Rushmore Abstraction

From October 1927 to October 1941, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum and a crew of about 400 men and women worked on a granite ridge in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Each face is sixty feet high. Washington was dedicated in 1934, Jefferson in 1936, Lincoln in 1937 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1939.

About ninety percent of the rock came off with dynamite. The last few inches were taken down by drilling rows of closely spaced holes and removing what was left by hand. Jefferson was started on the other side of Washington, the rock proved unsound, and that first figure was blasted away before he was carved again where he stands now. In fourteen years of work, nobody died.

This version breaks the monument into color. The four heads, pale blue-white against deep cobalt, stand in a row at upper left, Washington largest at the far left and Lincoln at the right, while the mountain below them dissolves into slashes of blue, orange and red like a forest on fire. Behind them the sky is orange cloud, with a corner of stars and stripes at the top left.