Lot 344: PIETRO CALVI

PIETRO CALVI ITALIAN 1833-1884 LO ZIO TOM (UNCLE TOM) signed CALVI-MILANO marble and bronze height 30 1/2 in. 77.5 cm

Related literature: G. Younge, `Don't Blame Uncle Tom', The Guardian Saturday Review, 30 March 2002, pp.1-2; Panzetta vol.1, p.71; Vicario vol.1, p.227

It is 150 years since Harriet Beecher Stowe first published Uncle Tom's Cabin. The work was originally regarded as a powerful polemic against slavery, but the eponymous central character has in recent decades been blamed for undermining the struggle for black freedom. However, there is an increasing rehabilitation of Uncle Tom as the epicentre of a massive cultural phenomenon which still affects the relationship between blacks and whites in the United States (see Younge, op.cit.).

To summarise the story: Tom is a slave in Kentucky who is sold by his debt-laden slave master, Mr Shelby. Tom, who rejects an opportunity to escape having had the promise of freedom from Shelby, is separated from his wife Chloe and children Mose, Peter and Polly and is taken down the Mississippi by a slave trader. A white girl, Eva St Clare, falls overboard and Tom saves her. Eva's father buys Tom and promises him freedom but dies suddenly. Eva's mother, however, refuses to abide by her husband's word and sells Tom to the vicious Simon Legree. Legree admires Tom's diligence but is frustrated by his refusal to do his bidding. When he orders Tom to whip a sick fellow female slave, Tom refuses and is beaten himself. When two slaves escape Tom is threatened with death unless he reveals their whereabouts which he confesses he knows. He refuses and is fatally thrashed. He lies dying just as the son of his original master, Mr Shelby, arrives with the money to honour his father's promise of freedom.

The story originally appeared in an anti-slavery newspaper, but was first published as a book in March 1852. By 1860 it had sold two million copies and Abraham Lincoln is said to have remarked, on meeting Stowe in 1862 `So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war'. The book had an international success and was hailed as a masterpiece by Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy. It is said to have been Lenin's favourite childhood book. This undoubted success within the narrow confines of Stowe's age, however, has in modern times given way to the realisation of the shortcomings of a book written by a white woman principally for other whites in which blacks are still regarded as chattels. Her text has subsequently been seen to endorse repeatedly racial stereotypes.

Divorced from the original text, modern stage and film adaptations sanitized Stowe's hero of any radical anti-slave message (to the extent of being parodied by Felix the cat) and by the 1930s Uncle Tom had become synonymous with subservience to racial oppression. Modern academic and political interpretations of Uncle Tom have used him as a form of insult symbolic of endorsement of the status quo. Recently analysed by Younge, this tendency is epitomised by the self-appointed Council on Black Internal Affairs whose recent publication the American Directory of Certified Uncle Toms ranks 50 black leaders, past and present, according to a five-star Uncle Tom rating.

Calvi's most famous compositions combine different materials to create a rich colouristic effect, such as his bust of Othello and as seen in the present pair of busts.