BRONZE AMBITION

Standing at 4 a.m. on the soggy lawn of Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum, L.A.’s most renowned bronze sculptor resisted the weight of a full-blown panic attack. His latest in a string of public art pieces, an 18-foot-tall tribute to the late jazz great Charlie Parker, was facing the wrong way. Hundreds were scheduled to witness its unveiling in a mere 32 hours, but Bird’s gaze was turned away from Vine Street, the historic jazz district in the segregated city that had nurtured his musical soul.

With the precision and outward calm of a shopworn general, Robert Graham planned his counterattack. His reputation, his heart and soul, were on the line so, by God, Parker would be facing the right way. Ten thousand Kansas City dollars and several man hours later, Bird had done a 180.

“For art to be accessible, it has to be meaningful. It has to be in sync with people’s geography and cultural values,” Graham says several weeks later in his Venice studio. “It’s about a confluence of things and what it means to that particular place.”

He is a perfectionist, annoyed by inefficiency and mediocrity. But his obsession and ambition are not readily visible. “Bob is sub-surface emotional, but he is a very emotional person,” says his wife, Anjelica Huston. “He gives an outward feeling of calm but I think he works hard on control. Control is an issue with him.”

Graham, after all, is working in an age in which some critics view public art--particularly figurative sculpture--as trite and compromised. He is one of the few public art artists whose work is respected, but many top-notch critics don’t love him. Like Frederick Hart--the late sculptor whose masterful “Ex Nihilo,” the west facade of the Washington National Cathedral, was all but ignored in high-art circles--Graham often grumbles privately that his work is invisible to his hometown newspaper, something that offends and infuriates him. And yet the commissions for important national sculptures continue to roll in.

Graham made a name for himself in the 1970s with miniature wax sculptures of nude women, and then graduated to larger bronze works--of nude women complete with precise genitalia. In the 1980s, he added public works to his repertoire, most notably the headless torsos in honor of the ’84 Olympics at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the bronze doors at the L.A. Music Center and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C.

For the past year, he has focused on the massive main doors for the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the mother church of the nation’s largest archdiocese, scheduled to open in 2001. He is at once eager and terrified at the thought of the critical reception his creation will receive, though in classic Graham style, he betrays little emotion. “We are all in the service of something or somebody,” he says. Artists are “in a service industry. Our calling is to make things that affect people. The aberration is this 20th century idea of modernism--that idea of art for art’s sake.”

*

Several months after Charlie Parker’s turnaround in Kansas City and a few days before Christmas, Graham is pleased with the progress on his all-consuming project. He stands in his studio beneath a 10-foot wooden model of the cathedral doors and announces: “See how far along we’ve come.”

The doors lean against one wall; an 8-foot Virgin rests in a corner. More than a dozen 200-pound clay panels, pressing against another wall, are sculpted with different manifestations of the Catholic faith--Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of the Apocalypse, the mano poderosa (powerful hand), the grape vine signifying the union of the Catholic church--all of which eventually will be part of the doors in bronze.

Graham expects to finish these--the south side doors as the main entrance to the cathedral--within 18 months. As for the north side doors, which are smaller and less intricate, no start or completion date has been set though his preliminary designs have been approved.

The creative heart of Graham’s studio is upstairs, in a room crowded with a computer, desks piled high with books, cigar boxes and ashtrays. The windowsills are decorated with empty tequila bottles. Jazz is humming constantly in the background.

Graham is a high-tech artist, using computers to complete his grand visions for his large projects. The process varies slightly from project to project, but step one of any of his artworks is the sculpting of a clay model. That model is then laser-scanned into a computer digital file, the brain behind a large five-axis mill that cuts the clay into actual size. Graham sculpts that clay piece with his hands until he is satisfied. Then a mold is created, from which a wax impression is made. Through something called the lost wax process, the wax is melted and bronze replaces it.

At the same time, Graham has an army of 200 workers, foundry men, technicians, engineers and hydraulics experts working on the mechanics of the project’s larger pieces, the bronze doors, which are more than three feet thick at the edges. Eventually the bronze doors will be welded to a stainless steel structure to become one artwork.

