Max Kalish (born Kalashick; March 1, 1891 – March 18, 1945) was a Belarusian-American sculptor in Cleveland, Ohio, best known for his sculptures of laborers.
Early life
Kalish was born in Wolozyn, Russian Empire (now Valozhyn, Belarus), to Yoel Kalashick (also spelt Kolasik or Kalatzik) and Anna Levinson.Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774–1993
His Orthodox Jewish family emigrated from the Russian Empire to Cleveland in 1898, when he was 7 years old. His father worked as a cigar maker.1900 United States census, 1910 United States census; He had three brothers, Abram, Arthur, and Jacob (Jack). He began to show artistic talent as a boy and won a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art.
Career Kalish studied with Herman Matzen at the Cleveland School of Art; in New York City with Herbert Adams at the National Academy of Design, and in the studios of Alexander Stirling Calder and Isidore Konti; and in Paris with Paul Wayland Bartlett at the Académie Colorossi, and Jean Antoine Injalbert at the École des Beaux-Arts.Opitz, Glenn B, editor, Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers, Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986McGlauflin, Alice Coe, editor, Who’s Who in American Art 1938-1939, vol. 2, The American Federation of Arts, Washington D.C., 1937
He enlisted in the Army in 1917 after the U.S. joined the war. He was stationed at the medical hospital at Camp Cape May, New Jersey, where his artistic ability and knowledge of anatomy proved useful for the developing field of plastic surgery for wounded soldiers.
A travelling exhibition of his work, titled "Glorification of the U.S. Workingman", stopped in Detroit in January 1927.
Washington, D.C. publisher Willard M. Kiplinger commissioned Kalish to create fifty portrait statuettes of prominent figures in World War II era politics, arts and sciences. Kiplinger donated the statuettes to the Smithsonian Institution in 1944.Walter Lippmann, from Smithsonian Institution.
Kalish was the author of Labor Sculpture, largely a collection of photographs of these statues of workers. Most of those statutes were in a Social realism style. Critic Emily Genauer wrote in 1938, "It is the workmen who dominate the American scene, and who have become as surely symbolic of their time as the pioneers in covered wagons, and the robber barons and the great merchant princes were in their respective eras." This was what Kalish portrayed in his art.Kalish, Max, Labor Sculpture, Introduction by Emily Genauer, New York, 1938.
Personal life
Kalish married Alice Neuman in 1927. They had two sons, Richard and James. They lived in Paris until World War II.
He died in 1945 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.
Works Examples of Kalish's work can be found in: Baby’s Head, Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery, Canajoharie, New York Old Man Resting, Massillon Museum, Massillon, Ohio Portrait of a Boy, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina Gold Prospector, Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio Head of Louis Kronberg, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Torso, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland Laborer at Rest, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey Torso (1925), Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio Woodcutter (c1926) The Steelworker (c1926) The Discard (c1926) Spirit of American Labor (c1927) New Power The End of Day (1930), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln (1927–32), Board of Education, Cleveland, Ohio Man of Steel (before 1933), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
References
Further reading
Labor Sculpture by Max Kalish, A. N. A. Emily Genauer, editor. New York: Cornet Press, 1938. The Sculpture of Max Kalish. Noel Lawson Lewis, author. Cleveland: Fine Arts Pub. Co., 1933.