The Statue of Liberty: Stranger and More Complex Than You Think
What is the most iconic work of American art? As The New York Times art critic Jason Farago recently observed, the answer is a French sculpture, assembled first in Paris and then again in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty — “Liberty Enlightening the World” — is so deeply woven into the fabric of American identity that its true strangeness has all but melted into symbol. But a closer look reveals a monument far more complex, contradictory, and surprising than most Americans realize.
A Monument Born from Two Worlds
The statue was conceived in 1865 by French historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye, who proposed a gift from France to the United States commemorating the centennial of American independence and the abolition of slavery after the Civil War. French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi was tasked with bringing the vision to life, while Gustave Eiffel — later famous for his Parisian tower — engineered the internal iron framework that makes the colossus stand.
But the statue’s origins reach back even further, and further east. In the late 1860s, Bartholdi traveled to Egypt and proposed a colossal lighthouse for the Suez Canal entrance at Port Said — a robed female figure holding a torch, to be called “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia.” The project was rejected as too expensive, but when Bartholdi later designed Liberty, he recycled its key elements: the robed female figure, the raised torch, the monumental scale. The Egyptian robes became a Roman peplum; the headscarf became a pointed crown with sun rays, inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes.
Engineering at the Edge of Modernity
What makes the statue truly revolutionary, however, is not its symbolism but its construction. Standing 151 feet 1 inch from base to torch — and 305 feet from ground level to torch tip — the statue is made of copper sheets less than one-tenth of an inch thick, hammered into shape using the ancient repoussé technique. The copper skin is not load-bearing; it hangs from an iron skeleton designed by Eiffel, who conceived a central pylon with a secondary system of bars from which the copper gown would suspend.
As Farago writes, drawing on the work of art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Liberty’s true modernity was its “part-by-part assembly around a void.” The statue was designed to be dismantled in Paris, shipped across the Atlantic in 214 crates aboard the frigate Isère, and reassembled on Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island) in New York Harbor. “Empty statues,” Grigsby writes, “can be sent across the world in labeled crates, just as commodities circle the globe.”
Bartholdi’s sculpture became a shell. Liberty is only skin. As Farago puts it: “In other words, you could detach any section of copper sheets and the remainder would stand up just fine — because the Statue of Liberty is, as literally as I can say this, an American Eiffel Tower.”
The Evolution of a Symbol
Dedicated by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886, the statue was originally conceived to celebrate American independence and the abolition of slavery — symbolized by the broken shackle and chain at her foot. But its meaning shifted dramatically in the early 20th century. Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” written in 1883 for a pedestal fundraising auction and engraved on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal in 1903, recast the statue as a symbol of immigration and welcome with its famous lines: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
As the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation notes, the statue is “an icon, a national treasure, and one of the most recognizable figures in the world.” Yet this very familiarity has made it harder to see clearly. The statue has been reproduced endlessly — on souvenirs, in postcards, in miniature — and its image has been co-opted for countless political and commercial purposes.
What We Miss When We Look
Farago’s feature, published just days before America’s 250th Independence Day, invites readers to rediscover the improbability of Liberty. Its Orientalist pedigree — the Egyptian inspiration that complicates its identity as a purely Western symbol. Its technological ingenuity — the modular construction that anticipated 20th-century prefabrication and curtain-wall skyscrapers. Its hollowness — the void at its core that Farago reads as a metaphor for democracy itself.
“Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness,” he writes. “The formula for democracy is a thing of multiple parts. At its core is nothing solid, just a framework, on which pieces brought across oceans can be conjoined. From many, one.”
Designated a National Monument in 1924 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, the Statue of Liberty continues to attract approximately 4.5 million visitors annually. The National Park Service maintains the site, which underwent major restorations in 1984–1986 and 2011–2012. The original torch, replaced during the centennial restoration, now resides in the Statue of Liberty Museum, which opened in 2019.
A Colossus at the Fault Line
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the statue stands as it always has — at the intersection of art and engineering, France and America, the sublime and the souvenir. Farago’s rediscovery of Liberty reveals a colossus “quivering at the fault line of tradition and a new, modern age.” It is a monument that contains multitudes: classical and industrial, ancient and modern, solid and hollow. And perhaps that is precisely what makes it the most American artwork of all.
“French and American, vast and hollow, sculpture and building,” Farago concludes. “All those contradictions, the torturous progress of culture and democracy, can be read right on her lips.”