Frederick Hart

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In 1965, Hart’s sister, Chesley, was diagnosed with leukemia. Because her parents were unable to cope with the illness, Chesley's Aunt Grace became her caregiver. Hart tried to stem his family’s disintegration by helping Aunt Grace as much as he could. The next year, when she was just 16, Chesley died.

In the turbulent period after her death, Hart “stumble[d] into a sculpture class at the Corcoran School of Art, and [was] blown away.” Mourning Chesley shaped what Hart would later describe as his “moral responsibility” as an artist. As he said: Art must ”give hope to the darkness.” It ”must be a part of life. It must be an enriching, ennobling and vital partner... It should be a majestic presence in everyday life."

Hart dropped out of the Corcoran, then attended art classes at American University in Washington, D.C., but dropped out again before receiving a degree. While working at Giorgio Gianetti Studio of Architectural Sculpture, he assisted sculptors Felix de Weldon, Carl Mose, Don Turano, and Heinz Warnecke. Hart was also using his time in Washington, D.C., as an opportunity to study the public art of the nation's capital, and absorb the naturalistic style of sculptor Daniel Chester French.

Toward the end of the 1960s, Hart began work on one of his earliest and most personal sculptures, Family. Years later, Hart would say that Family was for him a way to come to terms with Chesley's death; it was an effort to represent an idea of stability, to capture a sense of belonging. The first casting Hart presented as a gift to his girlfriend in 1969. Stylistically, Family signals Hart's tendency to straddle the line between Classical and Romantic sculptural traditions. The heavy pyramidal form of Hart's Family evokes the solidity of French's Abraham Lincoln, but the raw, earthy contours set it apart, and situate it within the Romantic tradition of Rodin.

In 1967, Hart took a job as a clerk in the mail room at Washington National Cathedral. He did so for the specific purpose of pestering Roger Morigi. Morigi was the Cathedral's legendary master carver, an Italian immigrant who had carved the iconic frieze of the United States Supreme Court Building. "Highly respected, [Morigi] was a temperamental perfectionist who didn't tolerate incompetence and wasn't shy about sharing his opinions." Hart wanted Morigi to take him on as an apprentice. In time, it worked: Morigi became his mentor. Not only that, he became a father figure to Hart, who had long been estranged from his own parents.

"Working at the cathedral was the best experience of my learning life," Hart said. "It taught me 'how' to work. I wanted to know and feel the discipline—the mastery of stone carving—and I learned that in the hours of working up on the scaffolding in the heat of summer and through the winter." At first, Morigi put Hart to work on floral ornaments, primarily ceiling bosses. Because they were so high up, and far from view, any rookie mistakes would be less noticeable there, but for Hart, this meant scaling more than ten stories of scaffolding, and working high up off the ground. As his training progressed, Morigi gave him more responsibilities. Hart carved reliefs, motifs, and gargoyles, and sculpted a figure of Erasmus. He was on his way to becoming a master carver himself when the Cathedral Building Committee announced a major competition.

In 1971, the Washington National Cathedral Building Committee held a competition to determine the appearance of the west façade, the main entrance of the Cathedral. This was not just an important commission, it was a radical break with tradition. In the past, the west façade of a Christian cathedral typically featured a depiction of the Last Judgment; however, the Cathedral Building Committee wanted Washington National Cathedral to be the exception. Instead of the traditional image of judgment and destruction, they wanted to emphasize a message of love and affirmation, and so they specifically asked artists to focus on the theme of Creation.

To an ambitious young artist like Hart, it was an irresistible opportunity: a compelling theme, and a chance to see his own work carved in limestone over the main entrance of the Cathedral. Interestingly, too, the committee was willing to consider nonrepresentational, avant-garde designs, so for three years, Hart sketched in clay. His original tympanum design (from early 1974) was a wide, bare space, from which a woman's face emerges. The Cathedral Building Committee rejected this submission, as well as those of all the other artists. Only three sculptors were invited to submit new proposals. Hart was not one of them.

Undeterred, Hart submitted a revised design of his own. Guided by the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the idea of a dynamic universe, whirling into existence, Hart developed a revolutionary, unifying vision for the entire west façade. To the committee's approval, he submitted new models for the central tympanum, for the left and right tympana, and for the figures on the trumeaux below them.

In developing Ex Nihilo—the central sculpture, by far the largest of the group—Hart studied the combination of figurative and abstract forms in Rodin’s massive sculpture, The Gates of Hell. The final, full-size version of Ex Nihilo spans 21 feet, and stands two stories high. "The spiraling forms that recur throughout Hart's Ex Nihilo suggest the spirals that are found in nature—in sunflower heads, nautiluses, hurricanes, and galaxies." Hart intended the title as a double reference to Aristotle ("out of nothing nothing can be made") and the Bible ("everything is made out of nothing").

For the central trumeau, Hart sculpted an image of Adam, and for the tympana on either side, day and night. As a complete sculptural ensemble, the Creation Sculptures constitute "the most monumental commission for religious sculpture in the United States in the twentieth century."

