Glorified Workers

Max Kalish is the sort of artist who is written about in news columns rather than on art pages. Both his work and his story are good human interest material. A Polish Jew, he worked for a while in foundries in Cleveland, reproduced in bronze the men he saw there. The New York Evening Post, under a big spread devoted to pictures of his statues, called him the "Walt Whitman of Sculp-ture." The Philadelphia Inquirer gave him a page of its magazine section one Sunday ("Glorifying America's Workingmen in Bronze and Marble") and the Literary Digest wrote in lively style of an "exhibition of sculpture, now stirring considerable comment, both pro and con. . . ."

As a matter of fact, there was little comment con, and less pro, if by comment is meant competent critical appraisal of the work of Mr. Kalish. His structural steel workers, choppers, diggers, pourers, are handled with the respect due to big muscles, energy and the artistic principles of the late Auguste Rodin. To use the means with which Rodin got at metaphysical truth, the forces behind men and women, figures erect and hazardously separated from the earth that put life in them--to use this means for reproducing, as by a good magazine illustration, the overalled figures of U. S. industry familiar to everyone, was a sure formula for attracting attention. Mr. Kalish attracted it, deserved it. His work was able, though faithful rather to human anatomy than to the technique of the trades he depicted, as when he made an electric driller bend sidewise, for the sake of an esthetic curve, above his drill, instead of holding the drill in front of him where it could get the full thrust of his body. Better even than the workmen, admirers of Mr. Kalish liked his Christ, a taut figure in grave clothes.

Mr. Kalish went on tour. Shy, roundheaded, soft-eyed and massive, he shook hands gently with mid-western art groups and, rolling up his sleeves, showed his big muscles to anyone asking about them. "Michelangelo was strong, like me," he said. "You have to be strong to do-these things. ..." In Cleveland his Christ, one of the most widely advertised pieces of sculpture in the U. S., was exhibited. Many expressed approval. Buyers-were few. A middle-aged lady, struck by its strong religious content (which, she explained to a reporter, particularly appealed to her because of family troubles encountered in bringing up her dead brother's children) bought the statue (on part payments) for $300, presented it to the Cleveland Museum of Art.