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Manhood, Womanhood (and Food) at Macfaddens Physical Culture Restaurant

23-25 S 9th St and Ranstead 3-15-1915 Rolston, NM (PhillyHistory.org)
23-25 S. 9th Street at Ranstead Street, 3-15-1915, N. M. Rolston, photographer (PhillyHistory.org)

“Weakness is a Crime.” With those four words Bernarr Macfadden launched a media empire built on health. Within a year, his Physical Culture magazine brought its growing readership arguments for fitness and against refined foods; arguments for contraception and against the corset. Macfadden wrote and published books with seductive titles: Virile Powers of Superb Manhood (1900); Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood (1901). His boldly shared opinions on health, sex, exercise, diet and hygiene were famous; his name became a household word. Circulation of Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine topped 150,000 in 1899, the first year of publication. In time, it would reach 500,000.

Mafadden’s ambitions extended beyond publishing. In 1902, he opened a Physical Culture vegetarian restaurant in New York City. Before long, restaurants opened in Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia—at 25 South 9th Street. By 1911, the year Macfadden published his first Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, his health-food restaurant chain had twenty locations. Macfadden opened Physical Culture sanatoriums, health resorts and planned a Physical Culture City. The man had presidential aspirations.

Macfaddens Physical Culture Restaurant, 25 South 9th Street, March 15, 1915 N. M. Rolston, photographer, detail. (PhillyHistory.org)
Macfaddens Physical Culture Restaurant, 25 South 9th Street, March 15, 1915. N. M. Rolston, photographer, detail. (PhillyHistory.org)

“We need stronger, more capable men; healthy superior women, wrote Macfadden in 1915, introducing Vitality Supreme, another of his popular books. “The great prizes of life come only to those who are efficient. … The body must be developed completely, splendidly. The buoyancy, vivacity, energy, enthusiasm and ambition ordinarily associated with youth can be maintained through middle age and in some cases even to old age.  … Why not throb with superior vitality! Why not possess the physical energy of a young lion? For then you will compel success. You will stand like a wall if need be, or rush with the force of a charging bison toward the desired achievements. … Adherence to the principles laid down herein will add to the characteristics that insure special achievements. They will increase the power of your body and mind and soul. They will help each human entity to become a live personality. They will enable you to live fully, joyously. They will help you to feel, enjoy, suffer every moment of every day. It is only when you are thus thrilled with the eternal force of life that you reach the highest pinnacle of attainable capacities and powers. Hidden forces, sometimes marvelous and mysterious, lie within nearly every human soul. Develop, expand and bring out these latent powers. Make your body splendid, your mind supreme; for then you become your real self, you possess all your attainable powers. … It will be worth infinitely more than money. … Adhere to the principles set forth and a munificent harvest of physical, mental and spiritual attainments will surely be yours.”

Whatever were they serving at Macfadden’s Physical Culture Restaurants? Foods “in their natural condition.” Macfadden believed “the process of ‘refining’ is the great food crime of the age.” He believed conventional methods of food preparation had “a destructive effect” upon their “nutritive value.” He pointed out the evils of “white bread” where “the best part of the wheat has been eliminated in the process of milling.” Likewise, he noted, nutritional value is “removed from our vegetables in the process of boiling” and from rice, in the process of polishing. “Trying to secure adequate nourishment,” he observed, many Americans consumed “an excessive amount of the refined defective foods.” Bread is “supposed to be the ‘staff of life,’” wrote Macfadden, but “it might reasonably be termed to be the ‘staff of death’.”

Macfadden urged his followers “to select only natural foods” arguing that “unquestionably, a perfect diet is furnished by nuts and fruits.” In their raw state, “foods…possess a tremendous amount of vitality-building elements,” he wrote. Macfadden relied on salads of “celery, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, water-cress, parsley, cucumbers” with spinach and dandelion, dressed in olive oil and lemon juice. Macfadden woudn’t serve vinegar “partly because it is seldom pure, and one can never tell what combination of chemicals it contains.”

Bernard Adolphus Macfadden (he changed his first name to Bernarr for effect) barely survived a miserable childhood to become America’s first public bodybuilder/empire builder. He survived four marriages, founded his own religion—Cosmotarianism—made and lost fortunes and planned to live to the age of 125. Judging from his confidence and physique in middle age, Macfadden might have actually believed he could.

