Photograph courtesy of the Saint Louis Art Museum
It’s all right here, miraculously dust-free: the Trova Spark Plug his father invented, the famous Mickey Mouse collection, the glass eyes collected by his bohemian-heiress wife, the poems of his pal Ezra Pound, the Sacred Heart of Jesus statues, the stuffed armadillo. Everything that’s ever influenced or inspired Ernest Trova can be seen, in a sort of “Seek and Find” game, somewhere in the big, white, unassuming-for-Ladue house where he lived for 50 years, or across the hilly backyard in his studio.
His work’s here too, of course. Sculptures from his Falling Man series, which is represented everywhere from the Smithsonian Institution and The Museum of Modern Art to the Tate in London and museums in Israel and Venezuela. Silk-screened prints and canvases, hundreds of them, slid into vertical shelves. Sketches, assemblages, and collages on bedroom walls. And casually hung among them, Roman Boy, which started it all.
Trova, who died at 82 (just as this issue went to press), painted Roman Boy when he was 20, living at home with his folks and working as a window dresser for the old department store Stix, Baer & Fuller. He started on the back of an old cardboard shirt box, as he recalled, and with a wild mix of media, created what he pronounced a self-portrait. He signed it “Tino Trova” and submitted it to the Saint Louis Art Museum for the Missouri Show, and the curators (one of whom was the German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann) appalled St. Louis by accepting it.
The head of the St. Louis Artists’ Guild pronounced young Trova’s paintings obscene and concluded, “If they belong anywhere, it can only be on the walls of an outhouse.” Life magazine was more amused than scandalized: “Window Trimmer’s Painting Baffles Critics in St. Louis,” read the headline, and the review took Trova’s talent seriously.
He’d been serious since age 17, when he and a St. Louis University High School buddy cajoled use of a carriage house as their studio. Son of an industrial designer, Trova had zero interest in college or art school. “I enjoyed working in the display department,” he told me earlier this spring. “It’s essentially like sculpture; only thing is, it’s commercial. You have to design something, take it to the carpenter’s shop, build it, paint it, install it in the window. All of those things were a little more valid for me personally than studying Rembrandt.”
Trova found his own influences: philosopher Bertrand Russell; poet Ezra Pound; Picasso, of course; sculptor Alberto Giacometti; painters Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. In 1949, he went to see de Kooning’s “Woman” exhibit in New York—and arrived late. So he went to de Kooning’s studio, and de Kooning sent him across the street to buy a bottle of Scotch, and they spent the day drinking and talking. Trova left with a signed de Kooning sketch and a note admitting him to a meeting of the Club, the famously exclusive Abstract Expressionists group that was meeting that very evening. Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko…all the heavyweights would be there. But instead of going, Trova went back to his hotel room, took a Western print off the wall, pried it open, and inserted the sketch. (“He does like to see things framed,” remarks artist and gallerist Matt Strauss, who chose Trova as a mentor years ago.)
Back in St. Louis, Trova gathered de Kooning’s energy into his own. He moved to a huge studio in the Musical Arts Building and watched Gaslight Square grow up around it. His work grew, too, the size of his canvases expanding in the vast studio. Every day he would bring his lunch and sit in an old dentist’s chair and do mixed-media assemblages, dashing off to the Goodwill store on Forest Park Boulevard to buy inspirational junk.
Even before Gaslight Square, Trova painted to jazz and blues at the Crystal Palace on Olive, giving his work to a member of the audience at the end of the evening. He always loved jazz, its riffs and variations. “To me, my works are like little melodies for myself,” Trova said. He’d seek a motif then repeat it, twisting and playing with it until its visual meaning was spent.
His variations relied on color and shape and texture, but he was not a big fan of pure abstraction; its hollow clevernesses annoyed him. “If you show me a picture in a book that has a white paper stock, and there’s just two bands of color on it, I don’t really get a kick out of that,” he said. “It’s more like a wallpaper book. But I’m not being critical; some people think it’s the cat’s meow. I remember one time Rauschenberg did a work like that; it was something he erased that de Kooning gave him, and it went down as legitimate art.” He quirked a white eyebrow. “I’m not much into the extreme happenings. They’re like rock bands.”
What Trova liked to do was abbreviate the human form, refine it into a single, powerful, controlled idea. That idea was sometimes wry or playful, sometimes grim. In 1958, he started a series of “shaft” paintings, tortured columns of flesh with titles like Prisoner and Victim. They hurt just to look at, yet painting them was more of a cerebral exercise than an emotional one: “I was trying to get any hint of de Kooning off my back.”
