Word: baizerman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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. 5½ 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...
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...
...Whitney Museum displayed sculptures, watercolors and drawings by 172 contemporary U.S. artists. As always with selections of such scope, a good bit was bad. But Burr Miller's marble Chrysalis showed how a sensitive chisel can tease stone to life, and Saul Baizerman's Eve proved that it is also possible to hammer life into a sheet of copper. The water-colors ranged from the sweet, wet realism of Californian John Langley Howard's Coast Line to New Yorker Hans Hofmann's wholly abstract and strikingly handsome Composition...