But Macfadden didn’t achieve that ultimate goal. In 1955, The Washington Post and Times Herald summarized the accomplishments of his 87 years. Macfadden’s “proudly avowed aim” was “to rescue sex from the stuffy and unhealthy atmosphere of the smoking room and the honky-tonk into the clean sunlit world of outdoors, and also perhaps to dignify it as a subject of serious and high minded conversation in physical culture restaurants over a nut-and-spinach ragout and a magnum of chilled carrot juice.”

In the end, Bernarr Macfadden got credited for what he was most of all: a 20th-century American life-style pioneer.

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Listening to Lipchitz

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Jacques Lipchitz, sculptor. “Government of the People,” 1976. (© Association for Public Art)
Jacques Lipchitz, sculptor. "Spirit of Enterprise," 1961. (PhillyHistory.org)
Jacques Lipchitz, sculptor. “The Spirit of Enterprise,” 1960. (PhillyHistory.org)

Ask Jacques Lipchitz to share his views on art. His response is curious. “You can’t verbalize art. I think when you start to do that you lose exactly your impact, because art is born from darkness, and if you start to clarify it, it goes away.”

Ask The Master about “freedom of expression” and he takes us down another interesting rabbit hole: “The important thing, you see, is to acquire some kind of a freedom in expression. And if you know something it becomes very difficult. Freedom is not given to us.  We have to conquer it, we have to conquer it by fighting, by working, very hard, and then a little bit more freedom comes every time. You know you are more free… and you have to learn how to be free. You have to let everything what is unknown, because what we know is very little… So these unknown forces you have to let them work for you. And, first of all, you have to be able to catch them. You know that’s the technique you learn. Things are coming, coming, you don’t know what it is, but you have to have a net to catch them. Then you have is see what it is, what you can use. You understand? That’s freedom for an artist. Because he works with things which are absolutely mysterious for him, unknown.  What he knows is very little.”

And when an artist does know something? “Rodin was telling that you have to know anatomy, but when you are working you have to forget about it.  It’s not easy to forget.  If you learn it, it’s with you. But relative freedom can be conquered; that comes only with age.  So as soon as you have freedom, everything changes for you. All your views are changed.”

At the end of his life, Lipchitz created a few monumental artworks. “Government of the People” is one of them, just across from City Hall.

“It was the architect Kling from Philadelphia who came to me and proposed to me this job. You know In Philadelphia I was very well known because the museum had a lot of pieces of mine, the Barnes collection, etc. and so I was somehow…the chosen son…I was the pet sculptor of Philadelphia. And so they came to me and of course I was very happy to do the job, because it’s a very responsible job. Kling built an annex to the municipal building, a modern…with a big plaza and he wanted to have me to make this sculpture for the plaza. It’s a very difficult thing because so many styles of arch are around. You know, the Municipal building of Philadelphia…is very interesting architecture, end of 19th century French architecture, a mixture of all these styles. And beside this you have this church with a steeple. And then you have a kind of a Masonic Temple, which is a mixture of all kinds of styles. It’s very different styles all around…”

Lipchitz died three years before the installation of “Government of the People” in 1976. But his recorded voice, Penny Bach tells us, echoed through the plaza at its dedication. “I believe in the capacities and potentialities of the human being,” proclaimed the sculptor, “and I would like the exalt them in every one of my works.”

Today, that and any of Lipchitz’s many other quips, quotes, anecdotes and advice can be heard, thanks to the internet. But what we’d really like to hear are the sculptor’s words bouncing, once again, off the facades of Center City, when and where they will really mean something. As luck would have it, the opportunity isn’t very far off. In a few months, when the new conservation project to clean and wax the “Government of the People” is complete, why not invite Lipchitz to its re-dedication? He never was at a loss for words worth listening to. And more than forty years after his death, he still isn’t.

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How Jacques Lipchitz Cheated Death

Jacques Lipchitz, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Jacques Lipchitz, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture, 1953. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, (PhillyHistory.org)

“If Jacques Lipchitz is not the most overrated sculptor of the twentieth century,” sniped art historian Barbara Rose, “he is certainly in the running.” It was 1972 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective, Jacques Lipchitz: His Life in Sculpture seemed “to go on endlessly,” for Rose. Like so many “miles of stuffed kishka,” all the sculptor’s “bulges, lumps, nodules and protrusions” left her with “a bad case of esthetic indigestion.”

