UofL exhibition will celebrate Frederick Hart

But Hart’s work found an audience well beyond D.C. Some of his Millennium Cross cast acrylics are in the collection of the Vatican. The Prince of Wales has two Harts—a bronze bas-relief portrait of Lord Mountbatten and another bronze, Daughters of Odessa. A cast acrylic of Daughters of Odessa is on view at The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The contemporary art crowd’s shunning helped Hart mold a philosophy about the role of art in modern society. He felt his vision for art set him apart from artists who he thought chased after any new thing.

“If art is to flourish in the 21st century, it must renew its moral authority by rededicating itself to life,” he said. “It must be an enriching, ennobling and vital partner in the public pursuit of civilization. It should be a majestic presence in everyday life just as it was in the past.”

Hart’s first professional work as an artist was about as humble as it gets. He served as an apprentice stone carver at the National Cathedral working on gargoyles.

In 1971, while Hart was still carving gargoyles, an international competition was launched to find a sculptor to create works for the cathedral’s main entrance. At age 31, Hart, a complete unknown, won the commission that Tom Wolfe felt “would turn out to be the most monumental commission for religious sculpture in the United States in the 20th century.”

Hart would take 13 years to render The Creation Sculptures, three massive bas-reliefs carved from Indiana limestone and three life-size statues of Adam, St. Peter and St. Paul. They would move author James F. Cooper, editor and publisher of American Arts Quarterly, to note:

“Hart’s work is about transcendence and renewal. … At certain moments in history, one encounters a work of art that possesses the aesthetic, contextual and moral strength to signal the start of a new era. The Creation Sculptures is such a work. … It has the tender power of a Michelangelo.”

In stark contrast to The Creation Sculptures, Hart’s bronze Three Soldiers commission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial depicts three comrades gazing across the lawn at Maya Ying Lin’s elegant engraved granite wall. As veteran and author Frederick Downs Jr. said, “I am them and they are me. They will portray me for a millennium, long after I have returned to earth as dust and the war itself is forgotten.”

Hart always was attracted to the promise and mystery of life and creativity. His bronze The Source “celebrates the unblocking of the ancient springs of art and inspiration,” said University of Texas-Dallas arts and humanities professor Frederick Turner.

Hart’s Daughters of Odessa is a series of allegorical sculptures remembering innocence lost by human brutality during the 20th century.

His spiritual vision of the power of classical art took shape as the world faced a new millennium and grappled with changes wrought by globalization.

“Hart appeared at the very moment when we as a nation needed a vision to inspire us to move forward into a new century,” Cooper wrote.

Hart’s final vision for classical sculpture involved mastering a new medium: acrylic resin. The classical sculptor became an innovator. Born from a deep desire to explore the human psyche, he viewed this new material as a way to “sculpt with light.”

After years of experimenting, Hart created stunning figures out of acrylic resin and even invented a process of embedding one clear sculpture within another. Perhaps his greatest work in the medium The Cross of the Millennium, presented to Pope John Paul II, inspired the pontiff to say, “This work represents a profound theological statement for our day.”

What Will History Say?

Instant history is risky business. However, during Hart’s professional career spanning the late 1960s up until his death in 1999, many scholars and collectors recognized Hart’s place in the ever-tricky world of contemporary art.