STAN AND GUS: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age, by Henry Wiencek
In Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” a beautiful room can be a dangerous place. An arcade of soft yellow marble can just as easily gratify a character’s “craving for the external finish of life” as give “a sharper edge to the meagerness of her own opportunities.”
This paradox would have felt immediately real to Wharton’s first readers in Gilded Age New York. Colonnades may have lost some currency, but the dichotomy still stands — and it’s the kind that Henry Wiencek captures brilliantly in “Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age,” a bracing and masterful tag-team glimpse of two giants who helped make the turn of the century look so confident: the architect Stanford White and his collaborator and sometime lover, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
A bombastic Puck with a cartoonishly large mustache, White (1853-1906) apprenticed as a teenager to the great American revivalist of Romanesque architecture, Henry Hobson Richardson, then became a founding partner in New York’s enormously influential firm McKim, Mead & White, where he deployed his cannonball speed and lack of filter, his genius with interiors, surface detail and historical collage.
White could extract something oddly American-feeling from ancient Italy, as he did with the Washington Square Arch; or from ancien régime France, with a Gatsby-grade Rhode Island manor; or from Golden Age Spain, as with the electric-lit pleasure palace of the second Madison Square Garden, on which Wiencek opens and closes his chronicle of decadence.
White met Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), the legend goes, when he heard him whistling Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” through a window. The son of a working-class French Irish family, the Dublin-born sculptor apprenticed in cameo portraits, then labored over small commissions in Paris, Rome and New York until his breakout bronze, which depicted the Civil War admiral David Farragut in Madison Square Park. His new best friend White offered to design the pedestal.
At a time when sculptors were still expected to imitate Rome, the “Farragut” helped make public sculpture in America feel modern. Saint-Gaudens showed him in a flash of decision, coat and buttons flapping. White’s innovations in the surrounding bluestone — pebble-dash paving borrowed from a French abbey, and some of America’s first Art Deco engravings — were revolutionary in their contrast of textures and moods.
Through collaborations like this, including a tomb for the former New York governor Edwin D. Morgan (now lost) and the nude Diana weather vane for Madison Square Garden (versions of which live at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art), White propelled Saint-Gaudens to the top of his craft. He won him commissions and improvised excuses for the crippling perfectionism — what Saint-Gaudens called his “idiotic delicacy” — that delayed their deadlines by years, sometimes past clients’ deaths. “Never did an artist have a more devoted agent,” Wiencek ventures.
Their friendship was also sexual, though Wiencek, a journalist and historian specializing in the founding era, doesn’t trade in sensationalism. Instead, he uses the surviving erotic notes between the two men — “Darling, once more and for the 5,999th time you can kiss me,” Saint-Gaudens assured White in one sign-off — to explore their bond. (The partnership so dictates the book that certain groundbreaking solo jobs, like Saint-Gaudens’s $20 coin for the U.S. Mint, are breezed over.)
The pair’s social circles, too, were like Venn diagrams of bodily and aesthetic freedom: One shared spot was the Sewer Club, which Wiencek diplomatically calls “a safe space for sexual adventuring” with the painter Thomas Dewing, the architect Joseph Wells and other luminaries.
Wives paid a price. The long-suffering Augusta Saint-Gaudens eventually learned about her sculptor husband’s illegitimate son by his model for the Diana, Davida Clark. Bessie White got even for Stanford’s compulsive dalliances by bedding his lawyer. In Wiencek’s telling, the women are more complex than victims, while the men, for all their domestic crimes (“My rudeness to Gussie at times is intentional,” Saint-Gaudens once told her sister), are plagued by their own uneven devotional urges.
But a certain ambiguity was Saint-Gaudens’s signature. And splendor didn’t seem to be the only aim of White’s delirious, overloaded interiors — especially his clubroom for veterans at the Park Avenue Armory, a land-grabbing jewel box “fusing Greek, Islamic, Celtic, Egyptian, Persian and Japanese style and imagery” whose carvings and ironwork Wiencek brings to life from the workman’s-eye view. (Picture-wise, this book is inadequately illustrated. Find the volume “Stanford White in Detail.”)
The fledgling Union, having recently quelled the largest insurrection attempt in modern history, needed landmarks to assert its power. But it also needed visual playgrounds of delight, or mystery, in which its citizens could forget that power and discover a sense of self. A spendaholic with taste, White was one of the go-to art scouts, and a grandfather of interior designers, in the age of Morgan and Frick.
He was also a monster. While Saint-Gaudens lived out his final years in the New Hampshire artist colony he built with Dewing and the painter Maxfield Parrish, among others, White descended into Jeffrey Epstein levels of depravity.
Addicted to teenage actresses, some barely pubescent, the architect would have their teeth perfected by a dentist, “mentor” them, then bring them to his West 24th Street studio, where a mirrored bedroom lay drenched in “amber, rose and soft blue light,” Wiencek writes, or his apartment at Madison Square Garden, where he would then seduce or rape them. He was famously shot dead at the Garden’s rooftop theater by the enraged husband of one such actress, Evelyn Nesbit, the original “Gibson girl.”
Can one be visually gluttonous while remaining morally pure? This was the time of the Aesthetic Movement, the classically inflected push in visual arts “for art’s sake.” The movement was nothing if not a backlash against Victorian moral posturing. Did that shape its practitioners’ behavior?
Wiencek serves these questions without answering them. This leads us into a certain sympathy for the pair’s clients. Henry Adams, the descendant of two American presidents, hired the duo for a bronze and stone tomb in Boston to memorialize his wife, Clover, who died by suicide. After years of delays and ghosting, Adams seethed in a letter from Tahiti that “I should club St Gaudens and Stanford White, and put them under their own structure.”
Saint-Gaudens eventually came through with a mysterious hooded angel that seemed to embody Clover’s Buddhist beliefs and tragic ending. While sculpting this androgynous figure, he was grieving another lover, the architect Wells, who died from overwork. Wiencek implies that it could be a monument to both.
After the work’s unveiling in 1891, the statesman John Hay made his friend Adams weep when he described Clover’s angel in a letter as “full of poetry and suggestion, infinite wisdom, a past without beginning, and a future without end,” putting words to the stately present-tense enigma that defined these two interpreters of a rising America.
STAN AND GUS: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age | By Henry Wiencek | MacMillan | 320 pp. | $30
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