Stan and Gus Art, ardor, and the friendship that built the Gilded Age

The intertwined biographies of two Gilded Age artists reveal a complex relationship in electrifying, turbulent times. Known for his Civil War statues and the sleek, gleaming Diana of the Tower, Augustus "Gus" Saint-Gaudens was one of the era's most prominent sculptors. Stanford "Stan" White, architect of Greenwich Village's iconic Washington Arch, designed Fifth Avenue mansions and Long Island getaways for the Gatsby set. The men were very much opposites. Stan was dashing and sociable, a "sensation seeker" driven by powerful appetites. Gus, by contrast, was intense and ascetic, moody and tormented. Following a theatrical initial meeting, they "came together like two sticking plasters." Though both would marry others, Stan and Gus would remain intimate for 30 years, until Stan was murdered by a Pittsburgh millionaire whose wife he had allegedly raped when she was a teenager. Highlighting his subjects' larger-than-life personalities, the imbalances of their relationship, and the glittery, careening mess of their era, Wiencek (Master of the Mountain, 2013) ultimately celebrates the artistic impact Stan and Gus' relationship would have upon New York City.

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. (July)

Collaborators, libertines, visionaries. Wiencek dexterously chronicles the fruitful 30-year friendship of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed grand buildings and public art and ignored sexual taboos, leading to lurid tragedy. White's Madison Square Garden, topped in 1891 with a Saint-Gaudens sculpture, was the tallest building in a modernizing Manhattan. In 1906, the venue became an infamous crime scene when the architect was murdered in the Garden's rooftop theater. Wiencek toggles between ateliers and late-night clubs, detailing the duo's creative output--their projects included, most enduringly, memorials to presidents and war heroes still displayed in New York, Boston, and elsewhere--and their apparently intertwined love lives. White's design of a tower for Boston's Trinity Church was, per a colleague, the work of "an artist of extreme talent and power amounting to genius." He was a fop befitting a city on the rise, with "flamboyant, spiky red hair" and "see-through silk shirts of pale blue and green." Saint-Gaudens wasn't so fancy. Sometimes "dressed like a factory worker" and often battling deep depression, he'd spend months on a sculpture, then angrily destroy it. Saint-Gaudens and White had complicated sex lives and what the author calls "an erotic relationship" with one another. White, nearing 50, courted and then raped a teen girl, Wiencek writes, and in 1906 the man she'd subsequently married shot the architect to death, setting off a newspaper frenzy. Though Wiencek sometimes fixates on the tiring minutiae of his subjects' sexual couplings, he effectively contextualizes their work and depicts Saint-Gaudens in particularly memorable detail. While making a large altarpiece featuring reliefs of angels, he filled his studio with lit candles, giving the sculpture's angels "an unreal appearance, as if they floated." A brisk, absorbing portrait of troubled artistic allies whose work embodied an era. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.