BATMAN & CATWOMAN

An Inside Story

A commission that began with a weekend at the Art House.

It began at the Art House

CAMPFIRE STORY

Rosario and Carolyn came to the Art House in East Hampton for an anniversary getaway. They loved the house, visited our studios, and Rosario became especially interested in what I was doing in sculpture.

As we talked, he showed me photographs of his business office and his collection of Batman memorabilia. What interested him was not the dark, armored Batman of recent movies. His Batman belonged to the wonderfully campy 1960s television world - Adam West, the shorter cape, the gray and blue costume, and those great graphic explosions of language: POW! BONK! WHAM!

At some point I simply asked him, “Are you ready for me to make you a sculpture to put in your office?” He thought about it for a moment and said yes.

Finding their Batman and Catwoman

Rosario knew exactly which Batman he wanted. We went back and forth over the cowl, the cape, the proportions and the feeling of the costume. This Batman was heroic, but he was not built like today's massive superheroes. There was something almost formal - and around women, a little shy - about the character.

Catwoman was different. Rosario gave me much more freedom with her, and that changed the whole relationship between the two figures.

She is almost in the middle of a leap

I began to think of Catwoman as genuinely catlike. She is up on her toes, her body rising toward him, her arms around his shoulders. It feels as though she is about to use her claws to pull herself right up onto his body.

She is almost in the middle of a leap. He isn't quite sure what to do about it.

The details became the character

Rosario asked for one particular necklace, with a lion’s head motif. I made that part of her and added matching earrings. For the catsuit, I found a textured fabric, photographed it, and translated that surface into the sculpture. Her hair became another flowing counterpoint to the hard metallic skin.

The boots came from Rosalind. She was shopping in New York one day and photographed a pair in a store window because she knew I was trying to figure out what Catwoman should wear. We took the idea much further — studs, high heels, even working-looking zipper details — until the boots became sculptures in themselves.

A little camp. A personal touch.

Rosario wanted the exuberant word graphics from the 1960s Batman television series. They found their way onto the base, alongside a dedication to Rosario and Carolyn and their wedding date: June 28, 2015.

When the material changed the plan

Early on, Rosario wondered whether parts of Batman would be painted to reproduce the familiar blue, gray and black of the television costume. I thought I might have to do that. But as the copper and nickel surfaces developed, the sculpture began telling us something else.

The metal looked too good to cover. Copper supplied the warmth; nickel supplied the cooler silver body. Instead of imitating the television colors, the materials created their own version of them. In the end, the clearest literal color I added was Batman's blue eyes.

That is one of the things I like about making sculpture: you can begin with a plan, but at some point the object starts answering back.

A year of making

The commission took close to a year. I kept Rosario involved with progress photographs while the figures moved from separate parts to assembled bodies and finally to finished copper and nickel surfaces. The base became part of the storytelling too: the bat silhouette under their feet and the comic-book words scattered around them turn the sculpture into a little piece of that 1960s world.

What began as a collector's affection for a particular Batman gradually became something neither of us could have completely pictured at the beginning.

Wayne Manor

When it was finished, Rosalind and I delivered it to Rosario and Carolyn's home on Long Island. At the front door of the Tudor-style house was a plaque: WAYNE MANOR. Inside were the collections he had told us about - Batman memorabilia and other objects from the 1950s and '60s.

There were a couple of possible places for the sculpture, but it finally landed on a table in the large living room. It immediately became the focus of the room.

The next day Rosario called. He and Carolyn had been living with it, looking at it, marveling over the details. They absolutely loved it.

For me, that completed the story: a conversation in my studio had become an object in theirs.

AT HOME WITH BATMAN & CATWOMAN

From the studio to Rosario and Carolyn's living room.

BATMAN & CATWOMAN

Copper and nickel electroplated sculpture

Michael Cardacino