Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn as a Mosaic of American Culture | Page 5

ity to communicate
with each other.”
The center was an
environment in
which artists could
exchange ideas with
engineers, mathema-
ticians, physicists, and
other scientists—and
create new kinds of
art using modern,
sometimes unexpected
media. Lat er in life,
Kepes returned to
painting, and his work is included in the collections of the
Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Wash-
ington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum in New York.
His wife, Juliet, was a painter, sculptor, author, and graphic
artist who sometimes collaborated with her husband. She
illustrated her own children’s books with her Asian-influenced,
color and ink-washed drawings, often depicting animals. She
wrote over a dozen books, including one that was awarded
a Caldecott medal.
The Kepeses have also achieved a harmony between
nature and technology in death through their unique mon-
uments. “When my grandfather was young, in his 30s or
40s, he bought burial space at Mount Auburn when he and
my grandmother moved to Cambridge,” says the Kepes’
grandson, Janos Stone, an artist who lives in Queens, N.Y.
“He said he wanted the grave marked with these traditional
Hungarian fejfa, or wooden posts. They convey through
carving, information about who is buried there and where the
person is from and what they did.
“In the area of Hungary where my grandfather grew
up, when a person is born, his family plants a fruit tree.
Then, when he dies, they cut the fruit tree down and carve
a monument from the wood. My grandfather’s fejfa has a
sloped top, which indicates it marks the grave of a male of
some distinction. It has nine segments on the front, each
representing a decade of life, and each decade has a chip
taken from it, like a half-circle, symbolizing a year. So you
can read the age a person attained through the carving on
their monument (see photo opposite).
“He knew I was going to carve the monument, but I
couldn’t discuss my ideas with him because he was battling
a dementia similar to Alzheimer’s in the years before he
died. But he had many photographs of these monuments
in Hungary that I used for inspiration.
“My grandmother, who was born in London, has a mon-
ument made of English ‘bursting stone,’ a kind of slate or
shale that doesn’t readily fracture. We had the stone quarried
in the south of England and shipped here. The bird carvings
on the front are drawings my grandmother did over the
years, from the late 1940s until she died.
“By the way, Buckminster Fuller was friendly with my
grandparents. Buckminster and my grandparents worked
on projects together. There was quite a community of artists
in Cambridge, Boston, and Cape Cod.”
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Marguerite “Missy”
LeHand were both power players in high-profile
presidencies thirty years apart.
JFK’s Confidante, a Son of History:
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007),
Historian and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author
Lot #385, Narcissus Path
Ohio-born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger moved to Cambridge
at age seven in 1924 when his father joined the Harvard
faculty. He was raised in an intellectually stimulating envi-
ronment, among family friends such as James Thurber, John
Dos Passos, and Samuel Eliot Morison. When he was still
young, he changed his middle name to Meier and began
referring to himself as junior because he so emulated his
father, a renowned historian.
Schlesinger’s poor eyesight prevented him from experienc-
ing combat during World War II, so he instead served as a
writer for the Office of War Information. Simultaneously, in
his “spare time,” he was working on his first book, The Age
of Jackson, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1946.
Later, he was employed by the Office of Strategic Services,
a “precursor” of the
C.I.A., in Washington,
London, and Paris.
He then worked as a
journalist and became
a professor at Harvard.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; Photo: Ted Thai,
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
He wrote speeches for Adlai
Stevenson’s run for the U.S.
presidency and fulfilled the
same role during John F. Ken-
Arthur Schlesinger’s
nedy’s campaign in 1960. He was
monument at Mount
appointed as Special Assistant to
Auburn
President Kennedy, and, after
Kennedy’s death, wrote a history of the administration, A
Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, winning
a second Pulitzer Prize. When Robert Kennedy’s widow
requested he write her husband’s biography, he produced
Robert Kennedy and His Times, which garnered a National
Book Award.
Spring 2010 | 3