1994 Newsletter

It was only after his death, when Ills son legacy permeates his translations, with their Soper remembers "Fogg" having told her and daughter-in-law, John and Ann Soper, careful, illuminating footnotes. These transla- that his chief interest in religion was that by opened the Rosemont home in March to a tions willremain, I suggest, among the most taking his wife to church he could observe small group, that I realized how little I actu- eloquent ever produced in our field. her profile uninterruptedly. ally knew about his roots, his personal and Aocording to his children, Professor The Depression in the earl)' thirties pre- family history, his relationship to the com- Soper adored his mother, whose gentle vented the young graduate from finding a munity that surrounded him when he humor, love of the beauty oflandscape, and job as an architect, and he "dabbled" III wasn't being "Professor Soper." I have tried encouraging nature stood in some contrast Chinese philosophy, literature, and history in these remarks to fill some of the gaps that to the expectations of a father who positively at Columbia and Harvard Summer School. you may share. enjoyed military life. The Soper way of dabbling included transla- Alexander Coburn Soper I[I was born in Young Soper followed his grandfather tions of Chinese texts with C.C. wang. 11 Chicago 1Il 1904, the eldest of two sons born and father to Hamilton College. The winters was always amazing to those of us who need- to Alexander Coburn Soper, Jr., and Bertha were shockingly cold to the young ed all the help we could get in Chinese, that Dunlop Soper. His brother, Arthur, was a Californian. He was admonished, however, he was essentially self-taught. few years his junior. The roots of the Soper by his father to refrain from the inappropri- The reason he did not become an archi- family in America were already generations ate extravagance of buying a fur coat, and tect was that, according to him, he wasn't deep. Professor Soper's grandfather, the was encouraged 10layer, a sartorial habit he good at it. He found the drafting agonizing; first Alexander Coburn Soper, was born in kept. I remember observing on many occa- and in the end "one hadn't even used one's Rome, New York, and was a member of the imagination." A close friend and colleague Sons of the American Revolution. He from the program at Princeton, who in attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New "Rowley argued 'Style' as the Soper's eyes was a naturally gifted architect, York, and later became a generous benefac- standard of truth in art, suggested to him that he try something else. tor. He spent most of his successful business It was apparently a shocking revelation and career in Chicago as the head of a lumber against which Soper would it brought him up sharply. The remark is company, !"etiring to Lakeville, New Jersey, mount his standard of the kind of thing that I might have expected and keeping a summer house in York from Soper himself, to one of us. He could Harbor, Maine. 'Penetration by Texi'" be witheringly candid. Perhaps having Professor Soper's father, Alexander, J I looked himself in the eye, he expected the grew up in Chicago. He prepared for col- sions in his office on the north side of the rest of us to be equal to it. lege <ItHolbrook Military Academy, and like Oriental Room at the Institute of Fine Arts, He returned to Princeton to study classi- his father, was sent to Hamilton. He stayed where the winds whistled in off the park, cal art history and began to teach, which he tor two years, and then finished his B.A. at that he was wearing more than one sweater- enjoyed. A consistent style of mind is evi- Cornell. From there he went to Europe and vest at a time. Similar letters from his father dent in his notebooks, as is a legacYbf his studied at the universities of Vienna and instruct the young man to avoid distrac- training in architectural drafiing, whetFler Berlin, returning to Chicago to earn a med- tions, including the theater. the subject is Greek and Roman art., Chinese ical degl'ee from the Rush Medical School in Professor Soper remained spare in his architectural ornament, or Buddhist sculp- 1901. The young doctor's practice in taste for external appointments. [ was ture. Neatly penned notes accompany draw- Chicago was interrupted by World War I, always amazed how little he-needed. His ings, keenly observed-and rendened.in __ and his service in the Medical Corps as a office was modest in the extreme. His study detail. surgeon took him to the American West. at home was similarly bare except for books At Princeton, he came into the orbit of Not keen on returning to private practice, on long shelves, and a view onto the sur- George Rowley, a romantic Southerner he seized upon the idea of moving the farni- rounding trees. His favorite haunt at the trained