One night in 1959, Trova took Carla “Teddy” Rand, a young bohemian artist from the wealthy Rand shoe family, over to East St. Louis to hear Ray Charles. By 1960, Ernie and Teddy had married; by late 1960, they had a son.
They soon had a butler, too: William H. Alton III, inherited from the Rands. “The whole butler thing wasn’t really Ernie’s thing, as much as it was Teddy’s culture,” laughs Alton’s daughter, St. Louis actress Linda Kennedy. “I don’t think Ernie was ever really comfortable with that concept.”
Indeed, Trova rejected the very word “butler,” insisting that Alton, who died a few years ago, was a member of the family. “When we got married, we had more advantages than most people. My family, during the ’30s, it was tough to get along, if I recall. But then I started doing stuff in Gaslight Square and then getting picked up by Pace [Gallery], and it all evened out.”
Ernie and Teddy shook off the Rand formality and interlaced their lives. “You have to share the domination,” he said. “I call it ‘polishing the balance.’” He worked obsessively, but he took regular, fascinated breaks to watch his son and two daughters grow before his eyes. “When the babies were born, I would go up and play with them twice an hour, because they were so interesting,” he recalled. “There’s something about a pure baby who is absolutely helpless and absolutely right about everything. They can do no wrong.”
Diapers? “Well, no, I didn’t have to do that.” Still, it was an unusual devotion for a male of his era. “Well, later, now, that was different,” he said vaguely.
Later, parenting got more complicated. “Ernie’s very kind but very strict, and has expectations,” Kennedy remarks, then chuckles. “Do you remember Bill Cosby saying to the kids, ‘This all belongs to your mother and I’? I think that was Ernie’s philosophy. He didn’t want them to take anything for granted.”
His son, Ernestino Trova III, stayed in St. Louis, and he uses the nickname his father so quickly dropped. A poet with a day job, Tino is as sensitive, intelligent, and tentative as one might expect a genius’ son to be. Fluidly, with a warm, impulsive candor, he expresses all the emotion his father contained. Asked what Ernest Trova was like as a father, Tino pulls out a phrase carefully crafted for reporters: “He was a complex joy.”
Later, as Tino leads a reverent tour of his father’s work and collections, he murmurs, “It was like growing up in a collage.”
In retrospect, you can see the beginning of Trova’s iconic Falling Man in early groups of figures he painted on plywood, followed by triptychs showing figures in different positions: vertical, upright, walking; kneeling; horizontal, flat. Soon a single figure emerged, the now familiar profile silhouette of Falling Man, and Trova began to repeat it, suspend it in space, wrap it in a circle, let it tilt or slide. The pictures were about motion now, not just different positions, and the figure was in equipoise: falling, but not fallen.
When reporters started firing questions, Trova answered them elliptically, following his friend Ezra Pound’s mandate to “live art…but don’t talk about it.” The few words Trova did speak were about man retaining his dignity in the face of all manner of modern situations. “You don’t see him crying,” he remarked, more voluble at the end of his career. “He looks serene; he’s standing still yet moving. I think [dignity] is something valuable that people can acquire.”
Falling Man drew East Coast attention, but it wasn’t until the two-dimensional image became sculpture—in shining, impermeable metal—that it captured the popular imagination, laid claim to the zeitgeist, and won Trova abrupt international fame. In 1963, Morton “Buster” May, founder of the May Company and patron saint of modern art and architecture, asked Trova for paintings to exhibit for St. Louis’ bicentennial celebration. Trova countered with an idea: What if May gave him free rein over the entire downtown Famous-Barr department store: its workshops, glaziers, electricians, painters, copywriters, display artists? Amid the experimental, kinetic pieces that emerged, several shining, sculpted Falling Man figures stood and walked in three dimensions. When Trova’s dealer at the Pace Gallery flew in from the East Coast to see the work, excitement broke through his sophistication. “We’ll show them in New York as soon as we can,” he promised.
By the time Pace opened its show the following year, nearly every piece had been sold. Since then, people have had a field day interpreting the Falling Man image. It’s been described as isolated and vulnerable, clothed and invulnerable. It’s been pronounced male, sexless, androgynous, and pregnant. It’s been identified as Milton’s fallen man, Icarus, an Egyptian tomb statue, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, and a futurist robot. It’s been understood as a journey toward death, an existential triumph, fate’s fool.
