Firm Makes Ugly Faces Into a Pretty Penny
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 says. “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 No. 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 scores 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 says. “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.”
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Goldsmith was, at the time, one of Noto’s helpers in the store. “His background is show business,” Noto says. “A wonderful dancer. . . . 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 company has 20 workers and sales of about $1 million a year.
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.” Gargoyles and grotesques, like many other products, go in and out of fashion. Why are they back in?
“We had a lot of fun trying to come up with answers,” Noto says. “We said, ‘In times of stress, people want to reach out for some icon.’ But really, your guess is as good as mine.”
