Karl Bitter (1867-1915)

One of Karl Bitter’s most well-known works is the Pulitzer Memorial Fountain between the Plaza Hotel and Fifth Avenue at 58th Street in New York City. The publisher Joseph Pulitzer died in 1912 and left a bequest of $50,000 for the creation of a fountain near Central Park “to be as far as possible like those in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, France.” Bitter was chosen to oversee the project and also to create the central figure for the fountain, and the present work is a preliminary model of his vision.

Bitter began to work on the central figure of Pomona in the fall of 1914, taking into account in his design that the sculpture was meant to be viewed from below, and the following spring he cast it into plaster. However, before Bitter was able to cast Pomona in full-size for the Plaza, he was tragically killed in a car crash on April 9, 1915 when leaving the Metropolitan Opera House. As a result, Bitter’s assistant Karl Gruppe used the plaster cast to make a larger model, which was slightly embellished by the sculptor Isadore Konti. The full-size version of Pomona was then cast into bronze and placed atop the Pulitzer Fountain in 1916. Posthumous bronze casts of Pomona are in the collections of the Century Association, New York, and Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina.