Perhaps the best and the worst thing that ever happened to Frederick Hart was being selected to fashion the sculpture of three soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A traditional figural grouping of three soldiers, the bronze work was added to soothe conservatives outraged by Maya Lin's then highly unusual memorial. As a result, progressive minds in the nation's art world associate Hart with reactionary kitsch.
Of course, Hart proudly considered himself an old-fashioned exemplar of sentiment and beauty, reaching back beyond Rodin for inspiration. But he also was very good.
The Las Vegas Art Museum does both him and us a favor by showing a selection of his work, accenting it with photographs and artifacts that open a window on his life and processes. "Three Soldiers" is here, too, or at least a small-scale maquette used in the process, along with photos, including one of Hart sculpting from a model. Like the memorial, the sculpture is ethically and politically neutral, and can be what you want to see, a weary unit straggling home or a proud trio of warriors.
Hart, who died in 1999, lived and worked in Washington, D.C., where his other most visible work resides, his tympana for the National Cathedral. He won an international competition at age 31 to create the three bas-reliefs filling the Gothic-arch recesses of the west portal. Two smaller works, "Creation of Night" and "Creation of Day," flank Hart's spectacular evocation of human creation, "Ex Nihilo" ("From Nothing") a maelstrom of tongue-like forms from which emerge eight human figures, as if flung from a vortex.
It is a brilliant conception and brilliantly executed, as several individual bronze studies make clear. As a sculptural idea, it ranks with Rodin's "Gates of Hell" project. But a text panel breathlessly declaring, "There is nothing quite like this in the history of art" is just a tad hyperbolic. (Rodin? Michelangelo?)
Still, the exhibition does an admirable job of presenting and examining Hart's work, largely through maquettes and other types of studies. For instance, it's engaging to compare a small maquette of Hart's "St. Paul," also for the National Cathedral, with a life-size model; the former seems to capture more dynamically the blinding moment the saint was accosted by a vision.
Hart also was an innovator in casting clear resin, and the bulk of the show comprises examples of these works, generally lit from below. The most remarkable, "Christ of the Millennium," was fashioned for a visit by Pope John Paul II to the U.S. A shrine-like alcove makes it difficult to examine, but the figure of the crucified Christ is hollowed inside a clear-resin cross, whose faceting creates multiple perspectives of the figure.
This play of light and reflection is reprised in a number of works, notably "The Three Graces," in which a profiled face reproduces itself in two reflections at different angles. Elsewhere, spectral figures seem to rise through the resin to form exterior figures, or suggest spirits inside a bust.
Hart mastered this medium, but something about it is off-putting. Pieces like these have become popular because they are so reliably showy. In a way, they ask light to do too much of the sculptor's work, supplanting flashy effect for subtleties of surface and expression.
LVAM curator-at-large James Mann moderates a panel discussion on Hart's work at 7 p.m. Thursday, with local artists Roberta Baskin Shefrin and Austine Wood Comarow and Jerry Olivarez, associate of the Galleria di Sorrento at the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, who has marketed Hart's work.