Monumental Tribute

At a glance, artist Robert Graham seems an unlikely candidate to create permanent public works on a monumental scale. Best known for his ongoing series of sculpted miniature female nudes, Graham’s work usually feels decidedly private, dealing as it does with issues of eroticism and connoisseurship. However, large-scale public works have in fact been central to Graham’s art-making practice since 1974, when he was one of five artists invited to collaborate on “The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.”

Slated to be unveiled in Washington, D.C., on May 1 with three days of festivities, the monument is currently being installed, so Graham’s contribution left town last weekend. Prior to being shipped, however, it was briefly on view in his studio.

Comprising five bronze panels in positive relief with five corresponding columns in negative relief, the work includes text, some of which is in Braille, and imagery relating to FDR’s social programs. (Among the dozens of faces that appear in the piece is that of director John Huston, whose daughter Anjelica Huston is married to the artist.)

Graham points out that everyone who’s thus far seen the piece is delighted to discover that the free-standing columns can function as molds; in other words, if you happen to have a wad of clay on hand, you can make three-dimensional impressions of the imagery on them. This seems to please the artist, who nervously fiddles with a cigar throughout an interview.

“Sitting here looking at the piece in my studio, it doesn’t actually exist yet, and won’t really come into being until it’s installed at the site--people have to have access to this piece for it to be fully alive,” says Graham, a reserved, soft-spoken man of 58 who refuses to talk politics when asked about his personal feelings about Roosevelt.

“One of my initial concerns when I was invited to participate was that I didn’t want to make a literal piece that was essentially an illustration of historical events,” he continues. “The aspect of Roosevelt’s presidency that resonated with me the most were the social programs he instituted--he established dozens, several of which still exist, and they were all about putting people to work.

“That appealed to me and it became the central theme of the piece,” he adds. “I like that it’s a genre of imagery that appears in friezes throughout history and that it’s something that will always be relevant to people. I thought my original conception was sound, so despite the fact that the project was in the works for more than two decades, my part of it didn’t undergo any dramatic change.”

Twenty-three years in the works, the multifaceted memorial was conceived by Bay Area designer and urban planner Lawrence Halprin, who won a federal competition held in 1974; however, the FDR memorial story goes further back than that. Ten years after the 1945 death of the president who shepherded the country through the Depression and World War II, Congress approved a memorial to Roosevelt, and nine years later a proposal by the design firm of Pederson & Tilney was approved, then rejected. In 1966 a design by Marcel Breuer met the same fate, and the FDR memorial languished on the Capitol’s back-burner during the chaotic late ‘60s.

It was revived in 1974 with the approval of Halprin’s proposal for an 800-foot-long environment the viewer walks through. The space is broken into four outdoor rooms representing the four terms of Roosevelt’s presidency, but is unified by a continuing chronological narrative addressing the events of each term.

Halprin knew he wanted the piece to be a collaborative effort involving several artists. As to how he went about selecting Graham, George Segal, Leonard Baskin, Tom Hardy and Neil Estern, Halprin says, “I knew the artists must be American, must be able to work in bronze and that the imagery would be figurative--those parameters alone eliminated hundreds of possibilities.

“I’d seen a series of small environmental sculptures of Bob’s that I loved,” the 80-year-old designer adds, “and I thought, jeepers, maybe he could work in a similar way on a larger scale.”

Halprin’s idea was remarkably prescient considering that he had no idea Graham’s background prepared him for just such a project. Born in Mexico City to parents of Scottish, English and Incaic ancestry, Graham recalls: “My family exposed me to all kinds of things from an early age, and I remember many visits to Aztec and Olmec sacred sites, and the amazing churches and palaces of Mexico. I didn’t understand those things as art at the time, but I now realize those were my first art experiences.” Graham moved with his family to San Jose, Calif., when he was 12.

Sacred sites, churches and palaces are, of course, public monuments but Graham still hadn’t connected that tradition to his own work. “At that point public art was a fuzzy idea most artists had no interest in, and I’d certainly never thought of it,” he recalls. “The feeling then was that to do a commission was to ‘sell out’ on some level--that you were basically just executing somebody else’s ideas. That attitude seems innocent to me now because I’ve since learned that artists are always in service to something and that it’s impossible for art to be anything but public.

“When Larry first called I had no idea why he believed I could work on a monumental scale,” Graham adds. “I’m glad he persuaded me though, because the FDR project completely changed my beliefs about the possibilities for art outside the franchise of galleries and museums.”

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Having recruited the artists, Halprin held a brainstorming session at his San Francisco office in 1976, which was followed by a second session at Segal’s New Jersey studio in 1978. By the end of that year Halprin’s project was ready to roll, but it took 11 years of annual congressional appropriations to accumulate the needed funds, with the final allocation approved by the Bush administration in 1989.

Completed at a cost of $50 million, the memorial also includes three Segal tableaux depicting a bread line, a figure listening to a Roosevelt “Fireside Chat” on the radio and a farming couple; “The Funeral Courtege,” a 30-foot bas relief by Baskin; bronze figures of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by New York artist Estern; and a 6-foot bas relief of FDR’s presidential seal by Portland artist Hardy.

The FDR monument was Graham’s first public commission, but will be his fourth to be installed. Preceding it were L.A.’s “Olympic Gateway,” completed in 1984; Detroit’s “Monument to Joe Lewis” of 1986; and “Quetzalcoatl,” a sculpture installed in a San Jose park in 1993. A fifth commission--Graham’s monument to Duke Ellington--is scheduled to be unveiled in Manhattan’s Central Park this spring.

Reflecting on his 23-year involvement with public works, Graham says: “You get better at certain things--I’ve certainly gotten better at the technical aspects of working on a monumental scale. Still, I’d never cast anything as large as the FDR piece, so lots of new technical problems came up. Usually something this large would be cast in sand, but had we done it that way we would have lost much of the detail, so we used the lost wax process--that’s really intended for working small, so it was pretty challenging to pull it off.

“And of course, spiritually and emotionally it’s a completely unique kind of art experience,” he adds. “There’s a big difference between having an exhibition in a gallery and putting a work out in the world in such a way that issues of authorship become irrelevant.”