“Every description you mentioned there might be somewhat correct,” Trova said philosophically. Asked what label he attached to himself (Classicist? Modernist? Postmodernist? Futurist?), he said, “I’ve been a man of my times, doing what I want to do, come hell or high water.”
The only interpretation of the figure that ever truly annoyed him was Jan van der Marck’s reference to “the false pregnancy of an elderly eunuch.” Asked about Falling Man’s armlessness, Trova drawled, “Well, the Sphinx doesn’t have a nose.” Asked about the figure’s tummy and slumped posture, he said with a twinkle, “Well, it was very pleasing to me, the image. And if I did it anatomically, or I had Charles Atlas or a bodybuilder, it wouldn’t be me! I take claim to that posture.
“What the Falling Man is doing,” he continued, “is getting by in all sorts of predicaments.” So it’s just passivity? “It’s persistence, dignity, loyalty. Somebody said it personifies the man of our time, the Everyman.”
The most stinging criticism he ever received? “That the piece called The Encounter was the worst in the show. From the current critic.” That would be David Bonetti of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, commenting on a 1994 hinged man-and-woman sculpture in a 2005 retrospective. His precise phrase? “A kitschy image of mechanized coitus.”
There was a dapperness about Ernie Trova—his black hat, round, dark glasses, big Italian mustache, and tweed jacket. He believed in dignified self-possession. And yet he collected toys, hunted down pictures of camels (“I like their faces”), searched years for an old perfume bottle (“They have Tabu, but they eliminated Voodoo. That upset my plan”). Until recent years, his sport was badminton; he was nationally ranked, and his speed and finesse silenced all snickers. “It’s the perfect game,” he insisted. “The bird goes fast, then it goes slow, and you have to run to get the bird. The faster you are, the better.”
His working rhythm matched his game: He’d paint all day, sculpt all night, and if he ran into anything resembling a block, he’d just switch to a different project. “He seemed to work at a sort of pulse pace, where there’s a beat, and I don’t think you interrupted Ernie,” says painter and Washington University professor Leslie Laskey. Some of the work is highly charged and original, but much of it is “echo,” he adds, noting that Trova just kept working until the next spark came. “One can glean things from that quiescence. And then you get this explosion, and you are amazed.”
Every time Trova opened his eyes, he was noticing, absorbing. When he heard that neighbor David Drier’s dog had died, he said sadly, “I just loved the details of that dog.”
“I see things visually,” Trova explained, and it was not the tautology it seemed. “If I see a little red ball that children play with, with their jacks set, well, I see the little red ball as an interesting object, too, and I’ve placed that a number of times on the prints that I do. It’s a visual experiment. Hit, or miss.”
And if he looked at one of his own Falling Man sculptures, say, Seated Figure, what did he see? “Shape, and form, and situations. He’s sitting. For 10 years, he was standing. It’s my opinion to continue with the series as long as there’s something making it new. I enjoy series: It’s a comfortable motif, and it’s a continuing thing that doesn’t end.”
New themes came after Falling Man, with new variations. Size almost didn’t matter; Trova was able to conceive of ideas that could be effective at 12 inches and 12 feet. But as the scale grew, storage became a conundrum.
His old friend, banker Adam Aronson, gave him the answer. Aronson’s widow, Judith, remembers how the relationship started: “We’d been in New York looking at things, and one of the dealers said to us, ‘Go home and look at Ernie Trova.’” That was in the early Falling Man era. By 1973, Trova was wrapping his iconic figure around huge abstract forms, bending it beyond recognition, and the finished pieces were crowding into his neighbor’s backyard, and his lawyer was pointing out that the neighbor had claim to the work…
Finally, Trova called Adam and suggested a sculpture park. Adam immediately dialed a friend, St. Louis County Parks director Wayne Kennedy. “Wayne got up out of a sickbed and said, ‘C’mon, I’ve got a park, but it needs a premise,’” Judith recalls. “And they did it in about two months, with forklifts and all sorts of things.”
Laumeier Sculpture Park, in Sunset Hills, opened in 1976. For the grand opening, Trova donated 40 pieces. “For a year, there was only Trova work out there,” he said with satisfaction. Of course, the park went on to add important work from other sculptors. It currently owns 42 Trovas and has 19 on exhibit in the park, 12 on display throughout St. Louis County, and 11 in storage.
Was Trova happy with the way Laumeier has evolved? “Well, I’m very happy for them!” he replied, elliptical once more.
