Frederick
Hart died at the age of fifty-five on August 13, 1999, two days
after a team of doctors at Johns Hopkins discovered he had lung
cancer, abruptly concluding one of the most bizarre stories in the
history of twentieth-century art. While still in his twenties Hart
consciously, pointedly, aimed for the ultimate in the Western
tradition of sculpture, achieved it in a single stroke, then became
invisible, and remained as invisible as Ralph Ellison’s invisible
man, who was invisible “simply because people refused to see
me.”
Not even Giotto, the twelve-year-old
shepherd boy who was out in the meadow with the flock one day circa
1280, using a piece of flint to draw a picture of sheep on the face
of a boulder, when the vacationing Florentine artist Cimabue
happened to stroll by and discover the baby genius—not even Giotto
could match Frederick Hart’s storybook rise from
obscurity.
Hart was born in Atlanta to a failed
actress and a couldn’t-bebothered newspaper reporter. He was only
three when his mother died, whereupon he was packed off to an aunt
in a part of rural South Carolina where people ate peanuts boiled
in salty water. He developed into an incorrigible Conway, South
Carolina, juvenile delinquent, failed the ninth grade on his first
try, and got thrown out of school on his second. Yet at the age of
sixteen, by then a high-school dropout, he managed, to universal or
at least Conway-wide amazement, to gain admission to the University
of South Carolina by scoring a composite 35 out of a maximum 36 on
an ACT college entrance test, the equivalent of a 1,560 on the
College Boards.
He lasted six months. He became the
lone white student to join 250 black students in a civil rights
protest, was arrested, then expelled from the university. Informed
that the Ku Klux Klan was looking for him, he fled to
Washington.
In Washington he managed to get a job
as a clerk at the Washington National Cathedral, a stupendous stone
structure built in the Middle English Gothic style. The cathedral
employed a crew of Italian masons full-time, and Hart became
intrigued with their skill at stone carving. Several times he asked
the master carver, an Italian named Roger Morigi, to take him on as
an apprentice, but got nowhere. There was no one on the job but
experienced Italians. By and by, Hart got to know the crew and took
to borrowing tools and having a go at discarded pieces of stone.
Morigi was so happily surprised by his aptitude, he made him an
apprentice, after all, and soon began urging him to become a
sculptor. Hart turned out to have Giotto’s seemingly God-given
genius—Giotto was a sculptor as well as a painter—for pulling
perfectly formed human figures out of stone and clay at will and
rapidly.
In 1971, Hart learned that the
cathedral was holding an international competition to find a
sculptor to adorn the building’s west façade with a vast and
elaborate spread of deep bas-reliefs and statuary on the theme of
the Creation. Morigi urged Hart to enter. He entered and won. A
working-class boy nobody had ever heard of, an apprentice stone
carver, had won what would turn out to be the biggest and most
prestigious commission for religious sculpture in America in the
twentieth century.
The project brought him unimaginable
dividends. The erstwhile juvenile delinquent from Conway, South
Carolina, was a creature of hot passions, a handsome, slender boy
with long, wavy, light brown hair, an artist by night with a
rebellious hairdo and a rebellious attitude who was a big hit with
the girls. In the late afternoons he had taken to hanging about
Dupont Circle in Washington, which had become something of a
bohemian quarter. Afternoon after afternoon he saw the same
ravishing young woman walking home from work down Connecticut
Avenue. His hot Hart flame lit, he introduced himself and asked her
if she would pose for his rendition of the Creation, an array of
idealized young men and women rising nude from out of the chaotic
swirl of Creation’s dawn. She posed. They married. Great artists
and the models they fell in love with already accounted for the
most romantic part of art history. But probably no model in all
that lengthy, not to say lubricious, lore was ever so stunningly
beautiful as Lindy Lain Hart. Her face and figure were to recur in
his work throughout his career.
The hot-blooded boy’s passion, as Hart
developed his vision of the Creation, could not be consummated by
Woman alone. He fell in love with God. For Hart, the process began
with his at first purely pragmatic research into the biblical story
of the Creation in the Book of Genesis. He had been baptized in the
Presbyterian Church, and he was working for the Episcopal Church at
the Washington National Cathedral. But by the 1970s, neither of
these proper, old-line, in-town Protestant faiths offered the
strong wine a boy who was in love with God was looking for. He
became a Roman Catholic and began to regard his talent as a
charisma, a gift from God. He dedicated his work to the
idealization of the possibilities God offered man.
From his conception of Ex Nihilo, as he called the centerpiece of his huge
Creation design (literally, “out of nothing”; figuratively, out of
the chaos that preceded Creation), to the first small-scale clay
model, through to the final carving of the stone—all this took
eleven years.
In 1982, Ex
Nihilo was unveiled in a dedication ceremony. The next day,
Hart scanned the newspapers for reviews … The
Washington Post … The New York Times … nothing … nothing the
next day, either … nor the next week nor the week after that. The
one mention of any sort was an obiter dictum in the Post’s Style (read: Women’s) section indicating that the
west façade of the cathedral now had some new but earnestly
traditional (read: old-fashioned) decoration. So Hart started
monitoring the art magazines. Months went by … nothing. It reached
the point that he began yearning for a single paragraph by an art
critic who would say how much he loathed Ex
Nihilo … anything, anything at all … to prove there was
someone out there in the art world who in some way, however
slightly or rudely, cared.
