Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age

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)