“I like a good doughnut,” Trova said. “Sour-cream, glazed.” He and Teddy used to go to a little doughnut shop on Brentwood every Sunday; she’d smoke, and they’d drink coffee and eat doughnuts and talk. For lunch or dinner, they’d go to their favorite restaurants: Tony’s, Dominic’s, Trattoria Marcella, and Carl’s Drive-In. “Ernie’s a great guy,” says Carl’s owner, friend Frank Cunetto, who eventually came to see Trova as a good friend and owns some of his work. “He always orders the tamales and chili, and he gets the chili in his mustache.”
For fun, Trova listened to “my man,” saxophonist Lester Young; caught Carlo Buti on YouTube (his Uncle Oswaldo used to play Buti, “the Italian Frank Sinatra,” on his radio show); and watched movies. His favorite was the 1948 classic The Red Shoes, about love, art, and betrayal: “I think it’s very inspiring for anybody in the arts. They seem like grown-ups all the way through the movie.”
Asked his favorite era, he said “1947.” Why so specific? “Because I saw more movies at that time, and I like that period.”
He did like the thick diner coffee mugs, and he once made a donation to the Corning Foundation so the director would send him the drinking glasses he kept seeing in movies from the ’40s.
But 1947 was also the year that Roman Boy was exhibited.
Trova didn’t bring up such things. All about the work, he painted and sculpted instinctively, with a child’s immediacy and a philosopher’s curiosity. Then he moved on. His ego was strong but not public; his dignity came from the walls of privacy he erected, and from his seeming indifference to fame. He was invited not once but three times to be in the American Pavilion at the pinnacle of contemporary art, the Venice Biennale, but for various reasons (political and ideological) was never able to participate. Each time, he shrugged it off—even in 1966, when the entire panel was scrapped because the curator disagreed with the inclusion, not of Trova, but of Jackson Pollock and Roy Lichtenstein. Describing the flap, a New York Times critic pronounced Trova’s work the most avant-garde in the group.
“No one from St. Louis ever gets near a Venice Biennale,” exclaims Strauss. But Trova was vague about his accolades; he preferred to talk about the speech Anton Walbrook makes at the end of The Red Shoes. Interestingly enough, it’s high drama about something Trova never had to do: sacrifice love for art.
“He wanted to work, he had permission to work, he had enough money to work,” says Laskey, speculating about why Trova never really needed friendships with other artists. Strauss, who founded the alternative art gallery White Flag Projects, says Trova “has always encountered a lot of resentment from parts of the local arts community because he surpassed it very quickly.” Laskey isn’t sure about that: “People didn’t feel competitive; he was too strong. People worked around him.”
Aronson says, a bit tartly, that Trova’s “always been reclusive”—but adds that at the height of his career, there wasn’t much of an art community in St. Louis anyway. “Back then, if we had put everybody in a room who was collecting art and interested, there may have been 20 people. He was a blazing star, and it was an empty sky.”
Trova suspected he paid a price for staying put—not when he had Pace representing him in New York, but later. On the other hand, he added, “I think by staying in St. Louis, I avoided a lot of interrogations and back-biting, because I didn’t have much to do with much of the group here or there.”
He turned instead to his wife, who adored him. They went everywhere together—partly because he never drove, mainly because they shared so many interests and small daily joys. Both consumingly visual, they collected arcane bits and scraps like magpies, and they talked about everything. All the words Trova shared with no one else, he poured on his wife’s plate at breakfast. “She was my muse,” he said matter-of-factly.
Teddy died last June; how was he coping?
“Badly,” he said without apology.
Ernie Trova was born in 1927, and Mickey Mouse was born in 1928. They grew up together, the icon and the icon-maker. “Mickey Mouse is an indelible image that has been scattered all over the world, to Walt’s pleasure,” Trova said. “Mickey Mouse built an empire, with Walt’s help. He used him in so many ways that I think it was a success.”
Trova used his Falling Man, too: painted, silk-screened, cubed, sculpted, polished, stainless, segmented, hinged. He fused it with technology, combined it with found objects, placed it in situations. Soon architect Philip Johnson was posing for a portrait next to his Trova sculpture, and the Trovascope, a Falling Man kaleidoscope, was a hot seller in the Museum of Modern Art gift shop. Trova had built an empire.
And like his man, it was about to fall.
Around 1986, Trova met Philip Samuels, who’d made a mint running his family’s Universal Sewing Supply company and wanted to buy some of the comic-character toys Trova had collected. Samuels also wanted to represent Trova’s work, and he offered to pay for the fabrication, promote the work, and open a local gallery.
Trova accepted the deal.
