The New York World's Fair Opened Today in 1939

Many artists created murals and sculpture to interpret the fair's theme "Building the World of Tomorrow." The results presented a wonderous, hopeful view of the future to the millions of fair visitors.

Paul Manship's sculpture, Time and the Fates Sundial, created for the fair, was the largest sundial in the world, with a bronze gnomon (the pointer on a sundial, which by the length of its shadow indicates the hour of the day) over eighty feet in length. Today, the work only survives in reductions.

Though he clothed them in antique garb, Manship uses the Fates obliquely to address the fair's theme, "The World of Tomorrow." Manship explained his program for the work within the context of the fair:

The gnomon is upheld by the Tree of Life, which grows out of a rocky, insular base. The Three Fates—Clotho, the Future, holds the distaff and is the motif of the forward curve; Lachesis, the Present, is vertical and looking ahead and is measuring the thread as it passes through her hands; and Atropos, the Past, the curved line which returns within itself, symbolizes the end of things as she cuts the thread. Over her head the branches of the Tree of Life have lost their foliage and the Raven—the Bird of Doom—sits watching her.

To learn more about the 1939 World's Fair, visit our on-line exhibition, Posters, American Style.

Source: Harry Rand. Paul Manship. (Washington, D.C.: For the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).

Pictured: Paul Manship, (1885–1966), Time and the Fates Sundial,1938, bronze on marble base, 54 1/2 x 55 x 9 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Paul Manship.