The most famous beast sculpture in the college town of Athens, Ga., isn’t — probably — a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall welded steel horse, an abstract maze of ripples and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a visiting Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in 1954.
When a crane first lifted Pattison’s mammoth from the basement of the university’s Fine Arts building that spring, it was unlike anything the campus had seen before, with a cage in the middle of pointed ribs, planes, cubic planes and a wavy, square – except mane and tail. It was recognizably a horse, but not a classical equestrian sculpture. And the artwork had many on campus seething.
Last spring, when the sculpture — briefly titled “Steel Horse” and then the artist’s “Pegasus” but popularly known as Iron Horse — was removed from a concrete pad in a cornfield outside Athens for maintenance, it was missing 32 pieces and the piercing deep scars from etchings and graffiti for decades and a bullet in his neck. His hooves were rusted the color of Georgia clay.
Statues on college campuses have long been a lightning rod for the issues and debates running through society. But exactly why the Iron Horse was attacked by students may always be a mystery.
“There’s all this mystery and misinformation around it,” said Donald Cope, a designer and metal fabricator who spent six months restoring the sculpture to its original state with a conservator, Amy Jones Abe, both of whom are based in in Athens. “He’s got that knowledge, he’s got an aura.”
He painstakingly addressed corrosion and reproduced missing parts (all but one, for which he could find no photographic support), imitating the artist’s hard welds. Before then, the Iron Horse had not been seen in its full form since the day it was revealed 70 years ago.
Scholars today struggle to discern a significant, large-scale, contemporary public steel sculpture in the South that predated it.
“If I was teaching at the University of Georgia and wanted to divide my courses into modern and traditional art, I could use this piece as the perfect reference point,” said David Raskin, professor of modern art history in the School of the Art Institute Chicago, where Pattison taught in the 1940s and 1950s.
For a few hours after it was first installed on the University of Georgia campus, the sculpture stood desecrated on a lawn between men’s dormitories. But strange crowds began to gather, and by evening hundreds of students had descended on the horse, marking it with graffiti (“What the hell is that?”), shoveling manure under its tail, and, among other things humbly, tying two balloons between on his hind legs. Old tires burned under it and the fire department was called to quell the flames and the mob.
“Essentially, I see a reaction to modernism, which was a subject that they didn’t understand, that a lot of Americans didn’t understand,” said William U. Eiland, who was director of the Georgia Museum of Art from 1992 to 2023 and pushed for the maintenance of the sculpture for years. “They were reacting to change.”
It was a “heady time” on campus, added Eiland, who wrote a biography of Lamar Dodd, the influential head of the art department at the time. It was the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the Brown v. Board of Education decision that would gut schools and campus dress codes and curfews for women. Did the Iron Horse represent something disturbing or unknown? Were its cubist lines somewhat like the horse in Picasso’s famous protest piece, Guernica, as some have suggested?
Perhaps. However, several of those involved in the incident later stated in a University of Georgia alumni newsletter that they were motivated more by a feud between Pattison and the university community, as reflected in the campus newspaper, The Red & Black.
Prank or grudge?
Pattison came to the university as an artist in 1953 on a grant from the General Education Council, which was dedicated to improving education throughout the United States and supported by John D. Rockefeller Sr. The artist, who died in 1999, was highly successful with more than two dozen works on public display in the Chicago area and pieces in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
He was initially well received in Athens, with one newspaper reporting that the exhibition of his work at the new academic Georgian Art Museum was expanded due to popularity. Students observed him on the campus lawn hand-carving his first commission—an abstract rendering of a mother and child from an 8-foot-tall block of Georgia marble, which was installed next to the Fine Arts Building that fall. But a student journalist, Bill Shipp, writing in the Red and Black, called the four-sided totem with its polished curves and jagged planes “ridiculously complicated.” A cartoon of the sculpture ran alongside his story, with the caption, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s….”
Then one night, after Pattison returned for the spring semester of 1954, the modern marble met a can of green paint.
Pattison wrote a letter to the editor, stating, “The green paint on my marble sculpture does not hurt me so much as the University over which the shadow of the presence of hatred, ignorance and intolerance is cast.”