“Everybody says it was a terrible mistake,” he confided, “but I got to do anything I wanted at any time and make as many pieces as I felt like doing. I don’t know anybody who would turn it down.”
In Strauss’ opinion, the deal was a disaster: “Samuels was dealing with Trova’s work like it was just another thing to be marketed and sold. He could have been selling shoes. Or sewing machines—which he actually was.”
With Samuels paying for fabrication, Trova’s engineering became more complex, his materials more expensive—and his work less popular. “He then enters the most brilliant, complex phase of his work—but there’s no criticism anymore,” Strauss says. “I am not aware of one word of legitimate art criticism written about Ernie’s work since 1984, the year he left Pace. There was such a run of bad decisions made: where his work was shown, what the price points were, what quantity was made. Imagine it’s 1966, and you have to spend a huge amount of money and wait six months to get a Trova. Some of these collectors are not intellectual giants; they want the object that is hard to get. And a Trova went from this incredibly difficult, expensive thing to Samuels making all these little desktop editions. You don’t want to spend $150,000 on a sculpture and then walk into your accountant’s office and see a miniature version on his desk. The cachet was destroyed overnight.”
Samuels counters: “Trova had already lost his cachet! Pace was doing nothing with his work. And while he has a place in history, in terms of contemporary art, he was never at the top.” Samuels also insists he didn’t overproduce Trova’s work: “I don’t think there are more than 4,000 pieces in the whole world, including the multiples.” Still, there was such concern at the time that Samuels did withdraw some of the multiples he’d issued. “It was a psychological thing,” he says. “Some people wanted more exclusivity in the pieces they owned. So, many no longer exist, because they were destroyed, with Trova’s permission.”
Trova, incidentally, did not think that Samuels made too many editions. Trova rather liked quantity.
“That’s always been his philosophy,” Strauss says, unsurprised. “That’s a mistake he was protected from under Pace.”
Five years after signing with Samuels, Trova sued him for $500,000 in actual losses, claiming inadequate compensation, inappropriate marketing and exhibition of the work, and failure to consult him. Samuels says Trova just didn’t want to honor their exclusive agreement. “I bought the distribution rights, and I sold his work everywhere, all over the world, and because I sold so much of it, he said it ruined him.”
The two men settled out of court. (Trova had by then bought back his toys, and Samuels was combing the world to replace them. “There’s a shark-feed going on right now,” a New York dealer said at the time. “There’s a man in the Midwest buying up all the comic-strip toys.”)
Years later, Trova dismissed the entire fiasco lightly: “Recognition comes with the people who represent you. I didn’t move to New York, I got an offer here, and I took it, and we did a lot of good things—but without the same level of expertise.”
He had a forgiving nature, Strauss says with a shrug. “The worst insult I’ve ever heard from him was to call somebody a dead pigeon.”
Indeed, in 2000, when Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School discovered one of its Trovas missing—and the next morning caught, on videotape, art teacher Alan Handler trying to retrieve it from a locker—Trova was more amused than anything else. “He got in a lot of trouble, and he wasn’t doing anything really bad,” Trova said. His son interrupted, quick to point out the immorality of theft. “He couldn’t afford to buy it,” Trova said mildly. “He was a teacher. I would have given it to him if I’d known.”
He did give away much of his work. And he was surprisingly easygoing about its fate. When his childhood friend Vince Bommarito tentatively asked if he could paint his outdoor sculpture, because the COR-TEN steel was rusting unevenly, Trova said sure. It’s since been orange and Chinese red in turn, and now it’s black with red edges.
For years, when someone wrote about a group of works, the Trova was almost invariably chosen for the illustration. There’s a Trova standing outside the Guggenheim, Carman is at the Whitney, other pieces are at the Met, the Tate, the Walker, the Hirshhorn. He was in three Whitney Biennials, and in 1967, John Canaday of The New York Times placed his work “among the best of contemporary American sculptures.”
“We cannot understand what it must have been like to be Ernie Trova back then,” Strauss says. “He was having dinner at Yoko Ono’s house. He was in every art history book for 20 years—and now he’s out of those books. In H.H. Arnason’s History of Modern Art, Trova’s gone.”
His fall may have been inevitable: Falling Man was so iconic for its particular period that, when time moved on, everybody stopped watching. By 1988, a reviewer in The Washington Post was calling him a “third-rater”; by 1989, a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times labeled him “one of the also-rans of modern art,” saying his work might have been exciting in its day, “but as works of contemporary art, the pieces come across as little more than gleaming metal and gadgetry to please the sci-fi crowd.”
