National Park Service Announces Plan to Turn Abraham Lincoln Statue Around

https://www.nps.gov/nama/linc01.htm



As the Lincoln Memorial approaches its 100th anniversary in May of this year, the National Park Service has unveiled a proposal to ensure the preservation of the colossal statue of the nation’s 16th president well into its second century. Under a plan announced this morning, the seated marble figure of Abraham Lincoln would be rotated 180 degrees, so that the backside of the statue would face the colonnaded entrance to the memorial.

Preservationists are concerned that the statue, constantly subject to the elements in the open-air memorial and exposed to direct sunlight each morning, is aging unevenly and the front mayeventually fade, not unlike DaVinci’s The Last Supper or Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker.

Rather than let nature continue to take a toll on Daniel Chester French’s masterpiece, the National Park Service convened a blue-ribbon panel of historic architects, art conservators and HGTV interior decorators to study the process and make recommendations. Their exhaustive report, presented to the National Park Service on President’s Day, outlines their preferred alternative for protecting the statue.

...

Lincoln, in addition to being president during the Civil War, was well-known for his folksy sayings, one of which, according to legend, was “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”