Good Humor in Bronze

For an age that seems to feel normal only when anxious, there is something a bit disturbing about all the wholesome good humor. The new bronze figures by Sculptor Chaim Gross at Manhattan's Forum Gallery appear to be having the time of their lives: mothers and children dance and embrace; acrobats tumble gaily over each other; jugglers fling their rings dexterously into the air. It takes a moment to shed the superstition that to be light-hearted is automatically to be lightweight.

Gross's youth was none too lighthearted: a series of nights during World War I from his native Austria to Budapest and finally to the U.S. in 1921, when he was 17. At one time he was a bus boy in Atlantic City; at another, he and his close friend, Painter Raphael Soyer, enrolled in a class to learn machine embroidery. When Gross got married, friends had to help out. "Someone bought me a ring; someone else provided the wedding supper, and a third bought the marriage license." All the while he studied art, but before 1935, the year he won a $3,000 commission from the Treasury Department, Gross sold only an occasional statue for $10 and a few watercolors for $1 apiece.

Gradually collectors began to hear of his highly polished, carved and chiseled figures that adapted their own outlines to the sweep of the grain of stone or wood.

For years Gross lived near a number of lumberyards, but when the yards began to make way for new housing projects, he found good wood hard to come by. Today he works in plaster, which is later cast in bronze. Where before his figures took life from their materials, they now get it directly from the modeler's fingers.

The stone and wood statues were full-bodied; the bronze figures are slimmed down to bone and sinew. The surfaces are rough, and the resultant ripple adds to the sense of movement. There is nothing slavishly naturalistic about Gross; he distorts freely for the sake of balance and design. "I used to say that if they tried, not one of my little circus girls could get up and walk away--people aren't built that way. But if you get away from straight naturalistic forms, it sometimes makes things more interesting." Gross is refreshingly unafraid of repeating himself: "I love doing these acrobats. I'd like to make thousands--they can do so much." And his appeal rests not so much on any special approach to art as on his approach to life. Every figure he produces seems to be in love with something--either the figure next to it, or with whatever it happens to be doing.

"The children and the acrobats--that's me," says Gross. "I admire others like Lipchitz and Moore, but I've never tried to be like them. I am what I am. I'm me and I'm happy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.