Stan and Gus

 

The Gilded Age is not just an amazing HBO series. It was also a real era in New York City's life and remains real today, monumentally so, in its grandiose public spaces and art. Some noteworthy examples of that public art are found in the Paulist Fathers' "Mother Church," the Church of Saint Paul the Apostle at 59th Street and 9th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. When that church was being built in the 1880s, the Paulist Fathers' founder and the first pastor of the parish called in for consultation three of the most eminent, contemporary artists, John LaFarge, Stanford White, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 

Henry Wiencek, STAN and GUS: The Ardor and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) is the complicated story of two of those artists, architect Stanford White (1853-1906), who designed the church's majestic main altar with its beautiful baldacchino, toward which all the lines of the church can be said to converge, and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), whose student, Frederick MacMonnies, made the three gilded angels above the baldacchino, and another student, Bela Pratt, produced the church's glorious statue of Our Lady of hte Annunciation, carved from Carrara marble in the form of a lily bud about to bloom. (None of this work is referenced in Wiencek's book.)

Wiencek's account recalls the partnership between those two famous Gilded Age artists - both their public professional partnership and their private personal relationship, revealing details about their personal and family lives, which their admiring public probably did not know and which would have likely diminished the public's positive perception of them as persons and perhaps also diminished for some the appeal of their artistry.

The two artists, White and Saint-Gaudens, came from decidedly different backgrounds and had notably different personalities, but became close collaborators as well as personal friends. Wiencek traces how they overcame their circumstances to become the successful artists whose works we remember, and how they relied upon each other for emotional support and professional advancement. The author highlights important early stages in their professional advancement - among them Trinity Church in Boston and the Farragut statue in New York. Along the way, we get a close-up picture of the artists' idiosyncrasies.

From time immemorial, artists have depended upon patrons - particularly rich patrons. Wiencek's account highlights this peculiar alliance. It is a story of artistic genius, constrained (only minimally as it turned out) by financial dependence upon rich patrons, but otherwise floating freely through the moral abyss of Gilded Age oligarchy. The Gilded Age may compare somewhat favorably to our contemporary experience of oligarchy, in that the Robber Barons - in contrast to our contemporary oligarchs - did in fact actually produce things of value (e.g., railroads) and cultural products of public benefit (e.g., libraries, churches, monumental statuary). Although White and Saint-Gaudens did inevitably produce some artworks for private use and benefit (including White's now torn-down private mansions), they also produced a great amount of properly public art, among them the many statues which were apparently all the rage in the post-Civil War era. Much of this public art remains and continues to enrich our social and cultural landscape, even as it also continues to remind us of the economic dislocation of the era that commissioned it - and the moral failures of the artists who successfully produced it.

Genius has often become an excuse for anti-social behavior. There are repeated instances described in the book where exasperated patrons - for example, Henry Adams and the Rector of Ascension Church - ultimately fell in love with the art they had commissioned, despite their frustrations and anger with the artists' entitled approach to their commitments. Nonetheless, the book illustrates quite clearly how obnoxious those artists (Saint-Gaudens especially) could be and how frustrating it was to commission work from them. Although he came to appreciate the end product, Henry Adams' outburst about Saint-Gaudens when he was working on Adams' wife's memorial is illustrative. "If I could, I should club St. Gaudens and Stanford White, and put them under their own structures. Nothing has distressed. me like their outrageous disregard  of my feelings in this matter. Never spare an architect or artist hereafter. Make their lives intolerable and have no pity, for they will have none on you."

Other victims of the artists' self-centeredness were, of course, their wives. Even allowing for the very different attitudes toward marriage at that time, some of their behavior toward their wives and their official families failed even by such lenient standards. Wiencek recounts in considerable detail the varied affairs conducted by the two men, as well as exploring the romantic and sexual aspects of their own relationship with each other. He does so journalistically without sensationalizing. The book is not primarily an expose of the two men's sexual affairs or of their own love affair. Still, their chaotic sexual behavior gets the treatment it requires as defining aspects of their mutual relationship and of their relationships with others.

Not only were the artists intimately part of a filthy rich social circle, with all the narcissism and abuses of power that accompany excessive wealth, they were also central to a social circle of sexual adventure, which combined an artistic inclination to sexual freedom with the privileges of wealth to abuse others. Most extremely, with White, the result anticipated some of the sort of depravity so recently exposed in the Jeffrey Epstein saga - also a story of licentiousness empowered by the power and attractiveness of wealth, and rich people covering for one another. The result in White's case, of course, was his murder in public at Madison Square Garden, the event which blew the lid off the false front of respectability he had managed to maintain. 

STAN and GUS tells an important story about a world most of us non-artists have no experience or understanding of. It also confronts us with the ambivalent legacy of an era of out-of-control oligarchy, which produced so much we can and should value in public spaces and public art. It also challenges us to evaluate the moral costs of indulging uninhibited sexual freedom, licentiousness, and depravity among the rich and talented, with comparably little regard for those we must now recognize as their victims.