Heavy thinker Albert Einstein has a weighty presence in the world of science.
Now a one-and-a-half-ton likeness of the wild-haired genius will be exerting gravity on the campus of Georgia Tech.
The 12-foot sculpture by Robert Berks is a smaller replica of Berks' gargantuan Einstein bronze sited near the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., which, since 1979, has been a magnet for tourists.
“The way it’s used in Washington, that’s the way we want it to be used here,” said Georgia Tech provost Rafael Bras, who expects to see a steady stream of visitors climbing into Einstein’s lap for selfies. “This is not a statue made to be looked at from a distance. This is made to be interactive.”
Bringing art to the campus is part of Tech’s push to integrate the fine arts with the sciences in the school’s learning climate. The statue is slated to be installed in a plaza near the Ferst Center on Oct. 23.
Berks is well-known for creating the rough-hewn bust of John F. Kennedy on display at the Kennedy Center in Washington, and has sculpted many well-known figures, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The New York sculptor, who died in 2011, met Einstein in 1953, and the physicist, dressed in a baggy sweatshirt and sandals, agreed to sit for a portrait. Over a two-day period, Berks spent one day chatting with his subject and the next slapping clay on an armature.
Berks’ creation sought a buyer for two decades before it found a home in Washington. The smaller version sat sidelined even longer. Atlanta businessman and collector Jim Barksdale recently met Berks’ widow, Dorothy “Tod” Berks, and discovered the smaller Einstein sitting exposed to the weather outside the late artist’s Long Island studio.
Barksdale’s friends at Tech were interested. “It was instant combustion,” he said. He offered seed money, and private donors raised $1.5 million in gifts to bring the statue to Tech.
The statue, in subtle ways, emphasizes Einstein's role as an advocate of human rights, and includes a quote from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
Bras said the combination is ideal: “science and technology and human rights: Those are the things that represent Georgia.”
Not everyone is thrilled with Berks’ textured style. The Washington Post once wrote that Berks’ faces “call to mind the underside of movie seats.”
Barksdale, an investment adviser, shrugs off the criticism: “You either like it or you don’t like it.”
The statue is seated on a bank of three curved white granite steps. The figure is casually dressed, his legs splayed, his posture relaxed.
He holds a sheaf of papers in his left hand, on which are written three of Einstein’s most high-impact equations, but the figure’s gaze is directed toward a black granite dais beneath him, studded with silvery stars. The metallic points are intended to represent the constellations as they appeared in Atlanta on Dec. 10, 1948, the day of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This is what drew Barksdale to the statue: “It embraced all that Tech wanted to be and it embraced all that Atlanta wanted to be.”
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