Lost piece of art found in Bigfork church
A piece of history, lost for 90 years, has turned up in the back of the sanctuary at Community United Methodist Church in Bigfork.
Aaron Street, a lawyer, internet entrepreneur and internet researcher is based in Minnesota. He has spent the last four years and thousands of hours tracking down the lost artwork of sculptor Oskar J.W. Hansen to create an archive of his largely forgotten work. The journey to find Hansen’s first ever sculpture, a bas-relief of the head of Christ, led him to Norway, Illinois, and finally, Bigfork, Montana.
Street first discovered Hansen as a tourist visiting the Hoover Dam, where Hansen’s sculptures adorn the plaza structure. He found inspiration in the great engineering feat; the designers of which sought not only to make it functional, but beautiful. Street’s wife bought him a poster of Hansen’s Winged Figures of the Republic, and it hung in his home for years with little thought.
“In September of 2020 was the first time it ever occurred to me to wonder what else this sculptor ever made, so I googled Oskar Hansen for the first time and went down a rabbit hole that’s now four years going,” Street said.
Though Hansen was arguably one of the most prominent public monument artists in the mid 20th century, when Street first looked him up he found only two sentences written on his Wikipedia page. Since then, he has traveled the world, reunited Hansen’s estranged family members, and found over a dozen lost sculptures.
“None of this was the intention, I was just curious about a guy whose art I liked,” Street said.
Hansen started out as an orphan in Arctic Norway, sent away by his foster family at 14 to work as a cabin boy on a sailing ship around 1906. He and the crew sailed through the Mediterranean and around Africa, stopping in Greece.
“All the other sailors went to bars and brothels while they were on leave, but [Hansen], at 14 years old, and the ship’s carpenter instead went to ancient archaeology sites and art museums,” Street said. “When they came back to the ship, they brought with them a couple of pieces of Greek marble that they had obtained because they wanted to see if they could recreate some of the things they’d just seen. So, they fashioned some sculpture tools out of the carpenter’s ship carpentry tools and started practicing sculpture.”
The result was a chiseled head of Christ, slightly larger than a piece of paper and about an inch thick. Hansen’s first work of art.
Hansen jumped ship and swam to North Carolina around 1910, then made his way to New York to serve in the Army for four years. It is unsure whether he swam to shore with the sculpture – given its size, it is possible though unlikely -- or returned to Norway briefly on their route and dropped it off to have it shipped to him later. After his service, he moved on to Chicago, where he was working on a project in the suburb of Hinsdale, Illinois. The next record of the bust was in 1932, over 20 years from its creation, when Hansen briefly mentioned in an interview that he believed the piece to be in a church in Hinsdale.
Street combed through old records looking for a connection that would lead him to the bust. He found it in Reverand Eugene Cosgrove, and to that note, Bigfork. Across the street from Hansen’s Hinsdale project was a little Unitarian Church whose Reverend Cosgrove would later officiate Hansen’s 1929 wedding.
Cosgrove immigrated from Scotland in 1905, spending his first year out of college as a tutor in the Canadian Rockies. He later attended seminary at the University of Chicago and became a minister there, well-known for his public speaking and mystical spirituality.
In 1919, newspapers across Montana ran a sermon Cosgrove wrote following a vacation to the Flathead.
“Friends, I have seen the sun set on the minarets of the Alhambra in Spain, and make splendid the dome of St. Sophia in Constantinople. I have watched the play of color upon the hot sands of the desert of Egypt, with sphinx and pyramid—these ghostly shadows of eternity—rising like exaltations out of the deepening twilight. I have made the trail through the hinterland of the Canadian Rockies to where the Aurora Borealis from the Polar seas make the northern night glorious half the cycle of the year. But for kaleidoscopic lights and shadows; for octaves of tone and color; for stupendous vistas, and the unending variety of the moods and forms of nature, Jewel Basin is, to the vision of my experience, the most charmed and charming spot in all the world,” Cosgrove wrote.
Cosgrove resigned from his ordination in 1933 and left the Hinsdale church; determined to start a religious retreat, “Journey’s End,” on the shore of Flathead Lake.
Street believed Cosgrove brought Hansen’s head of Christ with him from Illinois.
A 1994 Bigfork Eagle article by Marc Wilson on the history of Wayfarers State Park connected the dots. The park land was once owned by Henry Martin Parchen, who moved to Virginia City in 1864, the same year Montana became a territory. After starting Parchen Drug Company, he became a very wealthy man and purchased the 48 acres of land along the lake for a hunting retreat.
The article reads, “It’s uncertain, at least as the pages of history fade, how the Parchens came to know Cosgrove. But his spiritualism caught hold of both of the Parchens and helped him start the ashram called Journey’s End.”
Bigforkers who knew him described Cosgrove as always dressed in white. He would serve visitors at the retreat only vegetarian meals, then take them to the chalets of Glacier Park to eat a steak “on the sly.” He used to toss coins in Bigfork Bay during the Great Depression.
“Money was awful scarce and the kids thought he was crazy to throw money in the bay,” Bigfork old-timer Ursula Whitney said in an interview with Wilson. “He thought they were crazy for diving after the coins.”
The retreat became Wayfarers after Journey’s End fell into disrepair in the 40s and 50s; its deed passed hands several times before falling to the Bigfork Masonic Lodge. The Masons ran a summer camp from the old lodge for about 12 years before selling the land to the State of Montana in 1969 and setting up their new lodge on Montana Highway 35.
The article also listed some of Cosgrove’s personal belongings found on the property by the Masons – stained glass windows, a hand carved throne, and a sculpture of Christ, attributed to artist Gutzon Borglum.
That’s got to be it,” Street thought.
“I have reason to believe that article was mistaken and that sculpture is actually the missing Hansen piece,” Street said in an interview with then Eagle editor Jeremy Weber this January. “Until someone finds it and I can examine the sculpture, it is impossible to know for certain and I am doing everything I can to find it.”
Weber ran an article asking the public for clues as to where the sculpture might have ended up. Chris Hagan wrote Street four days later with the answer: Bigfork Community United Methodist Church.
Street got the chance to see the fruits of his effort last week.
“The purpose of finding this was not to get it for myself, it was just to close the loop on whatever happened to it and where is it, with the hope now that people are interested in these stories that there will be tangible places to engage with them,” Street said.
Handlers are keeping the location of the sculpture discreet until they can properly secure it. Street hopes that it will once again be shared with the public, this time with more information about its history.
Street is working to put together a book on the life and work of sculptor Hansen. He also hopes to someday make enough connections with his lost artworks to create a museum exhibit and get Hansen some of the recognition he has lost over the years.
“There is more for me to know before I tell this story, whether that is six months or a couple more years we’ll see,” Street said.
Those interested can follow more of Street’s journey as he works through the mysteries of Oskar Hansen and read more about his work to find the Bigfork sculpture at https://www.oskarjwhansen.org.
Aaron Street with Oskar Hansen’s rediscovered sculpture in Bigfork last week. (Courtesy/Aaron Street)