The truth was, no one did, not in the
least. Ex Nihilo never got ex nihilo simply because art worldlings refused to see
it.
Hart had become so absorbed in his
“triumph” that he had next to no comprehension of the American art
world as it existed in the 1980s. In fact, the art world was
strictly the New York art world, and it was scarcely a world, if
world was meant to connote a great many people. In the one
sociological study of the subject, The Painted
Word, the author estimated the entire art “world” consisted
of some three thousand curators, dealers, collectors, scholars,
critics, and artists in New York. Art critics, even in the most
remote outbacks of the heartland, were perfectly content to be
obedient couriers of the word as received from New York. And the
word was that School of Renaissance sculpture like Hart’s was
nonart. Art worldlings just couldn’t see it.
The art magazines opened Hart’s eyes
until they were bleary with bafflement. Classical statues were
“pictures in the air.” They used a devious means—skill—to fool the
eye into believing that bronze or stone had turned into human
flesh. Therefore, they were artificial, false, meretricious. By
1982, no ambitious artist was going to display skill, even if he
had it. The great sculptors of the time did things like have
unionized elves put arrangements of rocks or bricks flat on the
ground, objects they, the artists, hadn’t laid a finger on (Carl
Andre), or prop up slabs of Cor-Ten steel straight from the
foundry, edgewise (Richard Serra); or they took G.E. fluorescent
light tubes straight out of the box from the hardware store and
arranged them this way and that (Dan Flavin); or they welded
I-beams and scraps of metal together (Anthony Caro). This expressed
the material’s true nature, its “gravity” (no stone pictures
floating in the air), its “objectness.”
This was greatness in sculpture. As Tom
Stoppard put it in his play Artist Descending a
Staircase, “Imagination without skill gives us contemporary
art.”
Hart lurched from bafflement to shock,
then to outrage. He would force the art world to see what great
sculpture looked like.
By 1982, he was already involved in
another competition for a huge piece of public sculpture in
Washington. A group of Vietnam veterans had just obtained
congressional approval for a memorial that would pay long-delayed
tribute to those who had fought in Vietnam with honor and courage
in a lost and highly unpopular cause. They had chosen a jury of
architects and art worldlings to make a blind selection in an open
competition; that is, anyone could enter, and no one could put his
name on his entry. Every proposal had to include something—a wall,
a plinth, a column—on which a hired engraver could inscribe the
names of all 57,000-plus members of the American military who had
died in Vietnam. Nine of the top ten choices were abstract designs
that could be executed without resorting to that devious and
accursed bit of trickery: skill. Only the number-three choice was
representational. Up on one end of a semicircular wall bearing the
57,000 names was an infantryman on his knees beside a fallen
comrade, looking about for help. At the other end, a third
infantryman had begun to run along the top of the wall toward them.
The sculptor was Frederick Hart.
The winning entry was by a young Yale
undergraduate architectural student named Maya Lin. Her proposal
was a V-shaped wall, period, a wall of polished black granite
inscribed only with the names; no mention of honor, courage, or
gratitude; not even a flag. Absolutely skillproof, it
was.
Many veterans were furious. They regarded her wall as a gigantic pitiless tombstone that said, “Your so-called service was an absolutely pointless disaster.” They made so much noise that a compromise was struck. An American flag and statue would be added to the site. Hart was chosen to do the statue. He came up with a group of three soldiers, realistic down to the aglets of their boot strings, who appear to have just emerged from the jungle into a clearing, where they are startled to see Maya Lin’s V-shaped black wall bearing the names of their dead comrades.
Naturally enough, Maya Lin was miffed
at the intrusion, and so a make-peace get-together was arranged in
Plainview, New York, where the foundry had just completed casting
the soldiers. Doing her best to play the part, Maya Lin asked
Hart—as Hart recounted it—if the young men used as models for the
three soldiers had complained of any pain when the plaster casts
were removed from their faces and arms. Hart couldn’t imagine what
she was talking about. Then it dawned on him. She assumed that he
had followed the lead of the ingenious art worldling George Segal,
who had contrived a way of sculpturing the human figure without any
skill whatsoever: by covering the model’s body in wet plaster and
removing it when it began to harden. No artist of her generation
(she was twenty-one) could even conceive of a sculptor starting out
solely with a picture in his head, a stylus, a brick of moist clay
and some armature wire. No artist of her generation could even
speculate about … skill.
President Ronald Reagan presided at a
dedication ceremony unveiling Hart’s Three
Soldiers on Veterans Day, 1984. The next day Hart looked for
the art reviews … in The Washington Post … The New
York Times … and, as time went by, in the magazines. And
once more, nothing … not even the inside-out tribute known as
savaging. Three Soldiers received only
so-called civic reviews, the sort of news or feature items or
picture captions that say, in effect, “This thing is big, it’s
outdoors, and you may see it on the way to work, and so we should
probably tell you what it is.” Civic reviews of outdoor
representational sculpture often don’t even mention the name of the
sculptor. Why mention the artist, since it’s nonart by
definition?
