Max Kalish ( 1891-1945 )
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Foundryman - 1936 Bronze with dark brown patina 19 x 9 x 5 inches Stamped with founder’s seal (on left rear of base): Meroni Radice [Paris]
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Provenance:
The artist
By descent in the family of the artist
Born of Lithuanian heritage in the town of Valozin, Poland (now Belarus) Max Kalish immigrated with his family to Ohio in 1894. He studied first at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and then moved on to New York for two years, studying at the National Academy of Art. In 1912 he made his first visit to Paris, attending first the Académie Colarossi and then the Ecole-des-Beaux-Arts. After traveling in Europe, Kalish returned to the United States and assisted Isadore Konti (one of his instructors at the National Academy) on his sculpture Column of Progress, created for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
Following that exposition in 1915, Kalish returned to Cleveland and received several portrait commissions. But his art career was halted by his enlistment in the Army in 1916. Although he hoped to be stationed in France, he was assigned to the Army Medical Corps in Cape May, New Jersey where he worked on prosthetics for injured soldiers.
Beginning in 1920 and continuing for the next twelve years, Kalish spent half of his years in Paris and the other half in Cleveland and New York. He turned his focus to labor portraiture in 1921. These bold and finely detailed sculptures of the American laborer in action remained at the core of his work throughout his life. In 1925 he showed three of his labor sculptures at the Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen exhibition, establishing his reputation. Throughout the 1920s the artist would study workers on site and then he would mold and cast them in Paris. The trips to France became more irregular by 1932, when Kalish and his wife moved permanently to New York City.
Kalish’s laborers are a testament to the artist’s great technical ability. Each figure has a solid feeling of proportion and is composed with balance and a sense of movement. The detailing of the figures is rendered with a delicacy that belies the subject matter. The folds of the workers’ clothes, the rhythmic musculature and the emotional import of their faces all point to the artist’s talent. And each of Kalish’s subjects has its own individual physical characteristics—the bodies, the faces and the emotions that they convey vary widely.
Beyond his technique, Kalish’s laborers hold the viewer’s attention for other reasons. His is not a sentimental art, nor is it political. He obviously had great interest and respect for the bedrock of the Industrial Age—the American worker. (Kalish himself worked in factories in his youth). The postures of his subjects transmit strength, skill and dignity. He has taken classical forms and ideals and applied them to his own time. The result is a persuasive celebration of the laborer, and so by extension, industry and finally of America.
