The fame and calamity came as soon as the veil was lifted from the 50-ton Picasso sculpture almost 20 years ago in Rolling Meadows.
“The Bather” attracted international art lovers by the busload in 1975. But to locals, it was just an obscenity.
There, in monumental proportions 28 feet high, was a nude in Picasso-esque exaggerations: pin-sized head, large breasts, ample posterior-and pubic hair.
Motorists passing the concrete sculpture on busy Golf Road near the Northwest Tollway were offended, women were outraged and Rolling Meadows police joked about who would have to guard what some called “Big Bertha.”
The controversy endured until the owners of the Picasso, the former Gould Inc. of Rolling Meadows, agreed a few years later to move the sculpture from the front of the corporate lawn and shield it in a grove of trees.
The sculpture was sold for $1.3 million and ended up in Normandy, France, in 1989 after Gould Inc. was bought by a Japanese firm and relocated to Ohio.
With all the offended sensitivities during Rolling Meadows’ brief Picasso era, one would think that any return of “The Bather” would be out of the question.
Not so.
In a sign, or perhaps a test, of the changing times in the developing suburbs, a smaller version of “The Bather” will return to the public eye in the next month or so.
This time, its home will be Harper College in Palatine, which received the Picasso as a donation from William Ylvisaker, 70, former chairman and chief executive officer of Gould Inc.
Martin J. Ryan, an English professor at Harper who is coordinating the placement of the smaller “Bather,” said he believes the suburbs have changed enough over the last 20 years that there will be no brouhaha this time around.
“But I may be naive,” Ryan added. “Truly, it’s less in your face than the big one. And you know, it’s the human body and if people want to see the human body as obscene, then they’re going to see it as obscene.
“But we’ve never had that problem here and we do have art classes here,” Ryan said.
Harper’s Picasso sculpture is actually an untitled, partial version of “The Bather” that shows the nude only from the waist up.
It stands 6 feet 2 inches high. Its width, largely accounted for by the nude’s breasts, is of equal measure.
The sculpture will be placed in the center of campus, in more or less a quadrangle bordered by buildings housing the admissions office, women’s center, library, three-dimensional art studio, and other classrooms and offices.
The location is a crossroads for students and faculty traveling between classes, and the sculpture will be placed across the courtyard from a bust of William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago who is considered the father of the two-year college concept and after whom the junior college is named.
“I don’t expect it to have an impact of any serious nature or any at all,” Ryan said, but he added glibly: “I’ll live to eat those words.”
The smaller sculpture had been situated on Ylvisaker’s Barrington Hills farm until he moved to The Plains, Va., two months ago, Ylvisaker said.
He donated the sculpture to Harper because the campus was in the same area where the “The Bather” had been, and because Ylvisaker said he was impressed by the college’s sculpture garden and art collection.
Both sculptures were authorized by Pablo Picasso, but their construction wasn’t carried out until after his death in 1973, by longtime collaborator Carl Nesjar.
The sculpture consists of four concrete planes at oblique angles, according to Ylvisaker. Gould Inc. secured the rights to the sculpture after Picasso’s preferred site for the sculpture, Louisiana Museum of Humlebaek, Denmark, could not raise the money to make it, said Sally Fairweather, a former Chicago art gallery dealer and author whom Harper College officials credit with helping to secure the smaller “Bather” from Ylvisaker.
Nesjar made the partial version of “The Bather” more or less as “a test” of the bigger version, Ylvisaker said.
Picasso designed a small model of the planned sculpture after viewing Edouard Manet’s painting, “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,” itself a controversial work that showed a woman wading in her chemise during a picnic, according to Fairweather.
Ylvisaker insists that public pressure had no bearing on Gould Inc.’s decision to move “The Bather” to a glade of trees. It was moved to make room for a new acquisition, an abstract sculpture by Henry Moore, he said.
“There was certainly comments about it because it was a sculpture of a nude woman, which Picasso did a lot of,” Ylvisaker said. “It received a lot of acclaim and what I thought was a very limited controversy.”
But Rolling Meadows officials, and Gould’s former director of corporate communications, Gerard Corbett, who now works in New York City, said the outcry caused the move.
“It was a big deal in the northwest area,” said Roland Meyer, 64, Rolling Meadows mayor between 1967 and 1979. “To the people who lived out here, they said, `What is it? What’s going on out here?’ “
When Deputy Police Chief Doug Larsson was a patrol officer in the 1970s, the sculpture was the center of local jokes.
“We used to tease the rookies about having to guard that statue if they ever made a mistake or they ever got the lieutenant mad at them,” said Larsson, 42. “It never happened, but it was a good joke.”
Meyer said the Picasso tumult was short-lived, but he couldn’t say whether Harper’s version of “The Bather” will provoke another rumpus.
“I think you may hear some comment on it the first week,” Meyer said, “but after a while, people will forget it’s there.”