There had been a time when such words would have devastated Lipchitz. But the elder artist—Lipchitz turned 80 the year before—had learned long before even the most damning critical reviews had value. When starting out in Paris, another critic had written: “We have a newcomer by the name of Jacques Lipchitz, who is very promising, but [his artwork] looks too much like that of [Charles] Despiau.” Lipchitz hadn’t studied with Despiau and, in fact, had never even seen his work. Telling an older friend of this “injustice,” Lipchitz heard back: “My boy if you get such criticism every day for a year’s time, you will be famous.”

And so it was. By 1972, even through her indigestion, Rose admitted Lipchitz was “widely considered a major artist.” His role in the development of modernism had been undeniable. Lipchitz had seen the salons of Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. He had forged the avant garde with friends and acquaintances including Constantin Brancusi, Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, André Derain, Ernest Hemingway, Max Jacob, Le Corbusier, James Joyce, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine. He socialized with and sculpted Gertrude Stein. He sold his art to Albert Barnes.

To television producer Bruce Bassett, who had met the artist in 1967, Lipchitz’ life was a heck of a story, one worth telling in a documentary, but even more. “I wanted to share him with the future,” wrote Bassett in an unpublished essay, My Life with Jacques Lipchitz. “And since I was in media, I began to think of a way of doing it. One way was to do a film [Portrait of an Artist: Jacques Lipchitz] which ran on PBS. But what about the rest of the material? Another 400 hours was going to go on the shelf, and no one would see it.” Bassett envisioned “a machine,” a computer, that would allow Lipchitz to interact “with future audiences about his work, his ideas…”

He talked over the project with the artist. “There is a new machine coming,” said Bassett. “It is not here yet, Jacques, but it will be. I am conceiving your life as a mosaic of experiences. Each chip might represent a sculpture you created, pieces you collected, your relationships with your fellow artists, the tension in Europe that you survived, changes in the direction of your work, et cetera. Our new machine would instantaneously match people’s questions to the appropriate chips of your story. Our machine would make it possible for people to talk to our mosaic of your life.”

Jacques Lipchitz, Spirit of Enterprise,  The Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial, Kelly Drive, July 3, 1961. (PhillyHistory.org)
Jacques Lipchitz, The Spirit of Enterprise, 1960. The Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial, Kelly Drive, July 3, 1961. (PhillyHistory.org)

The idea “intrigued” Lipchitz, who, in his day, was no stranger to the cutting edge. “When we first came to Paris early in the century,” he responded to Bassett,” we looked around to see what was…happening in other fields. It was the machine age. Man was flying. … God did not give man wings on which he could fly, but man through his imagination found a way. … So we artists had to create monsters. But we had to create them so well that if Mother Nature looked over our shoulder to see what we were doing, she could say, ‘Look what man had gone off and done! He is cutting himself from my apron-strings to assume his own special adolescence.'”

The interviews, hundreds of hours of them, were completed not long after Lipchitz’s 80th birthday in 1971, just in time to include in the Metropolitan retrospective. The museum created “a special educational installation that makes use of the most up-to-date audio visual techniques.” Sculptures were “accompanied by Mr. Lipchitz’s own words, telling the story behind their creation, their place in the evolution of his style, and the ideas that inspired them.”

Critic Barbara Rose found the mix of artwork and video far from inspiring. As she saw it, the Met had concocted “some ghastly media experiment, ill-advisedly funded by IBM,” where “television sets with The Master in living color expounding on his art” littered the galleries. Rose found “the voice of Lipchitz resounding thought the show…an idiotic distraction.”

Lipchitz died the following May and Bassett spent the rest of his own life—he died in 2009—searching for a museum or a broadcaster to embrace his and Lipchitz’s creation. As computing evolved and the Internet grew up, the project seemed less futuristic and more plausible. Finally, in 2012, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, with its own collection of 153 Lipchitz sculptures, mounted what Bassett and Lipchitz had envisioned more than four decades before.

Go ahead. Ask Jacques Lipchitz a question. There’s nearly no end to the stories he’s ready to share with you.