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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.
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.
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Reviews
"In the historian Henry Wiencek's zesty new book Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age, the robber barons may have had taste, but it was not their own. It was sourced to a cluster of aesthetes of the period, of whom the architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens . . . were two of the most prominent . . . Erudite . . . Readers might want at least a
John Sedgwick, Financial Times
"Wiencek details a fascinating portrait of the exclusive world of the architectural and art society in New York at the time, drunk on their ambitions to remake New York as the most cosmopolitan, shiny city in the world. Even among the rich, the social structure of traditions of 'keeping up appearances' allowed men to have affairs and live separate lives outside of their marriages, and it was even
Lewis Whittington, CultureVulture