by Tom Wolfe
President Ronald Reagan presided at a dedication ceremony unveiling Hart’s Three Soldiers on Veterans Day, 1984. The next day Hart looked for the art reviews … in The Washington Post … The New York Times … and, as time went by, in the magazines. And once more, nothing … not even the inside-out tribute known as savaging. Three Soldiers received only so-called civic reviews, the sort of news or feature items or picture captions that say, in effect, “This thing is big, it’s outdoors, and you may see it on the way to work, and so we should probably tell you what it is.” Civic reviews of outdoor representational sculpture often don’t even mention the name of the sculptor. Why mention the artist, since it’s nonart by definition?
Hart was by no mention alone. In 1980, a sculptor named Eric Parks completed a statue of Elvis Presley for downtown Memphis. It was unveiled before a crowd of thousands of sobbing women; it became, and remains, a tremendous tourist attraction; civic reviews only. And who remembers the name Eric Parks? In 1985, a sculptor named Raymond J. Kaskey completed the second-biggest copper sculpture in America—the Statue of Liberty is the biggest—an immense Classical figure of a goddess in a toga with her right hand outstretched toward the multitudes. Portlandia, she was called. Tens of thousands of citizens of Portland, Oregon, turned out on a Sunday to see her arrive on a barge on the Willamette River and get towed downtown. Parents lifted their children so they could touch her fingertips as she was hoisted up to her place atop the porte cochere of the new Portland Public Services Building; civic reviews only. In 1992, Audrey Flack completed Civitas, four Classical goddesses, one for each corner of a highway intersection just outside a moribund mill town, Rock Hill, South Carolina. It has been a major tourist attraction ever since; cars come from all directions to see the goddesses lit up at night; a nearby fallow cotton field claiming to be an “industrial park” suddenly a sellout; Rock Hill comes alive; civic reviews only.
Over the last fifteen years of his life Hart did something that, in artworld terms, was even more infra dig than Ex Nihilo and Three Soldiers: he became America’s most popular living sculptor. He developed a technique for casting sculpture in acrylic resin. The result resembled Lalique glass. Many of his smaller pieces were nudes, using Lindy as a model, so lyrical and sensual that Hart’s Classicism began to take on the contours of Art Nouveau. The gross sales of his acrylic castings had gone well over $100 million. None was ever reviewed.
Art worldlings regarded popularity as skill’s live-in slut. Popularity meant shallowness. Rejection by the public meant depth. And truly hostile rejection very likely meant greatness. Richard Serra’s Titled Arc, a leaning wall of rusting steel smack in the middle of Federal Plaza in New York, was so loathed by the building’s employees that 1,300 of them, including many federal judges, signed a petition for its removal. They were angry and determined, and eventually the wall was cut apart and hauled away. Serra thereby achieved an eminence of immaculate purity: his work involved absolutely no skill and was despised by everyone outside the art world who saw it. Today many art worldlings regard him as America’s greatest sculptor.
In 1987, Hart moved seventy-five miles northwest of Washington to a 135-acre estate in the Virginia horse country and built a Greek Revival mansion featuring double-decked porches with twelve columns each; bought horses for himself, Lindy, and their two sons, Lain and Alexander; stocked the place with tweeds, twills, tack, and bench-made boots; grew a beard like the King of Diamonds’; and rode to the hounds—all the while turning out new work at a prolific rate.
In his last years he began to summon to his estate a cadre of likeminded souls, a handful of artists, poets, and philosophers, a dedicated little derrière-garde (to borrow a term from the composer Stefania de Kenessey), to gird for the battle to take art back from the Modernists. They called themselves the Centerists.