Trova did move on—experimenting with other media, doing drawings and collages—but nobody took notice. Not even Strauss can blame Samuels entirely, though. “Ernie’s work is in the tradition of Great High Modernism—Giacometti, Brancusi, other abbreviators of the human figure—and that is out of favor,” he concedes. “There’s also a larger battle that’s never mentioned: the uptown-downtown battle. Ernie was a prominent uptown artist. In the ’60s, work from the uptown galleries was ending up on yachts and in millionaires’ homes, while downtown artists were in their coldwater flats throwing lead at the walls. Right now, we’re in a very heavily downtown reading of contemporary art history. The lead has stuck.”
Even the phrase “Falling Man” has a new iconography, naming the chilling photograph shot on 9/11, the article in Esquire that followed, the 9/11 novel by Don DeLillo.
“I think Ernie’s going to need another generation to locate him again,” Laskey says gently. “I think there’s a way of emblems exhausting themselves. After a while, you don’t see things. It’s like the Falling Man outside Cardwell’s: They are so public that they’re not visible.”
The well-known New York art dealer Ivan Karp, who first connected Trova with Pace Gallery, blames Trova’s isolation: “He didn’t get involved with the political quagmire of the art world. If he’d been visible and lively and participative in the social life of the arts community, it could have made a difference.” Leaving Pace was a disaster, Karp adds: “He didn’t have a platform to launch his work.
“I think he may re-enter the history books,” Karp concludes. “But right now nothing will happen to anybody for any reason, because the art world is a corpse.”
“The word is ‘emblematic,’” Laskey says. “Trova made things that have become a part of the visual language. You see a figure and you immediately say, ‘Oh, Ernie Trova.’ It’s a kind of stamp.” Laskey compares the Falling Man works to stop-action photography: “For me, they’re a spinning top that’s stopped. There’s a kind of speed built into them when they’re reflective; they work as a silvery after-image for me.”
Laskey’s also interested, though, in Trova’s early work in Gaslight Square, and in “other images that are burned in my head. He’s got the most beautiful drawing of a dog that I would break into his house and steal. Very simple, very small, dog-shape.”
In 2007, at the age of 81, Trova had an exhibit of collages, “Insinuations,” at Bruno David Gallery. “He used digital images, techniques very young printmakers use today. Young people coming in were really taken by the work,” David says. “They had no idea who he was, so they did some research.” David pauses. “The art world in the last 35 years has not given him his proper place. History will take care of that.”
And meanwhile, there’s the armadillo. “It’s part of the recipe,” Trova told me gravely. “I have a new series of things that comes after the collages, and I call them recipes. I order something on eBay or Amazon and wait until two or three orders come in and put them together. I won’t know what they’ll be until all of them are here.”
Like his collections, his jazz, his other work, the recipes were variations on a theme.
“His interests in things were always a form of observation,” says Jack Parker, who owns O’Connell’s Pub, deals in art and antiques, and had been friends with Trova since their Gaslight Square days. “I don’t think he ever looked at anything in just a surface way.”
It was not things in themselves that interested Trova; it was their resonances, the ideas behind them. He spent his life trying to figure out why he was here; why any of us were here. “I grew up Catholic, and then I grew up,” he said briskly. Later, he talked about going to Catholic schools: “I did learn a lot about Jesus. But when I graduated, I had the opportunity to see for myself, and I didn’t see the same world they were describing.
“Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t collect Jesus rings and Sacred Heart statues,” he added dryly. “And I have Hitler and Cesar Romero and Errol Flynn and Mussolini, too.” He couldn’t quite believe the dogma; he couldn’t quite shake it. The single question he wanted answered, above all others: “Is there a God watching over us? And what is the evidence?”
He had secondary questions, too: “What God do you know of who will give you birth and at the same time condemn you to die? Is there any such thing as the Big Bang? Has anyone ever come back from the dead? Did the guys who wrote the Bible drink wine? How accurate could they be?”
When Trova was in the hospital earlier this year, unable to work and understandably depressed, a brave physician dared the standard question, “Have you ever contemplated suicide?”
“No, but I’ve contemplated atheism,” Trova shot back.
Asked if he had any traits that drive him crazy, he said, “Well, I don’t like having pessimistic views of some important matters, and I wish I’d stop talking about them.”
Did he have any regrets?
“That I’m human.”
Besides that?
“Oh, isn’t that enough?”
The Contemporary Art Museum (contemporarystl.org) will honor sculptor Ernest Trova posthumously at its 5th Anniversary Gala on April 18.