After laboring over the Creation Sculptures for ten years, with the project approaching completion at last, Hart began to look around Washington, D.C., for new jobs. To submit a proposal for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Hart teamed up with architect Sheila Brady. Just as in the competition for the Cathedral Building Committee, Hart's initial plan was not accepted. His team placed third. However, in response to the controversy over the winning architect's design, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund tasked Hart, as the most highly ranked sculptor in the competition, to provide a sculptural component. Hart conceived a sculpture of three soldiers "not at the apex [of the wall], as originally planned[,] but 400 feet away from the wall as if looking for their own names."

Hart had become a master carver in 1974, and instead of continuing to work exclusively as a carver, he hoped to build on the success he had already won with more commissions sculpting national monuments. He would bring with him the time-honored techniques he had learned at the Cathedral, as an artisan among artisans, even as he acquired a stronger sense of his own destiny as an original artist, a sense of confidence in his own creative vision and capabilities. Of his work on The Three Soldiers, Hart said he would put the “folds of those fatigue jackets and pants up against the folds of any [carved] medieval angel you can find.”

In the 1981 competition to design the Carter Presidential Library, Hart was a principal of the winning team with Jova, Daniels and Busby Architects (Atlanta, Georgia), and EDAW Landscape Design Firm (Alexandria, Virginia). Hart was asked to provide a portrait of President Jimmy Carter, and on June 7, 1994, the statue of Jimmy Carter was unveiled at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta. Among the guests were Governor Zell Miller, President Carter, and Mrs. Rosalynn Carter. Hart said:

"I am greatly honored to have been selected to sculpt President Carter, a man who served our country in so many ways. From the Camp David Accords and SALT II treaty, that were among the achievements of his presidency, to the myriad projects he has since undertaken on behalf of human and environmental needs.

"In honor of President Carter’s past work as a farmer as well as his environmental initiatives, and his work on behalf of grassroots organizations, I have sculpted him in bronze on a low pedestal, in an informal pose, dressed in khakis with his sleeves rolled up… The gestures of the figure refer to the generosity of Carter’s nature, his eagerness to share a vision of justice, and his unpretentious delight in spreading a message of brotherhood."

Carter said he liked the portrayal: "It was that image that put me in the White House and the governor's office, and I hope I can remain . . . (like that) in the future," he said.

In 1972, Hart opened his own sculpture studio, to create original artwork, and execute commissioned pieces. Hart modeled his figurative style on the dramatic poses and sensuous expressions that he admired in the work of the Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Many were cast in bronze, some were carved in marble or limestone, but especially after the success of Herself (1984), Hart focused more and more on developing entirely new media for sculpture, using transparent and semi-transparent acrylic materials.

As seen in Elegy (1990), Hart developed an original process for embedding one acrylic sculpture in another. With the liquid look of ice sculptures, and their capacity to refract light, these pieces are perhaps his most distinctive. In these, according to Hart, “The sculpture is defined purely by light.” It is a “very delicate sense of image… suggestive of dreams, memories, and visions.”

“All the clear acrylic resin works are really the offspring of the Cathedral work,” Hart said. “They deal with being and non-being. In the Cathedral, the figures emerge from something that is tangible, from a mass of stone. But more beautifully, in a sense, the clear acrylic figures emerge and disappear.” According to Hart, the innovative sculptural medium creates a “relationship between light and form, and a sense of mystery around being and non-being.”

In honor of the Pope's fifty years of priesthood, Hart presented an acrylic work titled The Cross of the Millennium to Pope John Paul II in a ceremony at the Vatican in 1997. When it was unveiled, Pope John Paul II called the sculpture “a profound theological statement for our day.” Hart sculpted a smaller version of The Cross of the Millennium, cast and released as a limited edition.

Hart hoped to use acrylic on a monumental scale, for a public art project, but died before he was able to do so. Today, much of what he sculpted in acrylic remains in private collections. Among these pieces, Hart's later works tend to be "distinguished by an allusive rather than representational nature."

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• (1980) awarded a patent for inventing a unique process of embedding one acrylic sculpture within another.
• (1985) appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a seven-member committee that advises the U.S. Government on matters pertaining the arts, and guides the architectural development of the nation's capital.
• (1986) appointed to the Board of Trustees, Brookgreen Gardens Sculpture Collection.
• (1987) received the Henry Hering Award from the National Sculpture Society for sculpture in an architectural setting, shared with architect Philip Frohman (for Washington National Cathedral work).
• (1987) participated in an invitational exhibit of works in Philadelphia in conjunction with the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution.
• (1988) received the quadrennial Presidential Design Excellence Award (for Vietnam Veterans Memorial work).
• (1993) received an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of South Carolina for his "ability to create art that uplifts the human spirit, his commitment to the ideal that art must renew its moral authority by rededicating itself to life, his skill in creating works that compel attention as they embrace the concerns of mankind, and his contributions to the rich cultural heritage of our nation."
• (1998) received the first annual Newington-Cropsey Foundation Award for Excellence in the Arts.
• (2004) awarded (posthumously) the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States Government, “for his important body of work—including the Washington National Cathedral's Creation Sculptures and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's Three Soldiers—which heralded a new age for contemporary public art.”