‘Stan and Gus’ – Two practitioners of the ‘plastic’ arts change the face of New York

Henry Wiencek’s crisp new dual biography, “Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor and the Friendship That Built the Gilded Age” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), portrays an era as much as the working friendship of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. While it never loses its focus on those two artists, it tells stories of New York’s so-called gilded age (roughly, the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th) whose characters are more numerous than in a Tolstoy novel.

Such as there’s a problem, it lives in the book’s assumption that readers of this dense, action-packed history, which must have a modest target audience, need the author-devised nicknames, Stan and Gus, to keep track of the goings-on. White is most often called Stan and Saint-Gaudens the equally pedestrian Gus.