AN AMERICAN SCULPTOR

...Just what this meant Hart found out in the very first week after the dedication of Ex Nihilo in 1982 (two years before the completion of the entire façade...

...The bureaucrats kept commissioning large public sculptures that the public loathed, even to the point of going through protracted administrative hearings and court battles to have the loathsome objects, in all of their grave and weighty object-ness, removed...

...The young would-be sculptor spent three years conceiving and preparing a series of scale models...

...in Horry County, where folks ate their peanuts boiled in salty water and their black-eyed peas cooked with tomatoes, Hoppin' John style...

...Or do they choose Idealism, with its guarantee of...

...Among architects this came to be known as the "Turd in the Plaza" school of sculpture, after a remark by James Wines, who said, "I don't care if they want to build those boring glass boxes, but why do they always deposit that little turd in the plaza when they leave...

...One of the major theorists is Pierce Rice, who argues in his book Man as Hero that the great tradition of Western art has been, and should continue to be, not merely representational work but the idealization of the human form, the glorification of both heroic individuals and the heroic possibilities of mankind...

...While the citizens hooted and jeered and called them imbeciles, the councilmen tamped the sides of their heads with the heels of their hands—and, prodded by the NEA, paid up...

...From that time on, Giotto's life was an uninterrupted ascension to wealth, the company and patronage of the rich and powerful, surpassing fame, and the universal admiration of his fellow artists...

...The howler of all howlers came in 1976, when the City of Hartford, Connecticut, approached the National Endowment for the Arts to put up part of the money and find a sculptor to provide a major work for a choice site downtown to celebrate Hartford's eminence as the Athens of western south-central New England...

...Hart was now at the same point in his career as Giotto when Giotto did his first great painting, the Virgin Mary trembling before the Archangel Gabriel, for the high altar of the Abbey of Florence in 1301...

...Add to this the throngs who came annually to see his Three Soldiers and Ex Nihilo, and Hart could probably claim the largest following of any living American sculptor...

...This was not a cabal, simply a circle of fashion...

...In 1985, Ronald Reagan appointed him to the Commission of Fine Arts...

...In the 1950s and 1960s American corporations began building glass towers with bare concrete and granite plazas out front, and in the plazas they began placing abstract sculptures, the favorites being twisted extrusions in the Isamu Noguchi manner and boluses with holes in them à la Henry Moore...

...American art has lost a giant, a giant in the grand tradition of Augustus St...

...When Kaskey's Portlandia, a colossal figure of a woman in a toga, arrived in Portland by barge on the Willamette River in 1985, thousands of citizens lined the shore and boulevards, cheering and crying...

...He was expelled when he became the lone white student to join 250 black students in a 1961 civil rights demonstration and spent four days in jail for breach of the peace...

...Young sculptors with skills and aspirations resembling Frederick Hart's find themselves in a bind—felt even at the handful of art schools where figurative sculpture is taught...

...Orna-mentalists molded eggs, darts, acanthus leaves, and the like out of plaster for friezes and cornices...

...Eighty years ago no sculpture department would have offered anything else...

...Morigi urged Hart to enter the competition...

...In 1993, Hart began convening a group of artists, scholars, philosophers, and poets at his home in Virginia to try to create a new aesthetic for the arts generally...

...The question is whether public pressure will at last crack the art world's much-loathed New York Wall of taste or merely harden it...

...the lower half of the torso of a man wearing undershorts, ribbed socks, and Topsider sneakers with gaping holes in his legs and left buttock that look like crosses between abscess craters and plumbing drains (Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991...

...The American art "world," as it was known, was in fact a small circle of dealers, museum curators, collectors, and established artists who created and certified reputations...

...In 1971 he learned that the cathedral would be looking for a sculptor to adorn the entire west façade...

...eyes averted...

...The public loved the figures they produced, reveled in them, sometimes with startling displays of emotion...

...Thirteen years at work on the most important American religious commission of the twentieth century, and—nihil, a hollow silence...

...In the wake of the Hartford fiasco and many similar ones in the 1980s, Hart and other representational sculptors began to believe that the collapse of taste had finally hit bottom and that a rebirth of figurative sculpture—and skill—must be at hand, even in the New York art village...

...Prime examples were Hart's Ex Nihilo, Raymond Kaskey's Portlandia, in Portland, Oregon, Audrey Flack's Civitas at Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Eric Parks's Elvis Statue in Memphis...