It wasn’t going to be easy to get a new generation of artists to plunge into the fray yodeling, “Onward! To the Center!” Nevertheless, Hart persevered. Since his death certain … signs … have begun, as a sixties song once put it, blowing in the wind: the suddenly serious consideration, by the art world itself, of Norman Rockwell as a Classical artist dealing in American mythology … the “edgy buzz,” to use two nineties words, over a sellout show at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery of six young representational painters known as the “Paint Group,” five of them graduates of America’s only Classical, derrière-garde art school, the New York Academy of Art … the tendency of a generation of serious young collectors, flush with new Wall Street money, to discard the tastes of their elders and to collect “pleasant” and often figurative art instead of the abstract, distorted, or “wounded” art of the Modern tradition … the soaring interest of their elders in the work of the once-ridiculed French “academic” artists Bougereau, Meissonier, and Gérôme and the French “fashion painter” Tissot. The art historian Gregory Hedberg, Hirschl & Adler’s director for European art, says that with metronomic regularity the dawn of each new century has seen a collapse of one reigning taste and the establishment of another. In the early 1600s the Mannerist giants (for example, El Greco) came down off fashionable walls and the Baroque became all the rage; in the early 1700s, the Baroque giants (Rembrandt) came down and the Rococo went up; in the early 1800s the Rococo giants (Watteau) came down and the Neoclassicists went up; and in the early twentieth century, the modern movement turned the Neoclassical academic giants Bougereau, Meissonier, and Gérôme into joke figures in less than twenty-five years.
And at the dawn of the twenty-first? In the summer of 1985 the author of The Painted Word gave a lecture at the Parrish Museum in Southampton, New York, entitled “Picasso: The Bougereau of the Year 2020.” Should such turn out to be the case, Frederick Hart will not have been the first major artist to have died ten minutes before history absolved him and proved him right.
The Great Relearning
In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.
The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning … the laws of hygiene … by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.
“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School. The story of how the Bauhaus, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s, swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city during the twentieth century is a familiar one, and I won’t retell it. But I should mention the soaring spiritual exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself
from the dead hand of the past. By the late 1970s, however, architects themselves were beginning to complain of the dead hand of the Bauhaus: the flat roofs, which leaked from rain and collapsed from snow; the tiny bare beige office cubicles, which made workers feel like component parts; the glass walls, which let in too much heat, too much cold, too much glare, and no air at all. The relearning is now under way in earnest. The architects are busy rummaging about in what the artist Richard Merkin calls the Big Closet. Inside the Big Closet, in promiscuous heaps, are the abandoned styles of the past. The current favorite rediscoveries: Classical, Georgian, Secession, and Moderne (Art Deco). Relearning on the wing, the architects are off on a binge of eclecticism comparable to the Victorian period’s 125 years ago.
In politics the twentieth century’s great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Given that system’s bad reputation in the West today, it is instructive to read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World—before turning to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The old strike-hall poster of a Promethean worker in a blue shirt breaking his chains across his mighty chest was in truth the vision of ultimate human freedom the movement believed in at the outset. For intellectuals in the West the painful dawn began with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. (See above, pp. 101-2.) Solzhenitsyn insisted that the villain behind the Soviet concentration-camp network was not Stalin or Lenin (who invented the term “concentration camp”) or even Marxism. It was instead the Soviets’ peculiarly twentieth-century notion that they could sweep aside not only the old social order but also its religious ethic, which had been millennia in the making (“common decency,” Orwell called it) and reinvent morality … here … now … “at the point of a gun,” in the famous phrase of the Maoists. Well before the sudden breaching of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the relearning had reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China had begun to wonder how best to convert Communism into something other than, in Bernard Henri-Levy’s memorable phrase, “barbarism with a human face.”
The great American contribution to the twentieth century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt backlit plastic sign: TOTALLY ALL-NUDE GIRL SAUNA MASSAGE AND MARATHON ENCOUNTER SESSIONS INSIDE. Up until 1985 pornographic movie theaters were as ubiquitous as the 7-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with screens six, seven, eight stories high, the better to beam all the moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a panting American countryside. In 1985 the pornographic theater began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could be brought into any home. Up on the shelf in the den, next to the World Book Encyclopedia and the Modern Library Classics, one now finds the cassettes: Sally’s Alley; Young and Hung; Yo! Rambette!; Latin Teacher: She Sucks, She Has Sucked, She Will Have Sucked. In the fall of 1987, a twenty-five-year-old Long Island church secretary named Jessica Hahn provoked a tittering flurry in the tabloid press when the news broke that she had posed nude for Playboy magazine. Her punishment? A triumphal tour of the nation’s television talk and variety shows. As far as I was concerned, the high point came when a ten-year-old girl, a student at a private school, wearing a buttercup blouse, a cardigan sweater, and her school uniform skirt, approached her outside a television studio with a stack of Playboy magazines featuring the church secretary with breasts bare and thighs ajar and asked her to autograph them. With the school’s blessing, she intended to take the signed copies back to the campus and hold a public auction. The proceeds would go to the poor.