He is able to produce his work faster than he could have 20 years ago--and with fewer helpers. “These computers are replacing the 20 assistants I would need to help finish the doors,” he says, allowing more time, perhaps, for creative thought.

As long as he can remember, Graham has been sketching. He was not a great student as a child but he distinguished himself with his drawings. After high school, he continued to draw his way through life--even during a brief stint in the Air Force in 1956. When he left the service, he decided to dedicate himself to art. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and eventually found a dealer for his sculptures. Before long, he had 10 gallery exhibitions under his belt.

Ambition led him to London, where he and his first wife, Joey, and their son, Steven, lived for several years. Within 24 months of his arrival, he was invited to show at the Whitechapel Gallery, one of the most important in London, where he introduced his nude wax figures enclosed in acrylic casings made to resemble bedrooms.

A few years later, the Grahams moved to Venice, Calif., where he lives today. It was there, in the early 1970s, that Graham began sculpting his trademark bronze female nudes.

His decision to sculpt bronze, a medium extremely difficult to bring to life, impressed friends. But figurative sculpture cast in bronze is considered by many critics to be the most conservative form of artistic expression, and Graham found himself turning away from the gallery scene.

“I think everyone was intrigued and a little bewildered by him,” says Graham’s friend, painter Ed Moses, who was part of a clique of artists that formed in Venice in the ‘70s. “His view was very different from everyone else’s. But I was impressed by [the wax figures]. I found them strange, personal little creatures--little fetishy types of things and very surreal in that type of environment.”

The switch to bronze coincided with a change in scale.

“What he started to do was pull away and think bigger,” says architect Frank Gehry, another member of the group. “It was fascinating to watch how he took on those huge challenges. His ambition was clear. It was like a general planning an attack--very deliberate, careful and organized, and all of us were in awe of that.”

The 1984 Olympic torsos--a man and a woman--were a manifestation of that ambition and became a turning point in Graham’s career. He won new commissions for massive public works of art, including the Duke Ellington sculpture in New York’s Central Park and the Charlie Parker memorial in Kansas City.

Graham’s high-tech approach to making art has prompted criticism that he is not completely at the helm of his projects. Some critics have berated his nudes as bizarre creatures out of place in the confines of current artistic concepts. But his facility with bronze has never been questioned.

“I respect [the art] because it’s got positive qualities,” says Peter Plagens, Newsweek’s art critic. “He’s a magician with the figure rendered in three dimensions. He has talent and facility and he knows his craft. He does make statements--the things are not pointless exercises in dexterity.”

“What is interesting, and frankly strange, is that I think of Bob not as a sculptor but as a statue maker,” says Times art critic Christopher Knight. “One of the biggest shifts in sculpture over the last 50 years has been the abolition of the pedestal and Bob has played against that move for almost his entire career. The art almost exists out of its time and it almost makes him the perfect artist for monuments. This insistence at always working against the grain is what makes him interesting.”

No other work in his career comes close to the importance of the cathedral doors. It is a monumental task not only as a technical and engineering feat but from an emotional standpoint as well: Graham is creating a work expected to endure for centuries.

“My RPMs are running pretty high,” says Graham, sitting in his studio, puffing away on Cuban cigars. “I don’t think about the fear that I probably have. I think that fear is a common thing in all artists. There is really no way to assure yourself that what you are doing is not self-delusional.”

*

Through years of artistic challenges and private downfalls, one thing has remained constant in Graham’s life: women.

He was born in Mexico City on Aug. 19, 1938, to Adelina Graham and Roberto Pena, but he never really knew his father, who died when he was 6. He was raised by his grandmother, Ana, his Aunt Mercedes and his mother.

Graham vividly recalls Adelina taking him by the hand to visit Mexico’s magnificent public monuments, such as Chapultepec Castle and the pyramids, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros’ murals and the cathedrals and churches nationwide.

“I don’t remember ever going to a gallery,” Graham says. “The things that were important were those murals and what people saw all the time. They were my history books. You could see what the Aztecs looked like, what [Hernan] Cortes looked like. I never looked at it as art--it was part of your experience as a Mexican.”

