Arts and Letters

In honor of José de Creeft's ninety-fifth birthday, my wife and I had a party for him at our house. There were perhaps one hundred fifty people present, milling about and crowding around the guest of honor, and I remember vividly how José stood for over three hours, talking, telling anecdotes in his lively way, to the ever-changing groups that surrounded him during the evening. Finally Renee went over to him and suggested that he sit down. "No," he answered her firmly, "no," he repeated, ''you sit down!" He treated his body as he did the hard obdurate stone that he transformed into works of art—it had to obey his will.

It was de Creeft's will that is one of the constants of his art. He worked in many materials—a wide variety of stone, ivory, plaster, clay, bronze, and even, many years before it became a fad, "junk." And yet, from the time he found his own way, in the early 1920s—the way of direct carving—de Creeft's will permeates his forms, no matter what they are made of. Control of his material seems to have been an exercise in self-control; it was through discipline that he arrived at freedom.

But not discipline alone. The other coordinate of de Creeft's world of forms in space was love of his material. The feeling of the sculptor for the stone or metal in his hands was empathy, which can arise only from the springing forth of love. There was no mistaking de Creeft's love for his material in the way he spoke of it. He could not have sounded more tender, more understanding, more passionate speaking of a woman he loved. His emotional and sensual awareness of materials was his bridge to life itself; his perception of significance, his priorities, his aspirations were mediated by his consciousness of nature as the condition shared by inert matter and his own person.

His person was, in fact, quite remarkable. When I first met him in the early 1930s, a few years after his arrival in the United States, he was a lean man in his forties with a keen-eyed, attentive look, already an accomplished sculptor. I remember thinking how much this Spaniard looked like an El Greco come to life. The form of his head was a long, narrow ellipse, and he had a high, prominent forehead and a rather large, bony nose. Later, when he grew a beard, his resemblance to one of the grandees in El Greco's “Burial of Count Orgaz” was extraordinary. He was not a large man, slim, in fact, but his shoulders and upper arms were well developed, with long, powerful-looking biceps.

As I think back to conversations I had with José, I realize now that there was something of the comic in them, for this reason: José spoke English with a strong Spanish accent; I speak English with a strong Yiddish accent. I remember one occasion in particular when he happened to come by my studio on 41 Grand Street. He stopped to say hello, and I asked him to come inside—I had the impulse to make a drawing of him. As I worked, we talked, of course. I don't think he always knew what I was saying, and I know that I didn't catch everything he said, but it didn't really matter. We really understood each other. We were both accustomed to read and interpret forms in nature, and the forms of our body language complemented our spoken words. It probably helped, too, that we shared many ideas about art in general, and about sculpture in particular. I think it's a little as if I said that he spoke in stone and I spoke in wood—our language differed but our expression of our thoughts was mutually harmonious, and we communicated with each other with satisfaction and pleasure.

The power of making his meaning clear, regardless of his Spanish accent, was evident in his teaching. I recall one day at the Art Students League, when I was passing by the classroom where José was teaching. The door was open, and I stopped for a moment, professionally curious, of course, to hear how a colleague handled his students. He was telling them about some events in his own life, not, at that moment, demonstrating technique, or teaching them how to approach a specific problem. I could see, looking through the doorway, how rapt the students were, how attentively they were listening—but not with puzzlement. They followed him, and it was clear that they were learning something about an artist's life and thought that was as important as learning the skills of the métier. This method of teaching was something else that we shared.

In making this tribute, however, I do not want to confine myself to personal reminiscences. José de Creeft was too great an artist to be remembered only in personal terms. He was in every sense a public figure. His work belongs to the public, especially to the people of his adopted country, and it is represented in many of the greatest art institutions in the United States: The Metropolitan Museum has his granite “Maternity” (1918), for which he won First Prize in Sculpture at the Metropolitan's Artists for Victory exhibition in 1942. (Here, too, our careers touched, for I was awarded Second Prize in Sculpture in the same exhibition.) The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts possesses his “Rachmaninoff” (1943), hammered in beaten lead, for which he was awarded the George D. Widener Memorial Gold Medal in 1945. His work has also been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others, including university art galleries, where they will have a direct impact on young students.

Public commissions came to de Creeft very early in his career, the first in 1918, when he executed “Le Poilu” for a war memorial in Saugues, France. But the public commission that will assure him endearing and enduring fame above all is his joyous, tender triumph, “Alice in Wonderland” (1959), in New York's Central Park. One wishes Lewis Carroll could have seen this greatest embodiment of his immortal work, his fantasy given a material form that is rooted in nature without being tamed.

It was with the materials of nature that José de Creeft lived for almost a century; it was through nature's matter, animated by thought and passion, that he realized himself as an artist. He enriched his century of life with the forms with which he patiently, with masterly craftsmanship and profound aesthetic authenticity, endowed the permanent materials of his art. And it is through matter, transformed by art, that he will continue to live through the centuries to come.