Art: Dean of Sculptors

The citizens of San Antonio, Texas turned out last week in admiring tribute to the dean of U.S. sculptors, Lithuanian-born William Zorach, 69, whose massive figures have for the past four decades decorated the U.S. scene. On view at the McNay Art Institute was a retrospective showing of 27 of Zorach’s sculptures, photographs of his best-known works, and 65 of his drawings and watercolors, on loan from leading U.S. museums and collectors. Editorialized the San Antonio News: “The most beautiful and exciting sculpture that it has ever been our happy privilege to see.” The San Antonio Express art critic enthusiastically agreed: “The finest show of sculpture ever placed on public view in San Antonio and probably anywhere in Texas.”

The celebration came as something of a consolation prize to Sculptor Zorach. One of four artists accused of past left-wing sympathies in the noisy row which greeted the traveling “Sport in Art” show in Dallas (TIME, March 12),-he had just run into another rebuff at the hands of Texas patriots: cancellation of a $124,755 commission for three huge sculptured aluminum panels designed for the exterior of Houston’s new $16 million Bank of the Southwest. The bank’s explanation: the sculpture was “too modern,” and somehow seemed inappropriate after the Bank of the Southwest changed its name from the Second National Bank of Houston.

Snorted Zorach, who indignantly denies ever having been a Communist sympathizer: “The figures would fit any Texas building, because they tell symbolically the history of Texas.”

Out of the Brass Factory. In his long career, Sculptor Zorach has had more than his share of artistic hard knocks. As an immigrant boy in Cleveland, Ohio, he earned pennies selling newspapers, worked in a machine shop and brass factory before he quit school for good after the seventh grade and became an apprentice lithographer. Saving up $160, he set off for New York to study art, got back home flat broke almost a year later and saved up more money, this time to go to Paris.

The art world that Zorach discovered abroad was bubbling with the new ideas and brilliant colors of painters like Matisse and Gauguin. “Before I realized it, I was as wild as the rest,” Zorach recalls. To his astonishment, he had four paintings accepted in the Paris Salon d’Automne of 1910. While in Paris he also met his artist wife, Marguerite Thompson, granddaughter of a New Bedford whaling captain. They returned to Manhattan just in time for each to hang a painting in the 1913 Armory Show that introduced the U.S. to modern art.

Up with Sculpture. Zorach tried his first sculpture, carved out of a butternut panel salvaged from an old bureau, while summering in 1917 in an abandoned New Hampshire farmhouse. Where Zorach felt that his paintings were derivative, he found that working directly in wood and stone gave him a sense of coming into his own.

Drawing for models on his wife and children, animals and friends, Zorach soon achieved a quality of serene, monumental nobility in his work. Two versions of his Mother and Child were bought by Manhattan’s Metropolitan and Whitney museums, his Youth by West Palm Beach’s Norton Gallery. He executed sculptural decorations for the Mayo Clinic, relief panels for the Greeneville (Tenn.) courthouse and Radio City’s Spirit of the Dance. But bad luck kept joggling his chisel. His prizewinning design for £ memorial to pioneer Texas women was refused because the figures were nude anc the mother lacked a wedding ring; a 90-ft. frieze for the Los Angeles City Hall done in 1929, was a Depression casualty: his large-scale figures for Denver’s Speei Memorial fell victim to local political log’ rolling. His statue of Benjamin Franklir (see cut), done for the Post Office Building in Washington, D.C., was installed only after the late F.D.R. personally over ruled the Federal Fine Arts Commission.

Of his latest rejection Zorach says: “] don’t think their motives were political They say they weren’t. But they just don’i understand. They think they can order ar artist to do a piece of sculpture, to pui his whole life, and guts, and soul into i piece of work, and then discard it like i piece of furniture.” Zorach still hopes thai the bank, which has already paid oui $110,000 on the commission, will recon sider. Says L. R. Bryan Jr., vice chairman of Southwest’s board: “The bank look; mighty pretty just plain.”

-The U.S. Information Agency, which had planned to send the show to the Olympic Games, last month changed its mind, decided to settle for an exhibition of 28 color photographs that it had already sent to Australia.