At 11, Graham and his three “mothers” moved to San Jose, Calif., where his uncle was living. He started a new life, never really looking back--until recently.

In the final days before Aunt Mercedes died last year, Graham found himself immersed in sadness. She had been the last of his beloved mothers. “I became the guardian of this stuff [photographs, photo albums, mementos] that brought back a lot of memories,” he says, glancing through stacks piled in a corner of his studio. Silently, he picks up an aged photograph--a little boy next to a fountain, surrounded by three women. He stares at it, drops it on the crowded table and walks away.

But one woman remains a focus in his life. Anjelica Huston had known of Graham’s work before their mutual friend, gallery owner Earl McGrath, set them up. In 1984, she attended the Olympic track and field competition every day. “Between events, I’d go and check [the sculpture] out and use it as a touchstone,” she recalls. “It really reflected the idea of physical prowess and courage and the effort toward athletic perfection. I fell in love with those headless figures.”

McGrath owns galleries in New York and Los Angeles and had known both Huston and Graham since the 1970s. He knew he had to play Cupid. Busy, successful individuals, each with a fierce independent streak, they seemed a good match. Most important, Graham’s passion for sculpting women would not get in the way. “I knew,” McGrath says, “that he needed an artist or an aristocrat--she is both--who wouldn’t mind if her husband was locked up in a room all day long” sculpting nude women.

Since that evening in the summer of 1990 when McGrath organized a dinner party with Graham and Huston, they have been a couple. They married in May of 1992.

“It was a moment in my life when I was going through a lot of changes,” says Huston, smoking a cigarette in her Venice office across the street from Graham’s studio. “I’d lived 17 years attached to Jack [Nicholson] in one way or another. I was recovering from the absence of having a significant other and I had a lot to talk about. [Bob] is very receptive and highly intelligent and very unbiased in terms of how he sees things.”

Huston, says Moses, “is like the other half of [Graham] and he is the other half of her. I think there is a kind of synthesis of psyches when they are together--sort of like a unit. I don’t think he ever had that before. I think he is a complete man now that he is with her. It is very unusual for two powerful, independent people to come together in that way.”

As for Graham, it takes much prodding for him to admit--on the record--that he is quite content and in love.

“She is like my executive muse,” he says with a smile. “She has a very big creative life, which I respect. She understands the kind of rhythm one has to have as an artist. In that way she inspires me, and it allows me to concentrate on my own commitment. We don’t meddle in each other’s artistic endeavors.”

*

It is more than appropriate that a man who believes so strongly in the civic function of art has the commission to design the doors to the city’s cathedral.

He lobbied hard for the job, talking to all the right people in prominent positions throughout Los Angeles’ artistic and civic communities.He is very active in the art world, sitting on the boards of the Otis College of Art and Design and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Although he abhors speaking in public, he has no qualms about picking up the phone and dialing one of his millionaire friends on the board of MOCA or LACMA or someone who has the ear of Mayor Richard Riordan (who in turn has regular contact with Cardinal Roger M. Mahony). With that quiet determination, Graham ensured that the right people knew he was interested.

His bronze doors to Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo’s 64,000-square-foot cathedral will serve not only as the physical entry point but also as a symbol of the unique nature of Catholicism in the Americas, a fusion of indigenous influence and iconography with Roman Catholic hierarchy and dogma. Icons worshiped throughout the Americas will welcome visitors. The 8-foot-tall Virgin who will stand above the doors is non-European in features, with robust lips, thick hair in a braid, full nose and intense cheekbones. She will welcome the masses into her haven--she is, after all, one of them.

The doors are more than a challenge for the sculptor. They have become a journey of sorts, leading Graham to read the Catholic texts and to immerse himself in religious art history, in particular the image of the Virgin Mary in the Americas.

“He’s been in a period of ecclesiastical study of late, and I think in some way it’s been good for him,” Huston said in April of last year. “I think this is sort of a spiritual quest for him. He doesn’t take his commissions lightly, ever, but I think in a way the idea that he’s the conduit for this spirituality is a heavy responsibility and one that is sort of resonating with him right now.”