Two months later, the Iron Horse landed on the grass.
But for Don McMillian, who was a veterinary student at the university at the time, and who got the manure in his Studebaker Commander convertible, it was just an end-of-the-year prank.
“It wasn’t a big, deep, dark problem with art or anything like that,” said McMillian, now 91 and a retired veterinarian who lives in Jonesboro, Ga. “It was just a bunch of crazy boys having fun.” (This was, he noted, the time of the raiding frenzy at universities across the country.)
Pattison himself was offended. “I was shocked, to say the least, when I saw the painting on it, and I saw the dung and the garbage around the place, and the things hanging from it,” the artist said in a 1981 documentary by William VanDerKloot about the sculpture that was shown on PBS. “It was a rather devastating experience for me.”
The morning after the attack, university officials put the sculpture out of sight, hiding it behind an off-campus barn, where it remained for five years until a horticulture professor, LC Curtis, got permission to take it to his farm in Greene county, aged 20; miles south of Athens. He placed it right next to Georgia State Route 15 for passing drivers to see.
And there the Iron Horse has sat for decades, transformed from pariah to a kind of icon, a destination for selfies, a landmark for visiting soccer fans, a symbol for the community — featured in city murals, in brochures, student bucket lists. McMillian, the veterinarian, visited a few years ago for the first time since 1954 to be photographed, he said.
For years, the university and the Curtis family disputed the Iron Horse’s fate and where it belonged. For now, though, his future seems to lie in the cornfield.
The Curtis farm was sold to the university in 2013 and renamed the Iron Horse Plant Sciences Farm, but the family retained ownership of the sculpture and the 400 square feet surrounding it. Last January, the family donated the sculpture to the university, with the condition that it be restored by the school and returned to the farm, said Alice Hugel, granddaughter of LC Curtis, who died in 1980. Her mother, Patty Curtis, she was recently married to LC Curtis’ son, Jack, when the family acquired the sculpture.
The university did not disclose the amount of the restitution, except to say in a statement that private funds were provided. Eric Atkinson, the school’s dean of students, said, “This restoration is an important step in ensuring that the Iron Horse remains part of the UGA experience.”
In late November, Iron Horse went back to graze in the cornfield, now with a shiny new coat of black paint, sitting on a plinth of Georgia granite.
But many believe it should be returned to the main campus, where the artist intended and where it could be better protected. One advocate was the artist’s son, Harry Pattison, a working artist living in Bellingham, Washington, who was 2 years old when his father completed Iron Horse. He said he had many discussions with his father about the fate of the sculpture before his death.
“Abbott wanted it back where it originally belonged,” Pattison said. “He thought, someday the university will want it back.”
Out in the field, for decades, the sculpture was subjected to the elements—and the high jingles of the campus. He was spray-painted at least twice by opposing football fans (and spray-painted back to black by a secret Greek society, the Order of Hellenic Knights, which considers the horse its symbol). The underwear is shaped into a hat stretched across the front. Climbing on top of the horse became the custom, which over time caused the welds to give. Once the carved initials tore at his skin.
“It’s kind of like the price of celebrity for the horse,” said Alice Hugel, who, with her mother, argued it should remain on the farm, where it would continue to be accessible.
Ruskin, the art history professor, noted, “There is something really wonderful that this horse on campus, even if it was controversial, somehow managed to at least focus people’s attention on modern art — or art at all.”
Now, curators Cope and Abbe hope the sculpture can enter a third phase of its life, where it is admired as a museum-worthy work rather than a roadside attraction.
“I just hope that people in the future have a different kind of appreciation for it, even if it came from a place of affection,” said Abbe, who previously worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
On a recent windy afternoon, the Iron Horse stood peacefully atop its hill, seemingly untouched since its relocation nearly two months ago.
Olen Anderson, a senior at the university and member of the Knights of Hellenic Order, said the organization and its alumni supported the restoration and offered to donate funds for the project if needed. “We feel very emotional about it,” he said. However, part of the group’s ritual each year is climbing atop the horse for the cover of The Fraternity Way magazine. What about the preservationists’ desire to admire it from the ground? “I think we would honor that. Because above all we want it to last.”
