Max Kalish

Max Kalish (1891-1945) was born in Poland in 1891, and his family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old. Settling in Ohio, Kalish showed remarkable early promise as an artist during his public school years and left school at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Cleveland School of Art, now the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he was awarded the first prize for life modeling. After graduating from the Institute, Kalish moved to New York City, where he spent two years studying under some of the most respected sculptors of the day, including Isidore Konti and Herbert Adams. With the financial and fundraising help of his brother Abe, Kalish moved his studies to Paris in 1912. There he enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, a school favored by many American artists, and studied under Paul Bartlett. The following year he entered the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, and that same year two of his portrait busts were accepted at the Paris Salon.

Returning to the United States, Kalish assisted Isidore Konti with the plasters for the Column of Progress at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition. With the money he earned from this project he repaid the loans for his Paris studies and returned to Cleveland, where he received commissions for portraits of the mayor and two United States senators. In 1916 he joined the army and sculpted a series of one-third life-size figures of soldiers that were eventually cast in bronze. Kalish returned to Paris in 1920, and for the remainder of his life he would spend six months of every year in the French capital.

While in Paris, Kalish became fascinated with the subject of laborers, and in 1921 he modeled the first of the sculptures for which he would eventually become famous. The model for this piece, The Stoker, was a worker in a Cleveland blast furnace. During Kalish's stay in Paris the following year, he saw the work of the Belgian artist Constantin Meunier (1831-1905), who had modeled European laborers decades earlier, and Kalish resolved to continue the tradition through his own portrayal of American workers. In 1925 he won first prize at the Cleveland Artists and Craftsmen exhibition for four of his works, three of which were laborers, and the Cleveland Museum of Art purchased one of these pieces, a marble torso of a nude. His career took off from this moment, and he produced many bronzes of laborers in the following years. In 1928 he received a commission for a monument of Abraham Lincoln for the City of Cleveland, and in 1932 he moved his studio from Cleveland to New York in search of greater exposure and access to commissions. He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1934 and was later inducted into the National Sculpture Society.

Kalish continued to model and cast bronzes of laborers throughout his career, and when the Second World War broke out he was commissioned to model and cast forty-eight one-third life-size figures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his entire cabinet, and several prominent figures involved with the war effort for the Museum of American History. The schedule for this monumental undertaking was grueling, and just as he was completing the project Kalish was diagnosed with incurable cancer. Although very ill, he continued to oversee the casting of this final work and lived to see its completion. Max Kalish died in New York City on March 18, 1945, at the age of fifty-four.