‘Stan and Gus’ – Two practitioners of the ‘plastic’ arts change the face of New York

Henry Wiencek’s crisp new dual biography, “Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), portrays an era as much as the working friendship of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. While it never loses its focus on those two artists, it tells stories of New York’s so-called gilded age (roughly, the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th) whose characters are more numerous than in a Tolstoy novel.

Such as there’s a problem, it lives in the book’s assumption that readers of this dense, action-packed history, which must have a modest target audience, need the author-devised nicknames, Stan and Gus, to keep track of the goings-on. White is most often called Stan and Saint-Gaudens the equally pedestrian Gus. Just not all of the time.

It’s a pressing concern for biographers, but the nickname tactic rarely works. There are occasions in which a sentence about White proposes “Stan” as the subject of the following sentence. Oddly, Gus is used almost exclusively for the more cumbersomely named Saint-Gaudens. Confusion sometimes reigns.

Thinking big
“Saint-Gaudens and White were the first American sculptor and architect to collaborate,” Wiencek declares. Despite being intermittently occupied with small commissions to advance their careers and repair their perilous finances, the two artists at their best worked in grand designs.

White’s achievements include an earlier incarnation of Madison Square Garden (MSG) and, also familiar to non-New Yorkers, the arch in the city’s Washington Square Park. Saint-Gauden’s include the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C. and a statue of the classical demigoddess Diana that once crowned a White-designed tower atop the colossal MSG and, after the demolition of the first MSG, now rests comfortably in a Philadelphia museum.

Tellingly, the public art and more intimate artistic forms interleave. There may be a familiar present-day ring to Wiencek’s paraphrase of Edith Wharton’s observation in her novel, “The House of Mirth,” “that a Manhattan socialite knows the exact size of a neighbor's ballroom.” Huge amounts of money change hands in the sagas of the pair’s projects, and a non-specialist reader may quail at the sums, given in their present-day equivalents as well.

“Nothing could stop Stan from spending,” Wiencek observes, wryly, late in the book. That’s partly due to the earlier picture of Stan as a mostly silent benefactor of his friend Gus, whose money problems were constant and grave.

Although the author sagely skirts any impulse to diagnose his subjects, it’s almost impossible to read the tale without seeing both as bipolar. The “louche” Stan has an effervescent energy that drives him and his work, manically – and drives colleagues of all stripes mad. The sculptor, Gus, “confessed that not a day passed when he didn’t think of taking his own life.” Among other related problems, his mental instability resulted in his taking on numerous projects at the same time and rarely finishing them by deadline (sometimes by years), if at all. He was notorious for destroying early stages of his work, often when time did not permit.

The rich are always with us
The pair’s work, individually and together, naturally depended on the kindness of others, mostly manifested by fat commissions. As fascinating as the history of the two artists’ work is, and how central a focus in this book, the reader is likely to be as seduced by the measure of the commissioners' largesse. 

The mega-wealthy (and sometimes the artists they patronized) seem forever to be traveling between the Big Apple and Europe and beyond. The account of White’s being dispatched to Europe to shop tapestries – huge, antique – for what turned out to be a project with no upper financial limits, is in its own way breathtaking.

Why are the affairs of the very rich compelling? They outshine even the most outrageous behaviors of the artists they hire, and it’s telling that today’s readers might recognize their names more easily than those of the artistic staff of this book. We’re not far into the history when we read that White was a partner in the prestigious architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White. The ultra rich left their names on their big public projects more conspicuously than the artists could.

The meaning of friendship
“Among the Gilded Age rich, husbands and wives often led very separate lives,” Wiencek observes late in the book. Both named subjects of this biography were married to women, even if the accounts of those marriages would not feature in bridal magazines.

Wiencek leaves little doubt that real passion underlies the men’s connections, and the accounts of their marriages make tamer reading than those of their exploits. It’s long been recognized that in earlier centuries men in intimate relationships, overtly sexual or not, expressed themselves to each other in language we would now regard as patently romantic. However, “A suitable marriage,” whether it was based on love or not, Wiencek observes, “was a social necessity in the worlds they moved in.” 

So, what of the intimacy between Stan and Gus? Although both men were genuinely affected by beauty of all sorts – expressly including women, sometimes quite young – their friendship was intermittently romantic and most probably sexual. It’s a pity that Wiencek corrals the relevant information about their intimate relationship in a single chapter midway through the book, though it certainly makes fascinating reading.

White had a separate affair with the railroad magnate Charles Lang Freer, who introduced him to high-roller public sex exploits. “As for Freer and White,” Wiencek adds, "their escapades were too numerous for repetition.”

A man writing under the pseudonym Earl Lind, later the author of "Autobiography of an Androgyne,” caught the attention of Gus and another of his lovers, Joseph Wells. Lind engaged them with tales of New York’s “houses of assignation" on Fourth Avenue, “which Lind called the androgyne headquarters,” its Paresis Hall “a place where fancy gentlemen went to meet male prostitutes.”

While there was in these times of Oscar Wilde’s trial and jailing across the pond the mocking of new gaggles of effeminate men “belonging to the ‘wealthy and luxurious class’” gathered “openly on the streets had become de rigueur,” Thomas Beer, author of “The Mauve Decade,” a social history of the gilded age, opined that “the odor of ‘whispered orgies’ wafted around White, while Saint-Gaudens got away with everything.” The scandal that ultimately defined White was his being shot – in the face, rather like the late Dick Cheney and his hunting buddy and Kristi Noem and her recalcitrant puppy – over a relationship “misunderstanding” and by a man named Harry Thaw, in the old Madison Square Garden.

“Stan and Gus” is serious scholarship combined with the love of a good story.

Fact or fiction
The ways of publishing are sometimes eerie. Scottish author Damian Barr has just published his second novel, “The Two Roberts” (Cannongate), about two Scottish artists, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, whose love and devotion are at the center of this historical fiction. The book is deeply felt in that way that fiction allows and could not come more highly recommended.

Henry Wiencek, “Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor and Friendship That Built the Gilded Age,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $30.

Damian Barr, “The Two Roberts,” 310 pages, $20, Canongate Books, available in the United States through House of Anansi.