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In the 1997 movie Devil's Advocate, the devil heads a major law firm. The devil's protegé is a young attorney groomed to be "The One." Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves are fantastic. The dialogue is gripping. The special effects are spellbinding. The premise is, by Hollywood standards, quite creative. But there is one huge problem.At the movie's climax, there is a clash in the devil's penthouse suite. As the devil stands before a larger-than-life sculpture of naked men and women who seem caught in a whirlpool of carved marble, the figures begin to move; soon they are coupling in orgiastic frenzy. The problem is, the art resembles a sculpture depicting God's creation that graces the entrance of National Cathedral in Washington. When the artist of the Creation piece learns of the movie, he is enraged beyond words. Like David battling Goliath, the artist engages several law firms and threatens to sue the Warner Brothers division of the media giant Time Warner. Against all odds, the sculptor wins.Although his was hardly a household name, sculptor Frederick Hart has been compared to the French sculptor Rodin. Some people hailed him as America's most popular contemporary sculptor. Ronald Reagan gave him a Presidential Design Excellence Award; President Bush commemorated his National Cathedral sculptures; and Pope John Paul II called one of Hart's processional crosses "a profound theological statement." Hart died tragically and unexpectedly at age 55 last August.He received an honorary doctorate 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, [his] skill, and his contributions to the rich cultural heritage of our nation." And although he suffered the rigors of poverty as a young artist, his pioneering work and marketing savvy in the field of acrylic sculpture made him a multimillionaire by his fifth decade. Hart's untimely death leaves a tremendous gap in the small company of Christians making a difference in the world of high art. His example and his works remain enduring testimonies to the legacy a person of integrity can build through persistence.

Yet during the course of his career, a condemnatory blanket of silence in the art world shrouded Hart's figural and representative sculptures. Because his style was too traditional for them, modernist critics dismissed Hart's work as derivative and passé. After all, modernism arose at the end of the nineteenth century in revolt against the classical values of beauty, realism, and content in art. Modernism dominated the twentieth century with its penchants for self-expression and the fragmentary nature of abstraction.Modernists saw any artist like Hart—who insisted on beauty, or that art had "a moral responsibility," and must therefore "pursue something higher than itself"—as hopelessly out of step with the times. And Hart's assertions that art must be "enriching, ennobling and vital," or "a majestic presence in everyday life just as it was in the past," caused twentieth-century critics to relegate him as a relic of the eighteenth century.Author Tom Wolfe, one of Hart's most vocal advocates, argues that the vise of modernism may finally be loosening. Wolfe, who established his status as cultural maven through books including The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Painted Word, detailed Hart's plight in the first issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine for the year 2000—which is itself extraordinary. From the outset, Wolfe writes, "Hart consciously, pointedly aimed for the ultimate in the Western tradition of sculpture, achieved it in a single stroke, then became invisible."Hart's deepest professional disappointment occurred, ironically, with the unveiling of Ex Nihilo—the very sculpture contested in the Devil's Advocate case. Hart joined the team working on the National Cathedral in 1967, after brief stints at several art schools. By then, economic recession had stymied construction of the sixth-largest cathedral in the world. As an outsider in a cadre of Italian stonecarvers, the Carolina-raised Hart began hewing gargoyles out of white Indiana limestone for one of the last purely Gothic structures of the second millennium.In 1971, Hart suddenly abandoned this job for a self-instigated mission to design three huge sculptures for the area called the tympanum over the cathedral's massive doors. He lived in the proverbial coldwater loft, often on the edge of starving or freezing to death, and with no guarantee that his work would be accepted in the Cathedral's international competition.Incredibly, in 1974, the nation's signature cathedral accepted the 31-year-old's concepts for Night, Day, and Ex Nihilo. As Wolfe writes, "A working class boy nobody had ever heard of, an apprentice stonecarver, had won what would turn out to be the biggest and most prestigious commission for religious sculpture in America in the twentieth century."Two passionate relationships grew out Hart's 11-year project: a stunningly beautiful woman who modeled for Ex Nihilo became his wife and subsequently inspired many later compositions featuring the feminine form. But as Wolfe points out:

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March 6 2000, Vol. 44, No. 3