5. A Challenge to International Neoclassicism

Rimmer's major sculptural works, such as St. Stephen, Falling Gladiator, Dying Centaur, and Osirus (destroyed), were created for exhibition and in response to the international neoclassical movement. In different ways, they are actually critiques of the rage for neoclassicism. Much of what Rimmer was trying to do is conveyed in his teaching, and he used his exhibited art as an extension of this. He wanted an art based not on copying from antique casts or from life but, rather, on the artist's own imagination so that the work is self-expressive. The fact that the man in Falling Gladiator assumes an impossible position is an instance of his insistence on the imaginative. The St. Stephen and a cast of the Falling Gladiator were exhibited in Paris at the Salon des Refusés, where the Gladiator created a stir as it seemed, wrongly, to be a cast of a live person. Rimmer broke new ground in producing fragmented human figures with an antique reference, such as his Osiris, a classical-Greek-looking nude male without parts of his arms. They resembled the broken ancient sculpture of the present rather than of the revered past. Originally Osiris had the head of a hawk. As with his pictures, Rimmer also was unusual in frankly accepting and portraying abnormalities as in his Seated Man (Despair). The late Fighting Lions, showing a male and female in vicious combat is arguably an allegory of male dominance. As an original thinker, Rimmer, more than once, explored the problem of expressing the spiritual in the material, most effectively in his relatively abstract Torso, which is an attempt to show the divine awakening or creation of a human soul. Following the Bible, the plaster cast retains the effect of a man’s torso having been crudely fashioned from clay. Perhaps just as unexpected was his plan for a colossal sculpture, Tri Mountain (never executed), which amalgamated the effect of three men and three hills as a symbol of the city of Boston. His one major public statue is the over-life-size Alexander Hamilton on Commonwealth Mall in Boston.