Art: New Roman

For the past 21 years the director of the American Academy in Rome, that comfortable haven on the Gianicolo for prize-winning painters, sculptors, architects and landscape architects, has been 56-year-old Gorham Phillips Stevens, a retired architect and active antiquary with a vast knowledge of the broken remains of Greece and Rome. This autumn when the new academicians go to Rome to spend their days measuring cornices and their evenings learning the difference between barolo and capri, Mr. Stevens will still be puttering around the Forum, still available for advice and encouragement, but he will no longer be Director. Last week alumni and trustees of the Academy and assorted architects assembled at the New York Architectural League, to banquet James Monroe Hewlett before sending him to Rome to succeed Gorham Stevens.

Architect Hewlett, 64, has such a large bald head above his sparse frame that draughtsmen call him “The Great Dome.” Like his predecessor he worked for a time in the office of the late famed Sanford White. He was born and still lives in Lawrence, L. I. For his ancestors was named the neighboring town of Hewlett. As architect he designed the Soldiers & Sailors monument in Albany, the Civil War Memorial in Philadelphia, the City Club of New York, the McKinley Memorial at Columbus, Ohio. As mural painter he has just completed four large historical panels for the Bronx County Building showing the history of Mayor McKee’s bailiwick from its foundation by Patroon Jonas Bronck. As a stage designer he made the maquettes for the U. S. production of Rostand’s Chantecler.

“The Great Dome” is no modernist. Last week reporters learned that while he plans no change in the ideals of the Academy, he is sensitive to the taunts of young art students that American Academicians are mere copyists of classical models.

“The only way men can be shown how to be leaders of art in our times,” said he, “is to see how those of other times have done it. But that we try to make them copy classic things is not the idea at all. . . . There is very little teaching [at the Academy] and my main duty, I presume, will be to keep up the esprit de corps. . . .

“Modernistic art is barren of originality and thought. … A designer may often think he is going to be governed solely by the utilitarian and to hell with beauty—but no one ever really does that.”