The Celestial Sphere Woodrow Wilson Memorial, Geneva, Switzerland

The Celestial Sphere Woodrow Wilson Memorial, Geneva, Switzerland

This sculpture by Paul Manship was officially inaugurated at the League of Nations’ Geneva headquarters in August 1939. It was a memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, who had represented the United States of America at the Paris Peace Conference. Wilson spent months in Europe, making the case for a post-war order that would accord with an American vision for an international order. This would include the much-discussed “self-determination” of national peoples (a right quickly denied to colonised nations) and the protection of a liberal economic world order that would open up markets for American investment and goods, in the face of an emerging communist alternative. Despite this, Wilson failed to convince American politicians to join the League he had helped create. Manship’s sculpture represented the heavenly constellations, worshipped throughout history and witnessed by all of humankind. The geometry of the sphere referenced the unity of all humans on planet earth, a key visual and terrestrial tenet of liberal internationalism. The sculpture was designed to rotate, although the motor did not function during the war years, when the sculpture also developed major structural faults, and has not been used since. The sphere is currently at risk of collapse; an unkindly metaphor for liberal internationalism, perhaps.

Henri Musielak / CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en)