Opinion: Robert Graham, Ave Atque Vale
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The funeral of the artist and sculptor Robert Graham could have been held nowhere but the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown L.A.
It was Graham who designed the great bronze doors of the cathedral, nearly 600 years after Ghiberti designed those other fabled bronze doors for the baptistry of the cathedral in Florence.
Graham died two days after Christmas, and the hundreds who came to today’s funeral mass passed through the doors he designed and into the nave -- artists like Ed Moses and David Hockney, public officials like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Police Chief Bill Bratton, City Council members Tom LaBonge and Bill Rosendahl, former Mayor Richard Riordan and former California Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp.
[I had interviewed Graham a few times, and gone to his Venice gallery and studio several times more. One weekend, in his gallery, I remember lingering over one sculpture in particular, agonizing over whether to buy it or to cave in to common sense and have my house’s noxious plumbing fixed. He and I talked over this quandary for a bit; I am sorry to this day, Bob, that I chose the copper plumbing over that Robert Graham bronze.]
Among those reading during today’s funeral were his brother-in-law, actor Danny Huston, who read Dylan Thomas’ poem, ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion,’ and his widow, Anjelica Huston, who chose the William Butler Yeats poem, ‘He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace.’
I had to leave before I heard California first lady Maria Shriver speak; a friend of mine who was there told me later that Shriver spoke of taking her ‘very Catholic’ mother to Graham’s studio, which was filled with the strong, sinuous nude torso sculptures for which he was so well known, figures like the massive ones of the ‘Olympic Gateway’ outside the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.
Her mother was shocked by what she saw, and later, in the car, took out her rosary and said she would pray for her daughter, for the artist and for his ‘poor wife.’
I did hear Cardinal Roger Mahony give everyone a welcome smile with his story about Graham’s design for the striking Madonna figure that stands above the cathedral entrance.
Mahony, who extolled the virtues of the kind of public art that Graham created across the nation and so singularly here in L.A., was invited to see a small plaster model of the Madonna figure Graham had created. It stood on a table, covered by a cloth.
Robert whisked away the cloth, and there was the figure. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ Mahony remembered saying. And Graham asked why Mahony was thanking him -- this was just a working model. No, no, Mahony said -- ‘I’m thanking you because she’s wearing clothes.’
Los Angeles has lost a man who loved it, and who showed how much he loved it by making it more beautiful.