The Exploding Explosion Sculpture
A sculpture created to commemorate the Halifax Explosion has itself been torn apart, its pieces scattered across the city, and experts worry the art work will be accidentally thrown out or destroyed.
Jordi Bonet, a prominent artist who was born in Spain but worked in Quebec, was commissioned to create the $25,000 piece for the opening of the Halifax North Memorial Library in the mid-1960s. Estimates on its current worth, had it been properly maintained, range from $150,000 to $1 million.
Bonet, a one-armed whirlwind of a sculptor, used fragments of the Mont-Blanc to create the piece and it was installed in front the library in 1966, which was in part built with funds from the Halifax Relief Commission to memorialize the explosion.
A write up described it as “symbolic of the Halifax Explosion and the city’s rebirth after the catastrophe.”
Measuring 15 feet by 7 feet by 10 feet, the Halifax Explosion Memorial was made up of four main parts. Its metal spikes represented the devastation caused by the Dec. 6 blast, while the cast-bronze outline of a doll evoked the hundreds of children who died. A piece of the Mont-Blanc sat on the base. A wheel and other sections spoke to the city’s rebirth.
In 2004, the library took the piece down and in 2007 replaced it with North is Freedom.
“The sculpture was in an extreme state of disrepair. When the front entrance of the Halifax North Library was being renovated, a decision had to be made about the sculpture,” says Susan McLean, director of public services for Halifax Public Libraries.
“It was decided to put the sculpture in storage until HRM could make a decision about its future.”
That’s when things started to fall apart – literally. The sculpture was broken into pieces and shipped to warehouses across HRM. A 2006 report located most of the main pieces and strongly urged HRM to gather them.
Janet Kitz has been researching the explosion for more than 30 years. The author of Shattered City is part of a community group pressuring HRM to collect the shattered sculpture under one roof to safeguard it for the future.
Kitz says it’s a unique and valuable piece of the city’s history. Its treatment over the last six years is typical of how the city treats its explosion history, she said.
The memorial on Fort Needham is a frequent target of vandals and the bells are out of tune. A few years back, Kitz took it upon herself to catalogue mortuary bags that held the personal possessions of people killed by the explosion. She found them in the dingy basement of Province House.
Kitz wants to see the sculpture restored and put on display. She’s also wondering what happened to the maquette, the miniature version of the sculpture.
“It’s of vital importance to get all the pieces in one place. Then, it may even be possible to put them back together,” Kitz says. “To have a sculpture like this, which is worth a lot of money, that’s of supreme importance.”
Jamie MacLellan, public art facilitator for HRM, says that’s what he wants, too.
“For some reason, and I don’t know why, they were not rounded up and stored at the same place,” he says. “This is what we’re trying to do now.”
It’s unclear how the sculpture was dismantled or why it was scattered, though the 2006 report says the piece was damaged in the process. Most worrying is the whereabouts of the bronze doll. “The doll piece is the enigmatic one. I don’t know why it wouldn’t have gone with the larger piece, or to a concerned institution,” MacLellan says. “(The sculpture) was saved, but the way in which was saved is incredibly problematic.”
MacLellan, who’s held his post for two years, agrees there’s a risk someone will unwittingly throw out a critical piece.
His department doesn’t have space to store the whole piece, but he’s searching for a short-term place to protect it while a long-term decision is made. Beyond that, he thinks the work could be repaired and put back on display, or officially “deaccessed” and returned to the artist’s estate (Bonet died in 1979).
"It was poorly suited to be sited outdoors but it would be a brilliant piece to be sited inside,” MacLellan says. “We want to do right by the artist’s family and those invested people in the city.”
The Chronicle Herald has spent the past month tracking down the pieces.
THE DAVIT: The davit arrived in Halifax with the Mont-Blanc on Dec. 5, 1917, likely holding the ill-fated ship’s lifeboats aloft. When the ship exploded on Dec. 6, it flew through the air and smashed into the roof of the Freeman house on Windsor Street. The family kept it for more than 40 years before donating it to the new library to be included in the sculpture.
“When I saw the sculpture had gone, I said, ‘Geez, I hope they didn’t trash everything,’” says David Freeman, whose mother lived in the house during the explosion.
On a March trip to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, curator Dan Conlin guided this reporter through a series of locked doors into a storage room in the bowels of the museum. Amid floor-to-ceiling shelves holding treasure chests and ship-wreck artifacts is a unit holding the ruins of the Mont-Blanc. Conlin calculates the ship was blown into 130,092 pieces, of which 50 are in the museum’s collection.
The twisted, scorched davit is among them. A sign explains its history.
Conlin says the museum circulates it in and out of its Shattered City exhibit, but would be open to loaning it to another institution if the sculpture is rebuilt and properly housed.
THE SHARDS: During the four decades the sculpture stood outside of the north-end library, pieces fell off. Library staff collected and stored them in a box behind the front desk. In April, a veteran library staff member guided MacLellan and this reporter into the north-end library’s basement. Beyond a garage is a narrow hallway stacked with old shelving units, car tires and piles of cardboard boxes. At the end of the dusty corridor, about 20 pieces of the sculpture lean precariously in a corner. This includes the wheel and dirty bronze and iron pieces of the work that are difficult to identify.
There is no indication of what they are and they resemble the 2006 report’s description: “a pile of scrap metal.”
THE BASE: The base weighs about 600 pounds and that makes it problematic. MacLellan says there aren’t many places to store something that size. The 2006 report says the piece is in an HRM warehouse, but MacLellan hasn’t able to arrange to see it to confirm its location and condition.
A photograph from the 2006 report shows a tangled wreck pressed against a wall in Burnside. Garbage cans are stacked beside it. There is no indication the piece is marked as part of a work of art. It’s not clear how it’s being stored today.
THE BRONZE DOLL: The doll was the sculpture’s human face, created to remember the hundreds of children who died in the explosion. The 2006 report said it was in good condition in a storage facility, but HRM couldn’t specify which one or confirm that it was there today.
The 2006 report recommended giving the davit to the MMA and displaying fragments of the sculpture in cases in the library. Four years later, HRM has safeguarded davit but the other pieces remain at large. The city says it intends to gather them under one roof, but couldn’t provide a timeline. In the meantime, the pieces gather dust, awaiting a rebirth of their own.
Jon Tattrie is a freelance journalist and the author of Black Snow, a novel of the Halifax Explosion. You can reach him at jon@jontattrie.ca.
- This article ran in the Chronicle Herald April 11, 2010 You can read the blog post here.