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

by Henry Wiencek Narrated by Michael Butler Murray

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, a beautiful room can be a dangerous place . . . This paradox would have felt immediately real to Wharton’s first readers in Gilded Age New York. Colonnades may have lost some currency, but the dichotomy still stands—and it’s the kind that Henry Wiencek captures brilliantly in Stan and Gus . . . a bracing and masterful tag-team glimpse of two giants who helped make the turn of the century look so confident." —Walker Mimms, The New York Times

"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 hundred more [pages]."—John Sedgwick, Financial Times

“An intimate account of the professional and personal relationship between architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens . . . [Stan and Gus] offers a colorful, captivating window into a fascinating historical era.” —Publishers Weekly

“Wiencek dexterously chronicles the fruitful 30-year friendship of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed grand buildings and public art and ignored sexual taboos, leading to lurid tragedy . . . [Wiencek] effectively contextualizes their work and depicts Saint-Gaudens in particularly memorable detail . . . A brisk, absorbing portrait of troubled artistic allies whose work embodied an era.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The intertwined biographies of two Gilded Age artists reveal a complex relationship in electrifying, turbulent times . . . Highlighting his subjects’ larger-than-life personalities, the imbalances of their relationship, and the glittery, careening mess of their era, Wiencek ultimately celebrates the artistic impact Stan and Gus’ relationship would have upon.” —Booklist

Kirkus Reviews

2025-05-01
Collaborators, libertines, visionaries.

Wiencek dexterously chronicles the fruitful 30-year friendship of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed grand buildings and public art and ignored sexual taboos, leading to lurid tragedy. White’s Madison Square Garden, topped in 1891 with a Saint-Gaudens sculpture, was the tallest building in a modernizing Manhattan. In 1906, the venue became an infamous crime scene when the architect was murdered in the Garden’s rooftop theater. Wiencek toggles between ateliers and late-night clubs, detailing the duo’s creative output—their projects included, most enduringly, memorials to presidents and war heroes still displayed in New York, Boston, and elsewhere—and their apparently intertwined love lives. White’s design of a tower for Boston's Trinity Church was, per a colleague, the work of “an artist of extreme talent and power amounting to genius.” He was a fop befitting a city on the rise, with “flamboyant, spiky red hair” and “see-through silk shirts of pale blue and green.” Saint-Gaudens wasn’t so fancy. Sometimes "dressed like a factory worker” and often battling deep depression, he’d spend months on a sculpture, then angrily destroy it. Saint-Gaudens and White had complicated sex lives and what the author calls “an erotic relationship” with one another. White, nearing 50, courted and then raped a teen girl, Wiencek writes, and in 1906 the man she’d subsequently married shot the architect to death, setting off a newspaper frenzy. Though Wiencek sometimes fixates on the tiring minutiae of his subjects’ sexual couplings, he effectively contextualizes their work and depicts Saint-Gaudens in particularly memorable detail. While making a large altarpiece featuring reliefs of angels, he filled his studio with lit candles, giving the sculpture’s angels “an unreal appearance, as if they floated.”

A brisk, absorbing portrait of troubled artistic allies whose work embodied an era.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192981757
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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