Hart was by no mention alone. In 1980,
a sculptor named Eric Parks completed a statue of Elvis Presley for
downtown Memphis. It was unveiled before a crowd of thousands of
sobbing women; it became, and remains, a tremendous tourist
attraction; civic reviews only. And who remembers the name Eric
Parks? In 1985, a sculptor named Raymond J. Kaskey completed the
second-biggest copper sculpture in America—the Statue of Liberty is
the biggest—an immense Classical figure of a goddess in a toga with
her right hand outstretched toward the multitudes. Portlandia, she was called. Tens of thousands of
citizens of Portland, Oregon, turned out on a Sunday to see her
arrive on a barge on the Willamette River and get towed downtown.
Parents lifted their children so they could touch her fingertips as
she was hoisted up to her place atop the porte cochere of the new
Portland Public Services Building; civic reviews only. In 1992,
Audrey Flack completed Civitas, four
Classical goddesses, one for each corner of a highway intersection
just outside a moribund mill town, Rock Hill, South Carolina. It
has been a major tourist attraction ever since; cars come from all
directions to see the goddesses lit up at night; a nearby fallow
cotton field claiming to be an “industrial park” suddenly a
sellout; Rock Hill comes alive; civic reviews only.
Over the last fifteen years of his life
Hart did something that, in artworld terms, was even more infra dig
than Ex Nihilo and Three
Soldiers: he became America’s most popular living sculptor.
He developed a technique for casting sculpture in acrylic resin.
The result resembled Lalique glass. Many of his smaller pieces were
nudes, using Lindy as a model, so lyrical and sensual that Hart’s
Classicism began to take on the contours of Art Nouveau. The gross
sales of his acrylic castings had gone well over $100 million. None
was ever reviewed.
Art worldlings regarded popularity as
skill’s live-in slut. Popularity meant shallowness. Rejection by
the public meant depth. And truly hostile rejection very likely
meant greatness. Richard Serra’s Titled Arc,
a leaning wall of rusting steel smack in the middle of Federal
Plaza in New York, was so loathed by the building’s employees that
1,300 of them, including many federal judges, signed a petition for
its removal. They were angry and determined, and eventually the
wall was cut apart and hauled away. Serra thereby achieved an
eminence of immaculate purity: his work involved absolutely no
skill and was despised by everyone outside the art world who saw
it. Today many art worldlings regard him as America’s greatest
sculptor.
In 1987, Hart moved seventy-five miles
northwest of Washington to a 135-acre estate in the Virginia horse
country and built a Greek Revival mansion featuring double-decked
porches with twelve columns each; bought horses for himself, Lindy,
and their two sons, Lain and Alexander; stocked the place with
tweeds, twills, tack, and bench-made boots; grew a beard like the
King of Diamonds’; and rode to the hounds—all the while turning out
new work at a prolific rate.
In his last years he began to summon to
his estate a cadre of likeminded souls, a handful of artists,
poets, and philosophers, a dedicated little derrière-garde (to
borrow a term from the composer Stefania de Kenessey), to gird for
the battle to take art back from the Modernists. They called
themselves the Centerists.
It wasn’t going to be easy to get a new
generation of artists to plunge into the fray yodeling, “Onward! To
the Center!” Nevertheless, Hart persevered. Since his death certain
… signs … have begun, as a sixties song once put it, blowing in the
wind: the suddenly serious consideration, by the art world itself,
of Norman Rockwell as a Classical artist dealing in American
mythology … the “edgy buzz,” to use two nineties words, over a
sellout show at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery of six young
representational painters known as the “Paint Group,” five of them
graduates of America’s only Classical, derrière-garde art school,
the New York Academy of Art … the tendency of a generation of
serious young collectors, flush with new Wall Street money, to
discard the tastes of their elders and to collect “pleasant” and
often figurative art instead of the abstract, distorted, or
“wounded” art of the Modern tradition … the soaring interest of
their elders in the work of the once-ridiculed French “academic”
artists Bougereau, Meissonier, and Gérôme and the French “fashion
painter” Tissot. The art historian Gregory Hedberg, Hirschl &
Adler’s director for European art, says that with metronomic
regularity the dawn of each new century has seen a collapse of one
reigning taste and the establishment of another. In the early 1600s
the Mannerist giants (for example, El Greco) came down off
fashionable walls and the Baroque became all the rage; in the early
1700s, the Baroque giants (Rembrandt) came down and the Rococo went
up; in the early 1800s the Rococo giants (Watteau) came down and
the Neoclassicists went up; and in the early twentieth century, the
modern movement turned the Neoclassical academic giants Bougereau,
Meissonier, and Gérôme into joke figures in less than twenty-five
years.
And at the dawn of the twenty-first? In
the summer of 1985 the author of The Painted
Word gave a lecture at the Parrish Museum in Southampton,
New York, entitled “Picasso: The Bougereau of the Year 2020.”
Should such turn out to be the case, Frederick Hart will not have
been the first major artist to have died ten minutes before history
absolved him and proved him right.