Robert Graham

Robert Graham was not a coin man. He was a sculptor of the human body — at scale, in bronze, for plazas and cathedrals. When the U.S. Mint released a silver dollar he designed in 1984, it was one of the first times a non-Mint artist had shaped a U.S. commemorative coin. The result was unforgettable, and not everyone meant that kindly.

He was born in Mexico City on August 19, 1938. His father, an American, died when Robert was six. His mother, grandmother, and aunt raised him, and when they moved north to San Jose, California, they brought a boy already steeped in the public monuments of Mexico — art made to stand in the open, for everyone.

He trained at San José State University and the San Francisco Art Institute, finishing his formal studies in 1964. From there he built a career most coin designers never touch: monumental public bronzes, a Hollywood marriage to actress Anjelica Huston in 1992, and a body of work in plazas across America. He died in Santa Monica on December 27, 2008.

Graham's whole subject was the figure — the human body, honored without apology. His large bronzes commemorate people: the boxer Joe Louis as a 24-foot fist hung over a Detroit street, a Duke Ellington monument in New York, the bronze doors of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, work on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington.

For the 1984 Los Angeles Games, organizers chose him to make a permanent monument — the Olympic Gateway, a sculpture at the entrance to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Two bronze torsos, one male and one female, frontal and nude. He then carried that same vision onto the commemorative silver dollar struck for the Games.

That is the key to the coin. The obverse — the "heads" side — shows the gateway to the Coliseum, with the two headless athletic torsos as its central image. The reverse shows an eagle. Graham removed the heads on purpose: the figures were meant to honor athletes as a whole, not any one famous champion. Collectors did not see it that way. Many were shocked, and asked loudly why the bodies had no heads — some read violence into it, others objected to the frank anatomy. Graham did not back down. The missing heads, he said in essence, were the whole point — a tribute to athletics itself rather than to a single face.

There was a quieter controversy underneath the loud one. The design seems to have arrived as a near-done deal, worked out between the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee and Treasury officials, rather than through the usual open design review. For a coin that carried the country's name to the world, that bypass raised eyebrows of its own.