Man with a Hammer

For the past 30 years, the neighbors have always known when Saul Baizerman was at work. To fashion his copper sculpture, he hangs huge sheets of shining copper from the ceiling of his Greenwich Village apartment, flails away at them with a hammer until the ringing metal bends and twists, forms dimpled bas-reliefs of prancing nudes, cherubic children, and heroic figures from mythology.

It is not the kind of sculpture calculated to make an artist rich. His massive, impressionistic panels, with their looping curves and intricate designs, are too overpowering for most people. But Artist Baizerman, a wispy little (5 ft. 5 1/2 in., 134 Ibs.) feather of a man, has never worried about financial rewards. The Russian-born son of a harness maker, he started out as a middling good classical sculptor, tired of it in 1920 just after he won the sculpture competition for a monument in front of Grant's Tomb. "I felt it belonged to a world of the past," he says. "It had been done better than I could do it, and to continue would be a false thing." Baizerman rejected the commission, began experimenting with lithe, modern figures in bronze and copper, and has been at it ever since.

Each copper sheet takes years to shape, with expert, glancing blows just hard enough to dent but not puncture the thin metal. The critics were impressed with his work from the start, but shows were scarce, and Baizerman scrabbled a living as a part-time teacher and mechanic, somehow managed to save enough to buy copper for his work.

Last week, after 30 years of trying, Sculptor Baizerman, now 63, was having a little well-deserved success. In Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center devoted six rooms to Baizerman's biggest exhibit ever: 35 hammered pieces, from his muscular Unknown Soldier to a tender Suckling child and a long panel of intertwined nudes. In five weeks the gallery counted 5,000 visitors. Three of Baizerman's copper bas-reliefs were sold, and the Art Center has already made plans to send the show on to museums in Des Moines, San Francisco and Ottawa. Saul Baizerman was on hand for the opening, then scurried back to Manhattan to make Greenwich Village ring anew with his hammer. He now has a Guggenheim fellowship to continue his work, and "enough ideas to last for 20 years." The nicest thing of all was the way gallerygoers came up to him in Minneapolis to say how much they liked his work. "Imagine you had children," says Baizerman. "And imagine you married them well, and then went out to visit them. Well, that's the way I feel."

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