| Robert Graham: The Ultimate Sculptor for the City of the Angels |
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 LOS ANGELES Throughout history, certain great artists have become virtually synonymous with the cities and eras in which they lived and worked. Think, for example, of Vittore Carpaccio, who in the late 15th and early 16th centuries captured the extraordinary architecture and luminosity of Venice, Italy during the full flowering of the Renaissance, or of the genteel beauty of late-19th-century Paris as portrayed by Georges Seurat.
In such a context, the Mexican-born, California-raised, Los Angeles-based sculptor Robert Graham, who died late last year at the age of 70, arguably became the preeminent and definitive artist of the late-20th and early-21st centuries in the city he came to regard as his home.Though he sculpted and sold series of cast bronzes that found their way in many top museums and private collections, Graham will always be best known for the monumental public works he created that have become visual and spiritual touchstones in the Los Angeles landscape. He first came to widespread attention with his “Dance Door,” created in 1978, which found a permanent home four years later in the plaza of the Los Angeles Music Center in downtown: an open bronze doorway and door 105.5-inch (2.68-m) tall, from the solid plan of which the forms of nude female forms tantalizingly emerge.  Robert_Graham, Dance Door In 1984, his “Olympic Gateway” solidified his civic reputation with a 25-foot (7.62-m) monumental structure crowned by nude male and female athlete figures, set in front of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as the definitive symbol of the XXIIrd Olympiad held that year in the city. Always celebrating the usually unclothed human, usually female, form, Graham’s works felt and continue to feel at once both classical in their obvious links to Greek and Roman sculptures and very much of their present day and place in their detailed realism and their celebration of perfect bodies in a city where physical perfection is all too often achieved in a surgeon’s office and admired on a TV or movie screen. The high-minded can gaze upon Graham’s works unabashedly for their obvious accomplishment, an appreciation only heightened by the knowledge that the sculptor went on to create such loftier (and fully clothed) celebrations of illustrious Americans as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument (1997) in Washington, DC, and the Charlie Parker Memorial (1999) in Kansas City, Missouri. And Graham completed what some consider his finest work in a still more exalted form and location in L.A.: “The Great Bronze Doors of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels” (2002), the main entrance to the city’s modern new Catholic cathedral.  Robert Graham, LA Cathedral The 30-by-30-foot (9.144-by-9.144-m) construction is adorned by classic images of the Virgin Mary from the many cultures that make up the metropolis, including Graham’s own Mexican heritage. Above the great doors, and surrounded by gold leaf that reflects the heavenly California sun, is a Graham-style figure of the Virgin as a clearly teenage girl of Hispanic or native blood, dressed in the humblest of peasant robes. It’s a heroic and touching work that perfect captures the great melting-pot history of Los Angeles. And, fittingly, it greeted the hundreds of mourners—including actress Anjelica Houston, Graham’s widow; Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver; illustrious local artists like David Hockney and Ed Moses—who arrived at the cathedral for Graham’s funeral mass on last January 7.  Robert Graham, UCLA Graham’s sculptures, however, live on. You can find his public works and civic monuments in Los Angeles by starting at his website, www.robertgraham-artist.com. Bookmark us: 
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