F E AT U R E
THE M AKING OF THE MUSES As thousands of Angelenos pour into the Hollywood Bowl this summer, most will pass beneath the kind and watchful gaze of the three muses, perched atop a tiered Streamline Moderne fountain at the North Highland Avenue entrance.
Built against the backdrop of the Great Depression and with war threatening to engulf the world, the Muses of Music, Dance, Drama sculpture embodied the city of Los Angeles’ resilient optimism that music and art would endure in difficult times. As the Los Angeles Times described it, “The 200-footlong, 22-foot-high sculpture was heralded as one of America’s most ambitious art projects in 1939 when artists and craftsmen hired by the federal government for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Project began constructing it.” This project was led by Charles Toberman, the real estate developer of such Hollywood landmarks as the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Toberman was president of the Hollywood Bowl Association for one season in 1923 and then from 1934 to 1950, and he petitioned the WPA in 1938 for the funds
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to build the fountain, as well as a tearoom and restrooms. Designed by George Maitland Stanley, the sculpture was carved by him and a crew of stone cutters from about 300 tons of granite quarried near Victorville. At 35, Stanley had worked on projects across Los Angeles, but he was best known for one of his smallest designs: the 13-and-1/2inch Oscar statuette, which he created in 1929 at the behest of MGM art director Cedric Gibbons for the first Academy Awards. Born in Louisiana, Stanley began drawing at the age of three. After moving to central California with his family, he came to Los Angeles to study at the Otis Art Institute, where he ultimately ended up teaching for over 20 years. It was there that he found his calling in sculpture, and he subsequently went to the Santa Barbara School of the Arts to study bronze casting. After returning to Los Angeles, Stanley
began to receive commissions for architectural carving and bas reliefs, both for private homes and for commercial and public buildings such as Bullock’s Wilshire, Scripps College, and the Griffith Observatory, where he was one of six sculptors contributing figures to the Astronomer’s Monument, a Public Works of Art Project in 1934. For the Hollywood Bowl Fountain complex, Stanley designed three heroic sculptures in an Art Deco style. The central figure shows the kneeling Muse of Music playing a lyre. The Muse of Dance is poised mid-movement, and the Muse of Drama holds the theater masks of comedy and tragedy. These figures were sculpted from the Victorville granite and placed on a tiered fountain made from 1,180 tons of concrete and faced with more granite. Stanley envisioned the sculpture as both an entrance to the Bowl and to all of Hollywood, a city working to define itself as a