But in the sexual revolution, too, a painful dawn broke in the 1980s, and the relearning, in the form of prophylaxis, began. All may be summed up in a single term requiring no amplification: AIDS.
The Great Relearning—if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not so much as the end point of the twentieth century as the theme of the twenty-first. There is no law of history that says a new century must start ten or twenty years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way. The nineteenth century began with the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth. The twentieth century began with the formulation of Marxism, Freudianism, and Modernism in the late nineteenth. And the twenty-first began with the Great Relearning—in the form of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in a single day, dramatizing the utter failure of the most momentous start-from-zero of all.
The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to use an old word. It is already clear that the large cities, thanks to the Relearning, will not even look new. Quite the opposite: the cities of the year 2000 are already beginning to look more like the cities of 1900 than the cities of 1980. From the South Bronx in New York to Southeast in Atlanta, no longer is public housing (“the projects”) built to look like commercial towers. The new look: the twee ground-hugging suburban garden villas of London’s Hampstead Heath. The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a retrograde mental atmosphere. People of our craven new world, snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with awe upon the century just ended. They will regard the twentieth as the century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself—but also the capacity to escape to the stars on spaceships if it blew—and to jigger with his own genes. But above all, they will look back upon the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the amazing confidence, the Promethean brass, to defy the gods and try to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, godlike extremes. They will look back in awe … without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero. Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their Neo-Louis bergères, idly twirling information about on the Internet, killing time like Victorian matrons doing their crocheting, knitting, tatting, needlepoint, and quilting, content to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century’s Hangover.
My Three Stooges
I can tell you, taking eleven years to write one book is a killer financially, a blow to the base of the skull mentally and physically, hell for your family, a slovenly imposition upon all concerned—in short, an inexcusable performance verging on shameful. Nevertheless, that was how long it took me to write one book, a novel called A Man in Full. Eleven years. My children grew up thinking that was all I did: write, and never finish, a book called A Man in Full.
Why did it take me so long? Not having access to Dr. Freud’s emergency night-line number, I won’t try to get into matters I don’t understand. I will only mention one thing I know cost me years. I committed the sin of hubris. I was going to cram the world into that novel, all of it.
Off I went to Japan on the most expensive trip of my life, because this book was going to embrace the entire globe. I returned with only two bits of information that I think might add to my fellow Americans’ knowledge of the Far East. First, living in a house with shoji screens for walls is even more beautiful than looking at one in a coffee-table book, but you can hear everything. Everything. Second, never try to treat two Japanese businessmen to three hours of whiskey and small talk in a Tokyo hostess bar, the updated version of the geisha house, with only $900 in your pocket. When the check comes, you will be, by American standards, horribly embarrassed and, by Japanese standards, terminally humiliated. Tenninally.
This book was also going to tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the American art world, from the still-booming (it was 1988 when I started out) art market at
the top to the life of all the wretched, squirming, wriggling, desperate unknown artists at the bottom. I spent months—months!—in the lower depths. It seems that all the art schools, from the Rhode Island School of Design on the East Coast to the California Institute of the Arts on the West Coast, tell their students, quite accurately, that first they must catch on with a gallery in New York. After that, they can go be artists anywhere they want; but unless they first get their tickets punched in New York, their careers will go nowhere. So they come pouring into New York’s nether reaches literally by the tens of thousands, succeeding mainly in driving up each other’s rents in filthy, airless, treeless, grassless, rotting old sweatshop districts with names like SoHo, NoHo, Dumbo, TriBeCa, and Wevar, the only slums in the world inhabited chiefly by young white people with masters of fine arts degrees. Interesting … and completely irrelevant to the story of A Man in Full.