Frederick Hart

(American, 1943 –1999)

“Art must give hope to the darkness. It must be a part of life. It must be an enriching, ennobling, and vital partner... It should be a majestic presence in everyday life."
— Frederick Hart

Frederick Elliott Hart, called America’s greatest representational artist, believed that art should be a reflection of life, beauty, and grace. His work, done within the figurative tradition of American Beaux-Arts sculpture is exquisite. Although he did not receive extensive formal schooling, he found work in the field and learned from master carvers. His early work was often in clay, but many of his larger pieces are carved out of stone or cast in bronze. Later in his career, Hart explored themes of consciousness, spirituality, and beauty, sculpting in transparent and semi-transparent acrylic using a process he had patented. An outspoken critic of abstract art movements, he felt he had inherited an old representational tradition in sculpture, one closely wedded to religion and moral responsibility. The dramatic poses of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Anna Hyatt Huntington influenced Hart. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, and Auguste Rodin also helped to shape his style, especially affecting his naturalism, his experimentation with abstract forms, the way he conveyed movement, and the way he pushed the boundaries of traditional figurative art.

“It is breathtaking to see an artist with the technical abilities and devotion to craft… combine these gifts with an ability to go to the brink with them, but somehow keep the inner, emotional, intellectual and spiritual force of the work dominant,” J. Carter Brown, Director Emeritus of the National Gallery of Art said of Hart. Best-selling author and iconic journalist Tom Wolfe has written of him, “Rick is—and I do not say this lightly—America’s greatest sculptor.”

Hart was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1943, to a newspaper reporter and a failed actress. His mother passed away from scarlet fever when he was two and his father, with whom he would have a troubled relationship, was serving in World War II, so his maternal grandmother and aunt raised Frederick in rural South Carolina until he was 13. He then went to live with his father and his new family in Virginia. Although he didn’t really fit in with the family, he developed a strong friendship with his half-sister, Chesley, who was six years younger than he was. Although he enjoyed reading, he did not do well in school, failed ninth grade, and went back to his aunt in South Carolina to take it again, but had more trouble, and dropped out of high school. The principal got the teen to take the A.C.T. to show him that he needed to get on track, and the whole community was shocked at his score; he only missed one point. The University of South Carolina granted him early admission at age 16 to study art and philosophy, however, it did not last long. At 18, with the Civil Rights Movement in full swing, Hart joined a group of 250 black students passing him who were protesting segregation - the only white person to do so. Police arrested him and put him in jail, the University of South Carolina expelled him, the Ku Klux Klan chased him out of town, and he fled to Washington. In the next few years, his cherished half-sister developed leukemia at 15 and then passed away at age 16; the family was torn apart. The next few years were turbulent, and it would be longer before he started coming to terms with her death, but art would help him. The young man attended a couple different schools without completing any programs, then worked as an assistant at Giorgio Gianetti Studio of Architectural Sculpture. The late ‘60s saw him begin his own first major sculpture, Family.

In 1967, he took a job as a mail clerk at the Washington National Cathedral with an ulterior motive; he would attempt to convince the demanding and opinionated legendary carver, Roger Morigi, to take him on as an apprentice. After much struggle and rejection, he eventually got him to agree. Hart slowly trained, and Morigi began trusting him with increasing responsibility.

Then the Cathedral held an international competition to find a sculptor to adorn the building's west façade. They wanted a vast and elaborate spread of deep bas-reliefs and statuary on the theme of the Creation. Hart worked on his entry for three years, but his, along with all the other submissions were rejected. They requested three of the artists to come up with new submissions, but Hart was not one of them. He created a new proposal anyway, one so magnificent that it won. The monumental relief features an array of idealized young men and women rising nude from out of the chaotic swirl of Creation's dawn. He called it Ex Nihilo, meaning literally ''out of nothing,'' figuratively meaning out of the chaos that preceded Creation. An unknown working-class boy, an apprentice, had obtained what would turn out to be the biggest and most prestigious commission for religious sculpture in America in the twentieth century. The project also brought him bonuses in his personal life - romance with the love of his life and a deep relationship with God. Hart had become a handsome young man with long, wavy light brown hair, and a rebellious attitude. In the late afternoons, he had taken to hanging about something of a bohemian quarter and he repeatedly saw the same enchanting young woman, Lindy Lain, walking home. He introduced himself, asked her if she would pose for his rendition of the Creation. She posed, and they married. Her face and figure would recur in his work throughout his career. As he fleshed out his vision of the Creation, he also fell in love with God. He became a Roman Catholic and began to regard his talent as a gift from God, dedicating his work to the beauty of possibilities offered by God. Ex Nihilo would take eleven years to complete.

The masterpiece was unveiled in a dedication ceremony in 1982. The sculptor scanned the newspapers and art magazines for reviews, but there no artistic critique of his arrived. The one mention in the Style section of The Post was very simple - announcing some new, traditional style decoration on the building without any real artistic consideration. Hart had become so absorbed in his work that he had had lost track of the American art world, which in the 1980s, was the New York school. Art critics nationwide looked to New York for the definition of high art, and modern was definitely in, while Renaissance-school sculpture such as Hart's was verging on non-art. The art world just didn't see it. The devoted and gifted artist shifted through feeling confused, stunned, then outraged, and finally determined to force the art world to see what great sculpture looked like. He retained his artistic beliefs and pursued them passionately, but would not fully see the shift in which he so deeply believed in his lifetime.

During the last 15 years of his life, Hart cast figurative work in clear acrylic- the first artist to do so. He patented his process of embedment, the casting of an acrylic sculpture within acrylic resin. He referred to this contemporary twist on classical sculpting as, “sculpting with light.” The result resembled Lalique glass. These works are divinely sensual and lyrical. Hart would say of them, “All the clear acrylic resin works are really the offspring of the Cathedral work. They deal with being and non-being. In the Cathedral, the figures emerge from something that is tangible, from a mass of stone. But more beautifully, in a sense, the clear acrylic figures emerge and disappear, literally creating a spiritual relationship between light and form, and a sense of mystery around being and non-being. It’s a beautiful, poetic variation on the creation theme.”

He and his family moved northwest of Washington to a large estate in the Virginia countryside in 1987, built a Greek-Revival mansion, bought horses for himself, Lindy and their two sons, Lain and Alexander, grew a well-groomed beard, and turned out new work at a prolific rate. He invited a squad of like-minded souls to his estate, artists, poets, and philosophers, with the aim to take art back from the Modernists. They called themselves the Centerists. Shortly after his passing, there were more signs of change, showing an art world increase in consideration of figurative art.

Frederick Hart died at the age of 55 on Aug. 13, 1999, two days after his doctors discovered he had lung cancer. He was a world-renowned sculptor who worked in clay, stone, bronze, and acrylic. He had been commissioned for a number of projects including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and a five-year term on the Commission of Fine Arts. The creator of hundreds of public monuments, private commissions, portraits, and other works of art achieved many awards and accolades throughout his career including the National Medal of Arts and the Henry Hering Award of the National Sculpture Society. The gross sales of his acrylic castings have gone well over $100 million. Frederick Hart's storybook rise from obscurity is one of the greatest, as was his talent.

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