In the lifetime of a garden, they are but brief moments of respite or play, meditation or seriousness.
A toddler coos “pretty horsy” while petting Deborah Butterfield’s Pensive under the approving gaze of his mother. A group of students plays Frisbee in a shallow dell beneath the splendorous shade of feathery jacarandas and California sycamores. A young woman retreats to the lawn in an intense cell-phone discussion with her boyfriend — assured her audience of steel and bronze statues will never reveal the details. And by George Tsutakawa’s Obos 69, the garden’s only fountain sculpture, four men practice Tai Chi, their measured precision nearly camouflaging them among the artwork.
It’s a typical afternoon in the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, 5 acres of paradise on north campus that is whatever you want it to be: museum, sanctuary, study hall, social hub.
But combined, those moments — both the ordinary and the precious — fulfill a larger vision conceived by Murphy, UCLA’s sixth chief executive, from 1960–’68. Murphy pictured the garden as part of everyday campus life. He dreamed of a place where young adults could gain an appreciation of art in an unobtrusive setting, taking in sculptures spontaneously over a span of years, yet being infinitely influenced by them.
“Young people need to grow up in the presence of the arts,” Murphy, who died in 1994, once said. “My own view has always been that you cannot expect to develop beauty of character without beauty of environment.”
First-time visitors often are surprised by the garden’s lushness and notable collection of 19th- and 20th-century figurative and abstract sculpture by such seminal artists as Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Auguste Rodin and David Smith.
When shaping his idea for the sculpture garden, Murphy drew on his studies and travels in Europe, where he witnessed the continent’s great civic and urban-planning movement. He was especially taken with Italy’s great plazas, which provided public spaces in an artful environment.
“He wanted to create a sculpture garden as a transition zone on campus, as a place for reflection of the unforced, unmediated kind,” says Cynthia Burlingham, deputy director of collections for the UCLA Hammer Museum and the garden’s curator.
Murphy and UCLA landscape architect Ralph D. Cornell transformed what was originally the “fair-weather parking lot” — so-called because the dusty lot became a quagmire when it rained — into one of the nation’s most renowned outdoor sculpture gardens. Curators from museums and universities around the country come to campus to glean ideas when developing or modifying their own gardens.
“With its broad range of bronze, steel and marble works by European and American artists who have defined some of the most important directions in 20th-century sculpture, it not only clarifies modern sculpture, but also champions sculpture in general,” writes art critic Michael Brenson in an essay on the garden. “It makes the objects in it as important as buildings and trees, as essential as architecture and nature. Sculpture here seems part of all creative life, including nature.”
The garden is tripartite in design. It consists of a formal red brick piazza in front of Dickson Art Center and Macgowan Hall; the gothic allée — as Murphy dubbed it — a triple row of South African coral trees creating a promenade with a cathedral-like canopy that divides the piazza from the third section, an informal sweep of rolling hills set with meandering pebble pathways and six free-form seating areas.
The garden has no main entrance, so one can encounter it in many different ways. That was deemed such an important element that during the expansion of Bunche Hall, part of the building was raised on piers so it would not obstruct the walkway from the garden to the central campus.
The sculpture garden has continually evolved since it was dedicated in 1967 and, with 73 pieces, is essentially complete, Burlingham says. But UCLA has accepted new pieces that are “in the spirit of the garden,” she adds. The most recent addition was Butterfield’s Pensive, donated in 1997.
“The garden isn’t necessarily frozen in time, but it does have a certain integrity to it,” Burlingham says. “If you destroy that integrity, it’s just sculpture and landscape as separate things. It’s the relationship of the sculpture to the landscape, and of the sculptures to each other, that form integral pieces, and that’s something you have to preserve. But it doesn’t mean it can’t allow for change.”
During the planning of the garden, Murphy and Cornell went around the site with papier-mâché stand-ins of the artworks. Throughout the years, additions have been carefully placed. George Rickey’s kinetic sculpture Two Lines Oblique Down (Variation III) is positioned strategically to catch the wind. Rodin’s The Walking Man is located so that it can be seen from several vantage points, and when entering from the north side at night, it is the only sculpture visible at the end of the long walkway.
In addition, the sculptures are set so that they can be approached easily from all angles. In this sense, “few sculpture installations are as instructive about the nature of sculpture,” Brenson writes. “It makes clear that sculpture must be walked around, seen from near and far and, perhaps most important, touched. In museums, sculptures are as untouchable as the paintings, to which they are therefore almost inevitably subservient. But here, your approach can be hands-on.”
Many visitors from outside the university marvel at the garden’s openness. And others sometimes worry about the safety of the pieces. But Murphy never had such concerns.
“Security-minded people said we would have to build a fence around the garden to protect it,” Murphy told ArtNews in 1985. “It was feared vandals might spray obscenities on the nudes. At the height of the Vietnam difficulties, graffiti were scrawled elsewhere on campus and windows were broken. But the sculpture was not touched. The garden has an almost spiritual quality, you know. And the students understand that this is their garden. They protect it. I believe they always will.”