ART : Robert Graham’s Venetian Vision : The sculptor puts his architectural skills to work in constructing his dream studio on the Windward Avenue arcade

Robert Graham seems to have it all.

The 52-year-old sculptor of L.A.’s Olympic Gateway, Detroit’s Joe Louis monument and New York’s bronze hommage to Duke Ellington is arguably America’s preeminent figurative sculptor. In commercial galleries his full figures sell for upwards of $150,000. And he’s controversial despite the classic restraint of the work. Every public sculpture he does raises a ruckus.

He employs a full-time staff of 15. His daughter-in-law Lori Bruce Graham serves as studio director. There is a secretary, fabricators, casting and studio assistants. Two chauffeurs pilot his Cadillac stretch limo. Apparently, you need two drivers when the woman in your life is Anjelica Huston. Actresses work odd hours, so there has to be a night man and a day man to ferry the couple about, whenever.

He is puttering in his living quarters on Market Street. Like much of upscale Venice, it is fortified behind walls and grilled gates against the incursions of downscale Venice. Inside it is spare, relaxed and handsome. A piano stands in the living room. Graham says he plunks at it sometimes. Two blown-glass cobalt goblets have Graham-like nude figures for stems.

“Anjelica brought me those from Venice.”

Outside, the scene is a melange of bazaar and bizarre. Roller skaters pirouette, weaving together tourists, derelicts and yuppies on their way to dine at 72 Market Street. The restaurant is Graham’s extended dining room. He doesn’t own it, but between what he does own and what he leases he appears to have a kind of godfatherly control of the block.

The Doge of Venice, California.

He puffs contentedly on one of the several Havana cigars he smokes each day. His black hair, mustache and goatee are grizzled gray these days. With his swarthy complexion, aquiline features and gracious manner, he could be doge or grandee. With such success and fulfillment what else could he desire?

The Doge’s Palace, of course.

Even as you read, Graham is beginning demolition of a large chunk of Venice’s historic Windward Avenue arcade in order to build himself a new studio that he has designed.

What? Another case of disrespect for the Southland’s historic buildings? Another rapacious ravaging of precious cultural patrimony?

Not exactly.

Anybody who’s ventured down the street in recent years knows that it is, to put it mildly, funky. The wacky charm of Abbot Kinney’s original 1900s attempt to build Venice on the Pacific has faded through incarnations from amusement park to Beat Generation hangout and haven for artists. Today, great hunks of Kinney’s original Neo-Byzantine arcade have given way to parking lots. The most comely thing on the blighted boulevard is Terry Schoonhoven’s big mirror-image mural of the street.

Graham is no stranger to architecture, having designed the celebrated Doumani house, but he is one of the few artists since the Renaissance to practice both architecture and sculpture with ease and assurance.

“To me the one grows out of the other,” Graham says. “The human body is about structure too. You can’t get away from historical precedent. Every building comes from something whether it’s a cave or a coffin. Part of the historical precedent for this studio is the Venetian house. Basically, the concept of the space in a Venetian house didn’t change for 300 years except for the ornament. Another part of the inspiration was the phony Venice of 1900. You can’t look a gift program in the mouth. It was perfect.”

But why go to this much trouble and expense? Actually, it’s about an artist’s personal crusade to heal a fractured and cynical world of art.

“I think the impulse grew out of a dissatisfaction with the tasks of the artist in this society,” Graham says. “Artists have a weird acceptability but no real franchise. I’m talking about painting and sculpture, the kind of thing that can only function inside the museum and gallery system. Others who weren’t called artists were more effective. They built New York City. They made movies. In the past all the arts functioned together. It’s an aberration of our time that they were dispersed.

“I tried to pull all that together in the Doumani house and in a couple of high-rise projects where I was the art coordinator. I worked with David Martin Associates on a Mitsui Bank building and with Tim Vreeland Associates on the Home Savings building downtown. A lot of the artists who will work with me on the studio were in on it; Ron Davis designed things. We did things like screens, tiles and elevator doors.”

He says clients got scared and just wanted more and more compromise. Art consultants diluted the artists’ ideas to make them more palatable. Graham objected so vigorously he found himself sacked despite the enthusiasm of the architects, especially Vreeland.

“I always wanted to build a studio anyway, and it became a chance to do everything I wanted to do--to put all my crusading together in one place.”

For an artist of unmistakably contemporary sensibility, Graham has become something of a Renaissance man.

The artist took a decade of developing ideas and spent a year of real time designing his dream. Unlike the spare ateliers of the ‘60s, this one will be a hybrid of forms inspired partly by Kinney, but mainly by the original Doges’ Palace in that other Venice. Not one to treat his obsessions lightly, Graham passed days studying the famous structure and poring over Ruskin’s classic “The Stones of Venice.”

