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Sandstead evangelizes for fine arts
By MARY EVA CASSADA
Special to The News & Record
Lee Sandstead is a man with a missionary zeal, an infectious
enthusiasm, a one-man nonstop caroming tour through centuries of art
history.The chairman of the department of art history at the new
Founder’s
College, Sandstead has a loud, raspy voice and a broad smile. He
comes
across more as a pitchman or motivational coach than an art
historian.
Where’s the tweed? The dour seriousness?This fellow who liberally
sprinkles his e-mails with smileys and exclamation points is a scholar of
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Academic art of North America
and Europe?
Sandstead, who is 34 and lives in a loft apartment Downtown (“South
Boston's newest and finest bachelor, never married, never engaged,
is
looking for a fine bride to be. Will exchange vows for acreage!" he
joked in an e-mail) said his years of work are finally paying off
– and
in fun ways.For starters, there’s the TV pilot now in production.
Sandstead will
say only that it’s a major cable TV channel and the show’s format is
“something like Sister Wendy,” the nun whose art show on public
television was such a hit.Despite cable’s myriad offerings – science
shows, nature shows, travel and cooking – there’s a noticeable gap in art.
Where’s da Vinci? Enter a hopeful Sandstead.Sandstead landed the job
through friends. He’s already filmed at the National Gallery, and is
awaiting news about the next step.Secondly, when he’s not shooting, he’s
lecturing; this spring alone:
Harvard, Tufts, George Mason, and on April 26 at the U.S. Customs
House
in New York City for that structure’s centennial.Pretty good (and
high profile) for a guy who was once a philosophy major at Middle
Tennessee State University. Art had never done much for him until he
accompanied his then-girlfriend (“The only French girl in all of
Tennessee,” he quipped) to a “great lecture” that turned around his life,
his views and his ambitions.
He went on to study art history at the University of Memphis and in
the
doctoral program at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New
York.Now he wants to pass on that same enthusiasm to everyone he
encounters: from baggy-pants college kids to stroller moms at the
Metropolitan
Museum of Art. (“Babies free!” assures his website.)“My absolute
sincere goal is to take that snobby edge off” of art, he said. Art is “not
just for people in New York City.”“It is my sincerest goal to communicate
my love for art … to a culture that mostly does not have that love.”We
love cinema. We love sitcoms.
So what’s the obstacle to art? How did art – something traced to our
ancestors’ cave drawings, after all – become the province of the
intellectual or the elite?“I think it a lot of it has to do with
Modernism. … In the early stages it was dead-set against the common man,
the bourgeoisie,” Sandstead said. “The goal of the avant-garde was to
completely divorce itself
from society.”“There is a huge problem with how art history is
taught today. Art
history as such from the 19th Century as been buried by a very
Modernistic, nihilistic academia,” he says on his website video.
The “crazy shenanigans” of “dribbles of paint on a wall” turned off
potential art patrons, who began to ask, “What does this have to do
with anything?”For example, if he’s teaching about Jackson Pollock
(and he’d really rather not), he has to do a week’s preparation, unlike
Classical
artwork or, his favorite, the works he choose for his own domicile,
dating to 1860-1920.“I get all emotional inside,” he boomed.
Which brings us to the third Good Tiding of his current wave of
activity: a book he’s writing on his area of expertise: the
astounding
Evelyn Beatrice Longman.Never heard of her? Not surprising.
In Sandstead’s opinion, her timing was all wrong. She still should
be
noted, but, alas, Modernism came along and when it was time to
eulogize
Longman and her colleagues, they were yesterday’s news, discarded in
the excitement of the new new thing.Longman, an American born in
1874, was the first woman sculptor elected to the National Academy of
Design. Her often huge, allegorical figure works were commissioned as
monuments and memorials all across the country.She did the Great Bronze
Memorial chapel doors at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, the
Horsford doors at the front of Clapp Library at Wellesley College, the
wreaths, eagles and inscriptions on
the inner walls of the Lincoln Memorial, the Electricity and The
Spirit
of Communication atop of the AT&T skyscraper in New York City (later
relocated to Bedminster, NJ) and a huge bronze bust of Thomas Alva
Edison in Washington D.C.‘s Naval Research Laboratory – among so
many
others.He also revels in work of her contemporaries, including
Daniel Chester
French, the creator of the Lincoln Memorial who hired Longman when
she
was a young woman freshly relocated the New York City, and William
Bouguereau, one of the greatest painters of his era.
“These were people who at one time moved the world,” he said. “This
is
the stuff that I definitely love.”What’s to love?“It was just all
their attitude toward values,” stressed Sandstead. “They’re benevolent,
they’re colorful, they’re exciting. People were beautiful. People were
healthy.”Contrast that, for example, with Manet’s “Olympia” – the
depiction of a prostitute reclining in bed. Or “Fountain” by Marcel
Duchamp – a urinal.Sandstead and his camp prefer work in which the patron
doesn’t have to read an artist’s statement to interpret it.“Thousands of
books” have been written, and are still in print, on Van Gogh, Monet,
Manet and others, but there’s precious little about the
artists at the end of that preceeding era.But in his talks,
Sandstead doesn’t forsake his bete noire for his favorites.“I don’t focus
on my personal preferences,” he said. “What I teach about art history …
it’s not this person or that person.”“I want them to go out and find what
art THEY love.”
For those curious about what Sandstead has to say, he’ll be speaking
at
The Prizery (“certainly the most beautiful venue,” he interjected)
on
May 10, speaking about Evelyn Beatrice Longman.His art-historical
photography has been published in many publications, including The New
York Times, Fortune, Ms. and Preservation magazine.
His website is
www.sandstead.com