But perhaps more than a spiritual quest, Graham finds himself contemplating his cultural identity. “My formative memories are so strong about Mexico--it’s about identifying with a motherland, patria. Why is it that you feel a part of something? It’s not just sort of emotional tugs when you hear certain music, but something down below, very deep.”

For most of his life, ethnic identity was never a big issue. As a young man in the Air Force, when he cut his name down to Robert Graham (from Roberto Carlos Pena Graham), he sliced off the Spanish surname with surgical and cold precision. But in 1993, he began a nostalgic quest for his Mexican roots when he decided to sculpt the mythological figure Quetzalcoatl--a plumed serpent worshiped by the Aztecs--for the city of San Jose.

In 1997, he visited his past. He was invited to show his work in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. There he was, 48 years after his departure, returning to his old neighborhood. Things in the vast capital city had changed dramatically, but the romance of the Mexico he remembered was still there.

“I had gone full circle from living in this neighborhood to exhibiting in this neighborhood,” says Graham. “All the other adventures in between are not as crucial in terms of determining my identity.”

A record 155,000 people shuffled through the 2 1/2-month-long exhibit of 100 pieces which included nude female sculptures, drawings, reliefs and prints displayed in the Diego Rivera Salon. “Through his nudes, Graham is searching for the essence of a woman,” said Patricia Velazquez Yebra in her review for El Universal, a daily newspaper. “He breaks down the barriers that are created by posing and penetrates a woman’s interior nature.”

Finally, Graham thought, his work was understood and accepted without “classifying it with a modern spin.” The Mexican press, he says, got it right.

*

Though it now seems second nature, Graham agonized over his initial forays into public art.

Modern 20th century artists did not do public patronage, he would argue with himself. “I showed my work in museums and galleries. I didn’t make stuff for parks and for pigeons to sit on.”

Then came the 1984 Olympics.

The two headless torsos came to symbolize something bigger than a bronze sculpture, something bigger than Graham. They became part of a historic moment--markers of a time and place that would endure beyond art trends and fashions.

“I saw that I could make something without compromising,” Graham says. “I got the smell of something that was an alternative and allowed me to use my contributions and tie it to something bigger than my authorship. It was possible to be an artist who considers himself part of his time but also in service of his time.”

Sometimes that service generates controversy. When it was installed in 1994, his tribute to the Latino heritage of San Jose--Quetzalcoatl, the coiled plumed serpent--caused a minor furor among local politicians, who deemed the beast an inappropriate if not savage subject. Graham’s Joe Louis memorial, a 24-foot-long black bronze arm and fist in Detroit, was well received by Louis’ family but criticized by some as a stiff symbol of African American violence.

And then there are the naked women.

Author Alice Walker lambasted one of Graham’s torso sculptures (incorporated into an award she received) as an example of society’s acceptance of the mutilation of women. Some have referred to his perfect female sculptures as “bronze Barbie dolls” or to his work as being marginally pornographic.

“I respect it, but I don’t like it,” says Newsweek’s Plagens. “The lifelike aspect strikes me as deathlike--it’s a little cold.”

Initially, Doris Parker, Charlie Parker’s widow who before her death in December walked through Central Park beneath Graham’s Duke Ellington sculpture nearly every day, was not a Graham admirer.

“If they were going to have Robert Graham doing Bird like he did Duke, then I wanted nothing to do with it,” she said last year, referring to the 30-foot-high sculpture of Ellington and his piano held up by nine Graham nudes. “I didn’t like those nine naked broads--I thought they were unnecessary.”

But Graham is willing to woo detractors (Doris Parker among them) when it matters to him. Through patience, an unwavering willingness to listen and endless private discussions, he has gotten his way when he believes it is central to his artistic vision. He has worked closely with Mahony on the cathedral door design and made changes at Mahony’s behest.

