Chaim Gross at Oregon Jewish Museum

Lorraine Widman shares perspectives on the artist she once met

By Anne Koppel Conway

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Amidst Chaim Gross’ paintings and sculptures at the Oregon Jewish Museum, Lorraine Widman—artist, teacher, author—spoke about 20th-century Jewish avant-garde sculptors, whom she called modern art pioneers. The Gross exhibit runs through May 25.

Sculpting was “a dead art” until Rodin hit the scene in the 19th century, she said. In the 1940s, some critics tried to “pigeon-hole” Jewish artists.

Widman quoted English art critic Herbert Reed, who called Jews “a nomadic, desert race,” whose expressionistic, emotional art was “consistent with their origins.”

Since Jewish artists’ styles run the gamut, Widman sees Lithuanian-born Jewish-American Social Realist painter and photographer Ben Shahn’s view as more apt: there are Jewish artists, Jewish themes in art, but no Jewish art.

The Jewish-European artists who populated Greenwich Village during World War II inspired Widman and other New York art students at that time, she said.

Those fleeing from the Holocaust included Alexander Archipenko, Ossip Zadkine and Anton Pevsner.

Some Jewish artists were openly Jewish; while others like Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, “hid their Jewishness.”

Widman liberally sprinkled her April 6 talk with vignettes about various artists. Sculptor Gabriel Kohn borrowed her sculpture tools and “never gave them back.” She also personally knew Betty Feves and Mary Frank.

Lithuanian-born Jacques Lipchitz had a “huge fire” in his New York studio in 1952 where many of his works, including bronze models, were destroyed. His work was “the epitome of the 20th-century cubism.”

Max Ernst, a Dada founder, had been arrested by the Gestapo in Europe during World War II, but with Peggy Guggenheim’s intercession was able to escape with her to the United States. They were married in 1942 but “were divorced that same year,” Widman said.

Leonard Baskin’s work “took on a grim reality” after the Holocaust.

German born Eva Hesse experimented with latex, fiberglass and plastics. In 1970, at age 34, she died of a brain tumor.

Sir Jacob Epstein was born in the slums of New York in 1880 and moved to London in 1905 to become a “huge force” in the art world. But that world was not yet ready for his early abstract works, so he turned to portrait sculptures. His subjects included George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and Albert Einstein.

Ironically, the art world started embracing abstract art at that point and Epstein’s portrait work was called, “old school.” In 1954 he was knighted.

Chaim Gross was part of the Greenwich Village art crowd but “not well known” then. Today he is considered to be one of the greatest 20th-century figurative sculptors and helped define modernist sculpture between the two world wars.

In the late 1940s, Widman, age 14, met Gross, who lived from 1904 to 1991, when he dropped into her Music and Arts High School sculpting class in Harlem.

He was born in Kolomyia in what was then an Austro-Hungarian village and immigrated to the United States in 1921.

As a sculptor, Gross was a practitioner of the direct carving method—he took a block of wood and started carving, she said.

“His acrobatic pieces are wonderful,” she said. “Whimsical and easily accessible,” his carvings have a “folk-art influence.”

Widman’s book, “Sculpture: A Studio Guide to Concepts, Methods, and Materials,” which “took 10 years to write” was published in 1989. It is now out of print.

Based on this book, she produced a 20-program television series for Oregon Public Broadcasting in the early 1970s.

She received her master’s of fine arts in sculpture at the University of Oregon and has taught art at Portland State, at Clackamas Community College, for a University of Oregon extension course in Salem and for the Portland Public School District. Her sculpted bronze menorahs grace the Robison Jewish Health Center sanctuary.

OJM’s next exhibit, Margles said, will be Paul Goldman’s photographs of the birth of Israel. The exact June start date will be announced.

Joking, Margles said she would be delighted if someone wants to purchase Mark Rothko’s 1956 painting, “Orange, Red, Yellow” for the OJM. It is being auctioned off at Sotheby’s in New York on May 14. Last year one of his paintings sold for $14.3 million.

Chaim Gross: Modernist Drawings runs through May 25. Admission is free for members and $3 for nonmembers. The Museum is located at 310 NW Davis St. For hours or more information, call 503-226-3600.