in early Italian painting, who was I}'to California and growing oranges-or family summer house in Greensboro, developing philosophical superstructures in some similar promise the land held out at Vermont, was the building apart that was Chinese art on which to pin his sensitive the lime. He found some groves in just a room looking out onto the lake. responses to style. Rowley was a powerful Montecito, near Sarna Barbara, and relocat- It was impossible to think that a man so auructant, and at the same time someone ed the family while the boys were ),oung. He physically and mentally graceful was not against whom the young Soper would react, remained m the pracuce of medicine, how- prey to vanity. And I think he was; but any defining himself in the process. Rowley ever, and never did take up the farmer! vanity was so tempered by a rejection of argued "Style" as the standard of truth in rancher life he had envisioned excess that it showed hardly at all. art, against which Soper would mount his Young Soper rode LOthe Thacher School According to his children, he and his broth- standard of ''Penetration by Text." Rowley near Highway One on horseback each day, er were raised to respect healthy, strong was a Generalist; and Soper by comparison and there gained both a dislike of horses bodies; he enjoyed exercise, particular-ly indeed a Particularist. Rowley advanced and a training ill Latin that never left him. swimming and rowing, ate consciously with developmental models of style borrowed He repeatedly expressed dismay that his an eye to health, and drank "only with trom Heinrich WOlfflinworking III Western students could misspell "deity" with the "i'' meals." He had a strong clear voice and was art, that invoked to Soper the specter ofthe before the "e' when tile root was so clearly known as an excellent dancer. Long before anhistorical-the "universals," of which he "deus." Perhaps even more fundamentally, it was popular cant, he generally viewed a remained suspicious his whole life. In the order imposed on language through the naturallife as tonic. Soper's article of 1948 in The Art Bulletin, methods by which Latin was taught seems to III I92!'J,Alexander Soper enrolled at "Life Motion and the Sense of Space in have stood as a model for his later study of Princeton with the ann of becoming an archi- Early Chinese Represemational Art," he Chinese and Japanese. teet. While at Princeton, through a friend, he reached the "classically happy conclusion" of We have only to look at notebooks of his met Suzanne Smyth, born at Han's Hill in Rowley's model: looking at Han mural art, translations from the Chinese-c-columns of Whitestown, near Utica. ln the sumrncr of he found that Chinese art, like Greek art, neatly and very beautifully rranscrihed char- 1929, he earned his M.F.A. in architecture developed from the linear-planar, to plastic acters (the deficure flourish seems to reflect a and they were married. I was always moved volumes, to pictorial surfaces. But he intro- pleasure he wok In writing characters), their by how clearly Professor Soper cherished his duced the notion of regional styles, <I new empirical attempt to systematize, their rigor, wife and admired her virtues-her ciVIC navigational axis in the world of universals. their impulse to find structure in contexts of minded ness, her connectedness to people, The seeds of the professional debate Soper usage-to tee! his beliefthat the language her work in school administration in Bryn engaged in over the years with Ludwig had rules (they've always remained obscure Mawr. I also remember his saying how he Bachofer, Max Loehr, Wen Fang, and oth- and untrustworthy to me), rules that could be rattled around in the Rosemont house, how ers over matters of stylistic modeling, were transferrable in the service of meaning. This large it seemed to him, after she died. Ann planted with Rowley. 8lFA Alumni Newsletter I continue to wonder why Professor the double radiance of the Sun Goddess and mind, continuously fed as it was by records Soper, whose interest in Asia seems to have her Imperial descendant." from times and places it described. He had begun with China, applied to the (This mock-heroic beginning prefaces a an extraordinary capacity to see things Rockefeller Foundation in 1935 to study description of the arrival around the point of whole in his mind. He would often describe Japanese Buddhist architecture m Japan. the Emperor, returning from a fish-viewing a painting from memory, even when a pho- can only observe that he expressed a life- expedition at sea that forces the sun-bathing tograph lay on the table, clasping his hands long admiration for the humanism of Japanese to jump offthe diving raft and and turning his head to the side, holding Chinese culture, but that he seemed person- tread water.

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