Graham enjoys the discussion his work generates, although he is sometimes surprised by some of the venom. Yes, the Joe Louis fist is a violent symbol, but Graham envisioned it as representing the violence African Americans have suffered living in a racist society. That fist, he says, is also about dignity, pride and power. Yes, the serpent is savage, but it’s also everything that represents Mesoamerican tradition, its brutal legacy and its unifying beauty.

And as for the women . . . .

He is an unapologetic lover of women. Perhaps due to his silence, perhaps because of the subject matter, his nude sculptures have been misinterpreted, he says.

“I think maybe [the art] makes people uncomfortable with all the attendant attraction a female nude brings,” he says. “The human presence is the most important thing in art. I consider everything else to be background.”

It infuriates him when his art is described as “classic.” He is, he says, a realist, forever trying to capture the human body in its exact state, perfect or not.

“Every body is different. I am trying to retain that different rhythm. . . . [I am] watching the mechanics of the body producing a gesture,” Graham says. “I’m not making fashion models any more than I’m making starlets. They cease being whatever they are in real life when they come to the studio and they become models for the artist. I’m trying to capture their humanity.”

Many of his admirers and supporters are women--including his wife.

“The nudes have not given me a moment’s pause,” says Huston. “That is not to say that I’m not a jealous person because I have had moments of great jealousy in my life. It may be that he is sculpting beautiful women, but it’s what’s specific about each woman that is interesting. There is nothing in his work that is general. Each woman has her own rhythm, each woman has her own set of intrinsic values, both physical and emotional.”

Admirers say there is a certain amount of puritanism and political correctness to the criticism of his female nudes.

“Bob enjoys women,” says friend Andrea Van de Kamp, Sotheby’s West Coast chairman. “He sees the female form as beautiful, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Even Doris Parker made peace with the nine “muses” holding up Ellington and his piano.

“I had several long talks with him about [the Ellington memorial],” said Parker, who knew Ellington. “I’ve gone back several times since. I don’t resent the broads anymore. I think I have a better understanding of the artist. And I realized that Duke would be happy having nine naked broads holding him up.”

*

On the day in march of 1999 when the Charlie Parker sculpture was unveiled in Kansas City, the skies had cleared. Hundreds of people lined up on the lawn of the jazz museum, eager to see the sculpture of one of the city’s native sons.

The shiny brass of saxophones glittered in the sun as musicians played “Parker’s Mood.” They marched down Vine Street, more than two dozen sax players ranging from 15-year-olds to the octogenarians who recalled their jam sessions with Bird. Soon, the silk cloth would be lifted off the sculpture. But first, as with all public works of art, the assembled masses would hear speeches. The mayor, the town’s richest citizen, the patrons, all would shuffle across the stage to thank the necessary people. Then came Graham’s turn--an obligatory but terrifying task.

He had not slept the night before thinking about his speech. The body of a respected 61-year-old artist suddenly seemed inhabited by a little boy who was more comfortable sketching and observing than talking. Finally, Graham had scribbled a few words down on hotel stationery.

“I’m honored to have been chosen for this task,” he said in a halting, deep voice. Then, his voice cracking with emotion: “Most important, I thank the living spirit of Bird.”

The white silk sheet came cresting down.

With the 10-foot bronze patina head resting atop an 8-foot bronze pedestal reading “Bird Lives,” Kansas City’s native son, one of the creators of bebop, who died at 34, would finally be recognized.

As the crowd gathered around the monument, a father with his young son on his shoulders explained the heritage of jazz and Kansas City. Curious neighbors walked by and looked up at Bird, proud of their hometown hero.

“This will perpetuate his spirit,” said Eddie Baker, founder of the Charlie Parker Memorial Foundation. “And he’s facing Vine--the way he’s supposed to be.”

Graham had mapped out Parker’s face, dividing it into cross-sections as if they were separate riffs in a Parker jam session. The sculpture shows Bird at his most contemplative and introspective, in a moment of meditation when the music entered his soul and the furious world surrounding him disappeared.

Graham had really captured Bird.

“It seems like he is really at peace with everything,” said Doris Parker, smiling as she gazed up at the enormous bronze of her husband. “The one thing I would’ve wanted for Charlie would be for him to be at peace with himself and the world.”