Blog

By Ed McDevitt, Class of 2010

Back in 2011 several docents were doing research for a documentary on Chicago’s  architecture. One of my assignments was John Storrs’ sculpture Ceres, which stands atop the 1930 Holabird and Root Board of Trade Building.

Specifically, I was asked 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.

Recently a CAF “Did you know?” tweet repeated the model story, prompting me to revisit my research and solidify my conclusion with 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 and can be viewed HERE.

Storrs, as far as it’s possible to tell, was not thinking at all about a sculpture atop the Board of Trade building until John Root broached the topic in an August 1929 letter. Storrs was in Paris, where he had been since May, 1929, and he remained in Paris until the mid-1930s. Storrs’ own diary entries about Ceres, which began in October 1929, 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/Madeline
Madelyn did meet John Storrs, according to his granddaughter, Michelle Storrs Booz. If, as Madelyn claimed, she was 14 at the time, the encounter would have occurred in 1929. She was born in 1915, according to the plaque on her crypt in Los Angeles. While she says she met John Storrs at the Fine Arts Building, nothing in his appointment books/diaries for all of 1928 and 1929 indicates a modeling session with her. In fact, there is no mention of Ms. La Salle or any Ceres live model in any of his diaries. Furthermore, Storrs did not have a studio at the Fine Arts Building.

In Storrs’ correspondence there is a curious letter (dated August 13, 1929) from a “Madeline”, whose address was 2807 Polk Street in 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 quite colorful. In any event, if this letter is from Ms. La Salle, she clearly idolized Storrs. Yet there there’s no hint that she was anything other than an acquaintance as he makes no mention of her having been one of his models.

Concepts and adjustments
That Storrs was not working from a model can be inferred from the absence of any mention of a model in his correspondence or diaries. Even clearer evidence are the  drawings associated with the sculpture, two of which are below. The one on the left is typical of the near-cubist and cubist designs for which he was already known. The one on the right is more classical in concept. Neither, of course, was his final idea for Ceres; but the point is that 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, Storrs 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 Wellborn Root Jr 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.

Source of the story
But back to Madelyn La Salle. The source of her story about having been the model for Ceres seems to have been an April 21, 1954 article in the Chicago Tribune by society writer and sometime art critic Lucy Key Miller. Note that some spelling in the article reflects an effort at the time to “simplify” spelling conventions.

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 six 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.”

A granddaughter remembers
I contacted Michelle Storrs Booz, John Storrs’ granddaughter, the owner of his artistic estate and, as she described herself, “the last Storrs.” I 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.

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.