Graham is restoring what is currently the single-story portion of the Windward Avenue arcade with help from son Steven and project director John Cordic. In the old days, the building was a department store. Passersby won’t notice much difference for some time. It’s all being done carefully to avoid disturbing the neighbors. No big wrecking balls.

While Graham has received all the necessary permits and even took his project before a public hearing and Councilwoman Ruth Galanter’s Community Planning Board, representatives of the Venice Historical Society expressed concern with some of Graham’s architectural changes, including the redesign of the capitals on the columns. The society has proposed new language for the Venice Historical District land use plan that would call for design “in keeping with the character and spirit of the original architecture,” according to society member Betsy Goldman.

The model of the building is impressive. The Windward facade maintains the arcade with its groin vaults. An open loggia for browsing runs across the top story. There are only two windows on the whole surface, a huge beautifully proportioned cathedral window and a small vitrine. It will re-create one of his favorite roosts in the present studio, which he calls his “St. Augustine’s Study.” When feeling contemplative he sits for an hour on a platform raised to the height of a window where he can people-watch unnoticed by beachgoers.

The model’s interior shows that what looks like a three-story building outside becomes several interlocking levels inside. It looks like a palace with its barrel-vaulted entry hall and warren of levels and staircases--a fugue of alternating spatial experiences that should make it an exciting space to pace. A huge central room has the grand proportions of a regal reception hall, but it is the main studio. An elevator hidden in a shaft can accommodate a forklift. An immense skylight will open so a crane can be brought around to lift out a particularly large piece. Graham has clearly not forgotten the technical rigors of moving his 24-foot Joe Louis monument. (An interesting ecological note; the structure is designed without either air conditioning or central heating. Graham thinks he has fashioned it to maintain a comfortable temperature without them.)

He looks fleetingly irritated when he hears the phrase, “Post-Modern” attached to his work. He is not fond of the hasty, artificial character of much present revivalist architecture.

“Modernism was propelled by the innocence of a dialogue of ideas. Once that innocence is gone, then none of those ideas make any sense. You have to put it back together in a different way. The idea of an international art dialogue is silly because ideas grow out of specific needs of their region.”

The basic studio is scheduled for completion at year’s end, but that’s not the end of it.

“It will be intentionally elaborate,” he says, “Artist friends have already agreed to do parts of it. Kenny Price will do the capitals for the arcade columns. Gwynn Murrill will make animals for niches outside, and there’ll be frescoes by David Novoros. Billy Al Bengston, Tony Berlant and Doug Wheeler will do something and Ed Moses has two great 22-foot paintings I want for upstairs. I’ll probably go on working on it for the rest of my life.

“More richness equals more energy, but it’s risky. Whatever I add will have to make it better than what’s there. That takes time. You can’t do it in five years. That’s why it’s not Post-Modern. This is not going to be new old building. There’ll be gargoyles and water.”

And, of course, his own work. Graham plans to festoon the new building with his large oeuvre, presumably including the new ravishing nude that will act as the source figure for fountains that cascade down Larry Halprin’s new downtown “Spanish Steps.”

People who have known Graham a while have noticed a marked change in his character recently. He’s gone from being tense and slightly withdrawn to being gracious, warm and solicitous. He is at once looser and more dignified. Some say the change is due to his relationship with Huston.

“In her new movie, ‘The Grifters,’ she plays a character that’s quite unlike her in reality,” Graham says. “But what’s surprising if you know her is that all the parts of the character are parts of the real her just sort of rearranged. I guess that’s how actors do it.”

But it may be that the relationship is the result of a prior creative and emotional catharsis. Before a current spate of activity, he spent two solid years just drawing models. He’d never drawn before. The results were surprising when compared to the introspective character of his sculpted figures. Now funny, now sarcastic, now tender, they seem to mark a wonderful loosening.

With all that it looks as if Graham is about to join the ranks of artists whose studios are nearly as famous as they are. It doesn’t look like this one will remind anybody of Jackson Pollock’s barn or Andy Warhol’s Factory. If anything it recalls Diego Rivera’s last studio, which is now a museum and has been an inspiration to Graham, who was born in Mexico. It also calls to mind the sumptuous precincts of Olana on the Hudson River, the house and studio of the great 19th-Century American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.

Today, that fantastic place belongs to the state and is open to the public. Graham says his studio is not a monument to anyone including himself. All the same, it looks like it will be a knockout, and you can’t help thinking it would lend class to Venice if somewhere down the line it belonged to the people.

Asked about the cost of the elaborate project, he looks a little puzzled as if the question had never crossed his mind. Is it the mind of the inspired artist or a chap so rich he doesn’t have to ask the price of the yacht?

“I don’t think too much about that. I never have. I just keep going and somehow so far everything has come out all right. I’ll just keep it up as long as I can.”