...a bowl of plums, each plum possessing a screaming human mouth with purple lips and gnashing purple teeth (Rona Pondick, Plums, 1993...

...And so did the art schools...

...In 1974, at the age of thirty-one, a complete unknown, a stone carver by trade, Hart won what would turn out to be the most monumental commission for religious sculpture in the United States in the twentieth century...

...It may take twenty years, but in due course his reputation in the art "world" will catch up with his genius...

...True, it demands an appetite for the ugly and requires (and tolerates) only minimal skill, but it at least holds out the possibility of being taken seriously by the art worldlings who certify reputations...

...By day Morigi and Hart carved stone for Washington National Cathedral, an enormous structure in the Middle English Gothic style...

...Parents lifted their children up so they could touch the bronze goddess's outstretched fingertips...

...In the art press in the weeks and months and years that fol-lowed—nothing, not even so much as a one-paragraph review...

...By 1994 there were only half a dozen offering full-scale curricula in the sculpting of the human form...

...He said that God sent Michelangelo to earth to perfect the art of Florence, and Raphael to prove that a genius among artists could also be a perfectly polite and cultivated gentleman...

...Informed that the Ku Klux Klan was looking for him, he fled to Washington, D.C., and by and by got a job as an apprentice ornamentalist for the Gianetti Studio of Architectural Sculpture...

...It was as if the west side of Washington National Cathedral, the seventh-largest cathedral in the world, were invisible...

...All in all, an ascension of the Giotto dimension—but one thing was missing: the artistic atmosphere of fourteenth-century Florence, not to mention a Vasari or two to chronicle his success...

...In 1976 the author of The Painted Word estimated their number at no more than three-thousand souls nationwide, of whom about 2,700 lived in New York City or nearby...

...In the case of sculpture, specifically, matters had plunged to the level of outright farce...

...After all, the Giotto tradition was not dead...

...Bowled over by the boy's ability, Cimabue got the family's permission to take Giotto to Florence as his apprentice...

...Art (for "Intensive Care Unit"), in which self-loathing and loathing of the human species reach a nadir, from the Idealist point of view...

...In the 1970s and the 1980s the art bureaucrats—from such government creations as the National Endowment for the Arts' "Art in Public Places" program and the General Services Administration's Art-in-Architecture program— came into their own and started promoting the village's latest fashion, "the sculpture of object-ness" (in which sculpture was not supposed to evoke, much less represent, anything other than its "weight" and "gravity" as an object...

...Within the New York art village such a notion is so infra dig, the dealers, curators, collectors, and artists who establish fashions don't even bother to condemn it...

...By that time, many thousands of his smaller pieces cast in clear acrylic resin had been sold through galleries...

...This article is an expanded version of an essay that appeared in The Weekly Standard, October 2, 1995, and in Frederick Hart: Sculptor (Hudson Hills Press...

...He lasted six months...

...Hart was born in Atlanta in 1943, but his mother died when he was three, and he was packed off to her relatives in Con-way, South Carolina, over near the coast Tom Wolfe is the author of A Man in Full, The Bonfire of the Vanities, and many other books...

...There were still plenty of municipal, institutional, religious, and civic leaders who, wanting to pay tribute to great themes or great individuals, bypassed the art bureaucracies and turned directly to sculptors with skill, skill in portraying the idealized human form, to do it...

...In the 1940s this network was swept by a vogue for abstract art...

...Typical creations of I.C.U...

...Gaudens and Frederick MacMon-nies...

...At bottom, Idealism rests upon a religious assumption taken for granted in the Renaissance, namely that human beings are created in the image of God...

...Vasari attributed all remarkable developments in art history to God...

...He then presented the City Council with a bill for $87,000...

...So henceforth they would still feel guilty but would have no one to turn to for forgiveness, causing them to loathe themselves and one another...

...Giotto, as Vasari tells it, was out tending his father's sheep in a field one day in the year 1286 when the painter Cimabue happened to pass by on the way from Florence to a nearby village and saw him drawing a sheep on a slab of rock with a pointed stone...

...As Morigi's apprentice, Hart learned to conceive of form in stone from the carver's perspective, from the inside out...

...With that twist of fortune the flowering of Renaissance painting and sculpture began, and the erstwhile peasant boy became the most famous artist of his time...

...This led to one howler after another...

...He spent ten years creating the full-size models in clay and overseeing Morigi and his men as they carved Ex Nihilo, depicting mankind emerging from the swirling rush of chaos...

