Gargoyles Become Hot Items on American Boutique Scene : Catalogues: Brooklyn firm’s stock-in-trade is antique reproductions, most of them recreations of grotesque ornamental wood and stone pieces.
In Bob Noto’s business, you may not get far with just a pretty face. Ugly is another matter entirely.
“Grotesques are very hot,” Noto said. “No doubt about it.” He caresses the lumpy head of one of his star performers, a horned monster who peers glumly at the world with deep-set demonic eyes.
The face is familiar, as well it might be, having been around for more than a few centuries. In the company catalogue, it appears as Number 408, Small Peering Gargoyle. This also gives the little fellow a special standing in Noto’s business, which is called Gargoyles Studio.
Gargoyles’ stock-in-trade is antique reproductions, most of them plaster recreations of ornamental wood and stone pieces. Some are based on architectural elements--capitals and keystones--but most have faces. The half-dozen gargoyles in the current catalogue are miniatures of the ones that gaze down on Paris from Notre Dame; now Gargoyles Studio turns them out by the score in its factory near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Other faces are less well-remembered but no less memorable. They include sirens and satyrs, jolly monks and cheery cherubs, gnomes and goddesses, mermaids, clowns and angels. The animal kingdom is represented by lions, dogs, doves, swans, cats, frogs, horses, foxes, goats, sheep, rabbits, monkeys and, new last year, a Russian bear. All--human and otherwise--support shelves, adorn mirrors, guard boxes, serve as bookends, hold pencils or just hang on a wall for decorative effect.
One face in this crowd, that of a sweet-faced little satyr, has special significance for Ed Goldsmith, Gargoyles’ president. “The sculptor who made this for us used Ed’s son as a model for the face,” Noto explains. “A nice touch. And a smart one.”
Gargoyles dates back to the late 1960s, when Noto had a crafts shop in New York.
“I had it set up like a Moroccan market, lots of folk art stuff,” he said. “One day a kid came in, an artist who was living in the Village. He was making plaster castings off furniture, working in the kitchen sink. He was really hard up; his wife was pregnant.”
The starving artist was Sydney Cash, now a successful sculptor of glass with an upcoming show in a New York gallery. Noto bought enough of Cash’s output to help him survive and, in time, to quit his plaster-casting sideline. Cash suggested that Noto might like to buy the molds.
“There was a basement under the shop,” Noto recalls. “You opened a trap door to get into it. I had an idea we could cast the things down in the basement.”
Goldsmith was, at the time, one of Noto’s helpers in the store. “His background is show business,” Noto said. “A wonderful dancer. I think he was in ‘George M’ at the time. I said I’d teach him merchandising, and we could cast in the basement. It was like the Marx Brothers down there, and it lasted, I think, a month and a week. But we were successful. We sold Bloomingdale’s. We sold trade shows. We started looking for someplace else where we could make the pieces.”
The manufacturing business wound up in a Soho loft, and Goldsmith’s involvement deepened. “I always had a reasonable amount of theater work,” he recalls. “As with many actors, my days were very loose. Bob was my neighbor on West 69th Street, and I began spending days in the store.”
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Goldsmith spent a lot of time on the road with touring shows. “I’d take the samples on the road with me,” he said. “But I got tired of touring. One day I woke up and I was no longer in show business. It just happened. My last professional job was in the late ‘70s, a revival of ‘West Side Story’ with Patrick Swayze.”
Some of those theatrical skills still come in handy, he said. “I do selling. It’s very much like being on a stage. A lot of the old trade sneaks into the new trade.” Are the satisfactions the same? “They are if you can make it work,” he said. “If you get the order.”
The company has 20 workers and sales of about $1 million a year.
About 6,000 stores carry Gargoyles’ products, from Mom-and-Pop gift stores to such chains as The Museum Company, a hot group of two dozen stores that pattern their stock on the wildly successful shops (also Gargoyles customers) in major museums. Gargoyles has made reproductions for the Metropolitan Opera House, the Kenmore House museum in Virginia and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Many college bookstores carry Gargoyles’ wares, and they are tolerant customers, carrying pieces that sometimes meet resistance elsewhere. Noto recalls that one customer refused to carry the little satyr “because it had a cloven hoof. She said it was against her religion.” Another controversial piece, now out of production, was a copy of an amusing Renaissance carving that showed the devil playing a monk--perhaps Martin Luther--like a monstrous bagpipe.
Over the years, Gargoyles has added new lines of merchandise, such as framed reproduction prints. But these have remained sidelines; the focus remains on plaster (and some vinyl) reproductions.
Gargoyles and grotesques, like many other products, go in and out of fashion.
Although some pieces, such as a mirror surrounded by leggy frogs, have remained in production since Cash’s day; others, such as a Mexican-style sunburst wall plaque, have disappeared.
“Certain cutesy things generally sell well,” Noto said.
“Angels and rabbits, for example. But we’ve had angels that didn’t sell, because they weren’t pretty.”
Current favorites are dog’s head bookends, cat’s head bookends and, once again, the gargoyles. These old favorites had been somewhat out of favor for a while. Then, about two years ago, said Noto, “there was a groundswell for grotesques and gargoyles. They’ve really taken off.”
Inevitably, people asked why gargoyles were back in fashion.
“We had a lot of fun trying to come up with answers,” Noto said. “We said, ‘In times of stress, people want to reach out for some icon.’ ”
He smiles and shrugs. “But really, your guess is as good as mine.”
