Stan and Gus
Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
How the architect Stanford White and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens transcended scandal to enrich their times.
Stanford White was a louche man-about-town and a canny cultural entrepreneur—the creator of landmark buildings that elevated American architecture to new heights. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the son of an immigrant shoemaker, a moody introvert, and a committed procrastinator whose painstaking work brought emotional depth to American sculpture. They met when Stan was walking down the street and heard Gus whistling Mozart in his studio. They pursued their own careers in Italy and France, then came together again in New York, where they maintained an intimate friendship and partnership that defined the art of the Gilded Age. Over the course of decades, White would help sustain his friend's troubled spirits and vouch for Saint-Gaudens when he failed to complete projects. Meanwhile, Saint-Gaudens would challenge White to take his artistic gifts seriously—and so it went amid brilliant commissions and sordid debaucheries all the way to White’s sensational murder by an enraged husband in 1906.
In Stan and Gus, the acclaimed historian Henry Wiencek sets the two men’s relationship within the larger story of the American Renaissance, where millionaires’ commissions and delusions of grandeur collided with secret upper-class clubs, new aesthetic ideas, and two ambitious young men to yield work of lasting beauty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Wiencek follows up Master of the Mountain with an intimate account of the professional and personal relationship between architect Stanford White (1853-1906) and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). The two met in 1875 New York, forming a creative partnership in which White solicited commissions for Saint-Gaudens—who was seemingly always on the verge of financial ruin—and designed the bases for many of Saint-Gaudens's sculptures. Drawing on archival sources, Wiencek highlights how the pair embraced Gilded Age New York's "theatrical potential as a place of visual and social drama" in their projects, rejecting Gothic styles for designs with drama and "emotional power," such as their opulent Madison Square Garden, which included a statue of the Goddess Diana, and Saint-Gaudens's relief sculpture commemorating the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-Black unit that fought in the Civil War. Situating his subjects' story against the hedonism of the Gilded Age, Wiencek devotes ample space to their numerous affairs with women, men, and one another; the scandals that consumed White's life; and the complex dynamic between the pair——White was charismatic and confident, Saint-Gaudens was wracked by self-doubt—occasionally at the expense of more in-depth aesthetic and historical analysis. Still, this offers a colorful, captivating window into a fascinating historical era.
