THE BEAUTY OF BIG

Around 1715 a German immigrant artist named Justus Kuhn painted one of the young sons of the Maryland oligarchy, Henry Darnall III: a 10-year-old baroque doll, gazed at by an adoring slave boy in a silver collar. The balustrade behind him and the formal gardens and pavilions behind that are complete fictions. No properties in America looked like this. Kuhn was meeting the illusory desire of Colonial gentry to seem like important extensions of European culture. It would be a recurrent fantasy. Fifty years later, in Boston, one sees John Singleton Copley doing much the same in some of his portraits. But in another hundred years, with the growth of American wealth, grandeur began to get real.

The American appetite for it reached its apogee in the three decades from the mid-1870s to the early 1900s. This has since been christened, with every reason, the Gilded Age: the time of huge, unfettered industrial expansion; of unassailable and mutually interlocking trusts, combines and cartels; of rampant money acting under laws it wrote for itself. “Get rich,” wrote Mark Twain sardonically, “dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.” From this culture of greed arose the primal names of American business: Rockefeller (oil), Carnegie and Frick (steel), Vanderbilt (railroads), the Goulds, Astors, Fisks and, towering over them all, the magister ludi of saber-toothed capitalism, J. Pierpont Morgan. After 1870, America lost all its Puritan inhibitions about the gratuitous display of surplus wealth.

The superrich built themselves palaces on New York City’s Fifth and Park avenues, which were much satirized. But the red-hot site of Gilded Age extravagance was Newport, Rhode Island, where the very rich congregated in the summer. Here, in what they called with false modesty their “cottages,” they engaged in rituals of consumption and display that were so extreme, competitive and self-referential that they eclipsed anything done in private American building before or since. Newport confirms the piercing insight of Henry Adams, lamenting the crassness of his time: “The American wasted more money more recklessly than anyone ever did before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court-aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values.”

The Bernini of the swells was Richard Morris Hunt (1827-95), the most influential American architect of the 19th century. The poor have always wondered how the rich live. But more to the point in America, the rich have always wondered too. Wealth on the scale of the 1880s in the U.S. was still uncharted territory. Its signs could get crossed. So the plutocrat needed an architect to create a seamless etiquette of shared ostentation, with variants, and that was what Hunt did with Newport.

There was, however, a more positive and socially responsible side to this. The “American Renaissance” also produced some of the finest public buildings of the 19th century. There had been noble churches in the U.S. before, but none as boldly resplendent in space and decor as Henry Hobson Richardson’s Trinity Church (1872-97) in Boston. There had been libraries too, but none as ambitious as the great Boston Public Library (1887-95), designed by McKim, Mead & White. The library was the first major public building in the neo-Italian Renaissance style that was to become de rigueur in formal architecture. It expressed the praiseworthy idea that the citizen is the reason for the state; that public architecture should be generous, bold and finely built.

Patrons, architects and artists didn’t just want to imitate the Renaissance; they hoped to outdo it. Americans could take the trophies of high European culture and make them their own. Above all, they connected to the Renaissance by buying it. The Gilded Age began the process whereby the museum began to supplant the church as the emblematic focus of American cities. The suction of American capital was turned on the old collections of Europe. Out of it came some of the greatest museums in the world, from the encyclopedic Metropolitan in New York to the choice Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

This epoch of self-assertion through the arts, especially architecture, flourished until the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Indeed, it continued thereafter, for the New Deal conceived of the vast public work as an expression of shared potential, communal will and can-do. Its epitome, though, was the skyscraper, that uniquely American form. As a symbol of Promethean energy, the skyscraper has never been surpassed. It is the architecture of smooth-flowing congestion, an American ideal, and it took ever more glorious forms in such designs as the Empire State Building and the great, self-sufficient urban complex of Rockefeller Center.

After World War II, nothing of such magnitude would be tried in America; the triumph of the glass-box International Style meant the death of ornament and a recoil from “fine” material. Nor, in the ’70s and ’80s, was the cheap pasteboard revivalism of Postmodernist historical quotation going to revive a sense of grandeur. Moreover, with the exception of various memorials, and of such projects as Richard Meier’s six-building Getty Center in Los Angeles (to be completed later this year), the level of grand commissions for public benefit flattened out.

What had gone wrong? Perhaps the confidence of patronage, in a time when it was increasingly difficult to create public art because of the erosion of shared public values; perhaps the privacy and obscurity of so much of the art itself; perhaps the shift of social discourse toward the moving image and away from the static one. More likely a mixture of all three. In the ’80s and ’90s, things would get big and expensive, but no longer grand.