so that its elements would catch light falling on it. (The whereabouts of the applewood models is unknown, and there appears to be only one bronze.)
The influence of Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) can be seen in the stacking of abstract forms and the gleaming surface of Le Coq d'Or. Brancusi's work had been exhibited in New York at the Armory show in 1913 and at the Stieglitz 291 Gallery in 1914. In addition, photographer Edward Steichen owned La Maiastra, one of Brancusi's highly-polished, idealized bird forms; and the first version of Bird in Space had been executed in 1919. Wheelock could have seen all of these.
The first exhibition of Wheelock's work took place in 1921 at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. He was already working in abstract art at that time, and was a founder of the American Abstract Artists in 1936. Ilya Bolotowsky, Adolf Gottleib, Mark Rothko, and Hans Hofmann's students Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and David Smith exhibited with the group. Wheelock was active as a sculptor and designer into the late 1940s, and headed the sculpture department at Cooper Union from 1940-45. In the 50s he moved to New Mexico where he died at 80 in 1960.
His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles Museum of Art in addition to MAG, and has been exhibited in such museums as the Metropolitan, MOMA, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His sculptures include complete abstractions, religious sculptures, and interpretations of historic Americans such as Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Walt Whitman, Paul Revere, and others. He designed the modern Royal typewriter, Steuben glass pieces, and mobiles for children. Of his work, Time Magazine (April 1, 1940) stated, "No believer in repetition, Sculptor Wheelock keeps on experimenting. His lovely engaging pieces range from a plump, belligerent Fiorello LaGuardia to an abstract, pinafored Little Girl, from a bat-swinging Babe Ruth (Sultan of Swat) to a shiny, swivel-hipped Black Dancer." When LaGuardia saw the bronze Coq D'Or, he is quoted as saying, "If that's a bird, I'm Hitler!" (NY Times, May 5,1938). The Mayor obviously hadn't looked carefully enough!
The story of Chanticleer is simple, yet complex. Chanticleer was an arrogant rooster who thought that his crowing caused the sun to rise. He is first heard of in the 11th century tales of Reynaud the Fox and again in a 1910 play by Edmund Rostand. The French have adopted him as their national bird. The rooster is king of the countryside, a noisy, confident, practical braggart. To sing (chanticleer means "clear song,") he perches on a high fence in the barnyard, above all other animals. In the 9th century, an edict from Rome dictated that the figure of the cock, whose voice brought light to darkness, was to be symbolically placed on top of churches. The figure of Chanticleer is often used as a weathervane. (Cocks and banners are the most frequently used images in America.) The rooster is also a reminder of the New Testament story of St. Peter, who denied three times that he was an apostle of Jesus before the cock was heard to crow.
The Wheelock can be contrasted with MAG's cock weathervanes, which are flat and static.
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