...While at Gianetti he was discovered not by a Cimabue but by a stone carver from Italy, Roger Morigi...

...Hart's story would fit right into Giorgio Vasari's marvelous Lives of the Artists, assuming the great Renaissance biographer might have had a taste for tales from the boiled-peanut, Hoppin' John country of eastern South Carolina...

...Men no longer believed in God, he said, but they had not shed their own sense of guilt...

...sculpture are the incinerated and flagellated corpse of a tiny woman with her bloody spinal column popping out through the skin of her back (Kiki Smith, Untitled, 1991...

...His high school career was distinguished by episodes of juvenile delinquency, his obsession with drawing pictures, particularly during classes in which he was supposed to be doing other things, and the fact that he failed the ninth grade—twice—but nevertheless managed to get into the University of South Carolina at the age of sixteen, by shooting the moon on the Scholastic Aptitude Test...

...On the level of unlikely paths, at any rate, Frederick Hart's good fortune out-Lotto's Giotto's...

...In 1994, he completed a statue of Jimmy Carter for the State Capitol in Atlanta and was at work on a statue of the late senator Richard Russell and a statue of Luis Carlos Galan, the Colombian presidential candidate slain by drug cartel assassins, to be erected in front of the presidential palace in Bogota...

...As Hart was now able to figure out at his leisure, by the 1980s all work in the Giotto tradition of glorious lifelike human forms, not just his, was being buried in the most ludicrous collapse of taste in the history of the American art world...

...The art press, however, continued to ignore such work, as did the museums and major galleries...

...In the press, even the local press, there was nothing, save a single rather slighting remark in passing in the Style section of the Washington Post...

...But why...

...In recent years, the art village, the circle, has begun to sanction a form of figurative sculpture sometimes called I.C.U...

...Vasari doted on figures such as Giotto, the peasant boy who is discovered, miraculously, to have the divine gift of pouring liv-ing—or at least gloriously lifelike— human forms out of his fingertips and pulling them out of stone and clay...

...Repeatedly over the past ten years, the public has demonstrated not merely its preference but its passion for the work of the Harts, the Kaskeys, the Flacks, and the Parkses...

...It was merely invisible to the village and its subalterns in the provinces...

...and the blackened figure of a man with no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no ears, hogtied in a jack-knifed position (Antony Gormley, Proof, 1984...

...In due course a man named Carl Andre arrived with thirty-six rocks, huge rocks but just plain rocks from off the ground, and had some unionized elves arrange them in a triangular pattern, like bowling pins...

...For Hart, the more earthly rewards came soon enough...

...By night Hart began sculpting on his own, and by the age of twenty-five he was pulling human forms out of clay and stone with a breathtaking facility...

...It is . . . in such poor taste...

...perhaps for a lifetime...

...The tasteful view today is precisely the opposite and, as the Idealists see it, bears out a prediction Nietzsche made just over a hundred years ago when he announced that God was dead...

...As for Hart himself, his career is very likely fireproof...

...By 1994, the loathing of Homo sapiens among the fashionable sculptors had reached such an intensity that a University of Chicago art historian, Barbara Maria Stafford, was driven to ask: "Why, in order to be serious, do things have to be ugly...

...If recent history is any indication, those who want to celebrate Homo sapiens' hopes and feats will continue to seek out his surpassing skill at bringing alive the human form in the tradition Giotto introduced with his models for the campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore, and people will love it...

...If he was right, then God sent Carl Andre to Hartford to prove the correctness of the British playwright Tom Stoppard's crack, "Contemporary art is imagination without skill...

...They avert their eyes...

...They go by the name of the Centerists, but their thinking parallels that of a broader movement known as the Idealist school of contemporary representational art...

...As a result, the twentieth century would be a century of wars catastrophic beyond all imagining, waged by human beings who looked upon their loathsome selves as no different, morally, from other beasts—mere organisms, one and all, driven on by urges and appetites but constantly starved for meaning in their lives...

...The theme was to be the Creation, with the pièce de résistance a two-story-high, twenty-one-foot-wide stone bas-relief above the main entrance...

...The American art "village," he called it—and yet art critics everywhere, even in the popular press, were content to serve as obedient little subalterns conveying the village's decisions to the public at large...

...Do they choose the fashionable direction, which at the moment is I.C.U...

...In 1982, after a terrific imbroglio in which veterans protested the tombstone-like, anti-heroic look of the black wall chosen for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, he was commissioned to add a group of three soldiers to the site...