Norman Gardner with a sampling of his sculptures that
depict women with babies in the womb. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Mary Jane Fine
The theme here is not a subtle one. Room after room is pregnant with meaning. Nearly every sculpture, every figure, carries a baby within.
Sculptor Norman Gardner offers a tour of his handsome Townsend Place apartment, a few blocks south of Mizner Park. It is, of course, also a tour of his art and, in the process, a tour of his life and philosophy, honed over 80-plus years of life.
“We’ll start here,” he says, rising from a comfortable armchair to pause in front of the solid bronze Cat weighing nearly 100 pounds and carrying, in the open oval of its tummy, a polished bronze kitten. Nearby is Mermaid Maternity, inspired by a remembered story of the romance between a mortal man and a sea nymph, done in aluminum-filled epoxy and painted white, its edges trimmed in black. Then there is Sitting Pretty, a small bronze Cubist-style figure, a babe beneath its breasts. And Madonna and Child. And Labor of Love. And . . .
And his 92-page, self-published book, The Undiscovered Art of Pregnancy, subtitled “A Glowing Tribute to Pregnant Women.”
His youngest daughter, Miriam, provided the impetus for this body of work when, five months pregnant, she showed him a sonogram of his soon-to-be next grandchild.
“One look at that tiny creature, fully formed and wriggling inside my daughter’s belly, melted my heart, liquefied my brain,” Gardner writes in his book, “and launched me on a collision course with destiny that was to transform the remaining years of my art career.”
Destiny has not been kind — he has sold very little in the 13 years since he fixated on what he terms Pre-Natal Art — but he has persisted, refusing to return to his more salable work, work like the small, bronze bullfighter that was snapped up by a New York gallery, some years back, and sold the very next day. No, he remains true to his vision.
“I’m just too obstinate, and I believe in it,” he says. “I’m kind of obsessed with the idea, and having four daughters and nine grandchildren, I have to do it this way because I can’t give birth myself.”
His stainless-steel sculpture, The Births of Venus (yes, plural), does so in his stead. His original piece, an homage to the Botticelli painting of Venus standing on a scallop shell, featured an open space in the goddess’s abdomen — perfect, he decided, for the insertion of a baby.
“This to me was the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, and Life’s Beautiful Beginnings,” he writes in his book, “all wrapped up in one.”
He came to believe, the book notes, that “selective censorship” has discouraged museums and galleries from exhibiting “artworks that reveal unborn babies floating inside their mother’s wombs,” and that “this attitude is a hold-over from the Dark Ages when such explicit depictions of the pregnant condition were considered ‘a source of idolatry and paganistic excess.’ ”
The book, though, also charts his research into such art, with illustrations ranging from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a fetus in the womb to the 35-foot-high Virgin Mother with its cutaway pregnant belly by contemporary British artist Damien Hirst.
Gardner’s sculptures make no attempt at anatomical correctness. They are abstract and graceful with a nod to the Cubists (enough so that one museum curator, he says, in declining to display his work, dubbed it “derivative”).
His fascination with art, with sculpture, dates back to childhood, when he carved toys from wooden crates and won, in first grade, a bronze medal for his drawing of a Model T. He earned his degree in mechanical engineering from New York’s City College in 1949 and, later, after a stint in the Army, earned his master’s degree in fine arts at the Pratt Institute, where he then taught for a dozen years.
Along the way, Gardner worked at designing everything from guided missiles to toys to product packaging for Avon and Estée Lauder.
But, always, there was sculpture. He often began with a cardboard model, subsequently realized in stainless steel or bronze. At one point, he says, “I had a very successful career selling art. I sold dozens and dozens of sculptures. I had six galleries in Florida handling my work.”
The work he calls “my masterpiece” is here, a tabletop piece in the dining area. “Everybody and his brother have made ‘The Fall — Adam and Eve and the Apple,’ ” he says. “But not one has bothered to show the baby.” Now, there they all are: the snake entwined around a tree; the apple, balanced on Adam’s hand; the baby, curled into a space in Eve’s Belly. Its title: The Original Son.
Gardner’s obsession with the pre-natal is rivaled only by his obsession with puns. So a painting in the bedroom he shares with his wife, Katy, is titled All the Nudes That Fit We Paint, taking off on The New York Times motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print;” two others, Girl Before a Miró and Nudes Defending a Law Case riff on Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror and Nude Descending a Staircase, by Marcel Duchamp.
The fun is tempered a bit, these days, by the scarcity of sales. He picks up a tiny model, fashioned from cardboard and Elmer’s glue and turns it around in his hand.
“Now that I’m retired and penniless,” he says, and smiles, “I’m back to cardboard.”
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