Several years ago I was asked to do research for a Chicago architecture documentary. One of my assignments was John Storrs’ sculpture Ceres, which stands atop the 1930 Holabird and Root Chicago Board of Trade Building.
My task was to confirm the oft-repeated story of the “model” for the sculpture. Madelyn La Salle, a South Side barber’s daughter, claimed to have posed for Ceres in 1928 when she was 14. Rather than confirm the story, I was able to demonstrate at the time that the story was, in fact, a lovely myth that had no evidence to support it.
A recent Twitter posting prompted me to revisit my research. As it turned out, I found substantial additional information.
My 2011 research included study of John Storrs’ diaries, correspondence and other papers from 1928 through 1930. The diaries and journals are held in the Archives of American Art. (1)
Storrs was, as far as it’s possible to tell, not thinking at all about a sculpture atop the Board of Trade building until John Wellborn Root, Jr., whose architecture firm Holabird and Root had been commissioned to design the new Board of Trade Building, broached the topic in an August 1929 letter. Storrs was then in Paris, where he had been since May, 1929. He remained in Paris until mid-1930. Storrs’ own diary entries about Ceres begin in October 1929 and include no mention of Ms. La Salle. His sketches for the proposed sculpture occurred while he was in Paris, as did the fabrication of the maquette and of the statue itself.
Madelyn did actually meet John Storrs, according to his granddaughter, Michelle Storrs Booz. If, as Madelyn claimed, she was 14 at the time, the encounter occurred in 1929, since she was born in 1915, or at least so the plaque on her crypt in Los Angeles says. She met John Storrs at the Fine Arts Building, as she said she did, but nothing in his appointment books/diaries for all of 1928 or 1929 shows modeling session with her. And, in fact, there is no mention of Ms. La Salle or any Ceres live model in any of his diaries. Further, as we shall see, Storrs did not have a studio at the Fine Arts Building.
In Storrs’ correspondence there is a curious August 13, 1929 letter to him from a “Madeline”, whose address was 2807 Polk Street, Chicago. She thanks him for his “very unexpected letter.” She says, “Just to think you still remember me made me very happy.” She says “I still am taking care of my little brother, I am not so happy but I am working and I guess that is the right thing to do, although I much rather be in France with you. I went to school for a while but I didn’t like it but I will have to say I do speak a little better English then [sic] I did. . . . I do wish you are having a good time and I hope all your work will come out successfully, but I know it will there is only one John Storrs in this world that is a genius and that is you.” It is signed “your best friend Madeline.”
It is unclear if this is Madelyn La Salle. The name is spelled differently, though quite possibly Ms. La Salle changed the spelling of her name as she pursued her later career, which was, shall we say, quite colorful. In any event, if this letter is from Ms. La Salle, she clearly idolized him, but there’s certainly no hint of her having been anything other than an acquaintance of Storrs, and no mention of her having been one of his models.
That Storrs was not working from a model at all is certainly inferable from his never having mentioned any model in his correspondence or diaries. Even clearer evidence are his drawings associated with the sculpture, two of which are below.
The first one is typical of the near-cubist and cubist designs for which he was already known. The bottom one is more classical in concept. Neither, of course, was his final idea for Ceres; but we can see that he was conceptualizing from very generalized forms before he decided on the final design of Ceres.
As he was finalizing the shape and size of the sculpture, he realized that he had to adjust the relationships of height and width to account for the angle from which viewers would see it. In a handwritten note from Storrs to John Root on November 18, 1929, Storrs says that he realized that the piece would be viewed at an “angle of 40% from street,” and says, “also – in relation to her width – I have given the statue more hiegth [sic] than shown in either my drawing or the small model, both of which were made to be seen on level with the eye.” Later in this note he says, “Several of the big critics of modern art [in Paris] have seen it and are quite crazy about it.”
What we can conclude from this is that he was, indeed, creating a very contemporary abstract piece, the shape of which he was adjusting on the fly, and was not aiming for a recognizable depiction.
Photo courtesy WTTW 11, by way of Ted FioRito, Jr.
But back to Madelyn La Salle. Her story about having been the model for Ceres seems first to have appeared in public in an article by Chicago Tribune society writer and sometime art critic Lucy Key Miller in the April 21, 1954 Tribune. Note that some spelling in the article reflects an effort at the time to “simplify” spelling conventions. (2)
The article begins:
“Recently, Madelyn LaSalle FioRito rode down Chicago’s LaSalle st. with Frank Bering, chairman of the board of the Ambassador and Sherman hotels. “Do you see the statue on top of the Board of Trade building?” she asked him. “That’s me. Or at least a facsimile. I posed for it.”
The tall, dark haired young woman, formerly the wife of Bandleader Ted FioRito, now raises thorobreds on a ranch in California, when not traveling about Europe.
But Madelyn was a Chicago school girl back in the days when, between semesters, she rode up in the elevator of the Fine Arts building, on her way to be interviewed for a job. In the elevator a man stared at her intently. She was 14 at the time, as statuesque as she is today, and built like a Greek goddess. Her long, black hair flung down her back.
She did not get the job. As she reached the building lobby again, the elevator starter handed her a note from the man who had eyed her so strangely.
‘Please come up to my studio,’ it read. ‘I have spent a year looking for a model for the statue of Ceres, the goddess of grain, which I have been commissioned to do for the top of the Board of Trade Building.'”
LaSalle FioRito goes on to say that she posed for Storrs for 6 months. The article continues, “During those months, and the ensuing years, while the artist did innumerable silverpoint studies of her lovely face, Madelyn listened as he poured into her receptive ears stories of the world of art, music and literature that he loved so well – instilling in her the reverence that was his for the richness of learning.”
I contacted Michelle Storrs Booz, John Storrs’ granddaughter, the owner of his artistic estate and, as she described herself, “the last Storrs,” and asked what she knew of Madelyn LaSalle FioRito. She knows a lot of her and has nothing at all favorable to say. With respect to Madelyn’s having met Storrs and modeled for him in his Fine Arts Building studio, Ms. Booz says that Storrs did, indeed meet her at the Fine Arts Building, but that was it: he met her. She certainly never modeled for him; further, Storrs studio was not in the Fine Arts Building. It was in the Tree Studio Building at 4 East Ohio Street.
I asked Ms. Booz about some correspondence in the 1950s between Madelyn and John and Marguerite Storrs. Madelyn spoke in these letters about arranging to have a number of Storrs’ sculptures cast in Italy. Ms. Booz stated that Madelyn “convinced [Storrs] to consign multiple paintings and sculptures to her to sell for him in the States. She absconded with the art, never gave him any money, sold it as her own.” The Storrs family fought to retrieve the art works for years without success. (3)
As for Madelyn’s modeling story, we agreed that the faceless Ceres sculpture is a pure abstraction, one that required no model at all, and that the correspondence between Root and Storrs about the sculpture and the work on it was done almost entirely while Storrs was in France – never mind that he had no studio in the Fine Arts Building for her to pose in.
Ms. LaSalle FioRito (later Jones) made it all up. And then she conned John Storrs out of his work.
Hers was, indeed, a colorful career.
NOTES
(1) John Henry Bradley Storrs papers, 1790-2007, bulk 1900-1956. This archive contains Storrs’ journals and other documents and can be viewed at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/john-henry-bradley-storrs-papers-9484
(2) Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1954, p. 30.
(3) Interview of Michelle Storrs Booz by Ed McDevitt, October 17, 2017.
Photo of Ceres sculpture courtesy Society of Architectural Historians, Chicago Chapter.
© Edmund J. McDevitt
January, 2019
