In December 2010 the Foundation hosted an amazing poetry reading, ‘Art, Fantasy, and Experience’ in conjunction with an exhibit of Chaim Gross’s post-war fantasy drawings. The reading featured poets Elaine Equi, Nada Gordon, Rod Smith, and Charles Bernstein. PennSound has the recording of their readings on its site for those who missed this great event.

Born in Sibera, Russia to a Jewish family, Walkowitz emigrated to New York as a child, like Chaim. He went to Paris in 1906 to study at the Academie Julian and first exhibited in 1911 at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery; he stayed with the gallery until 1917. Chaim owned watercolors by Walkowitz from this early period, such as this soft watercolor of four women in a street from 1909:

And here’s another watercolor from the same time, of a gritty city punctuated by two red flowers, in a woman’s hand and on another’s hat:

Here’s one of Orchard Street which is in Manhattan’s Lower East Side:

And a later work, from 1917, a great close-up of three women and one man:

It’s interesting that the faces of the figures disappear when Walkowitz turned his attention to the fishermen at work in Rockport, Maine, in this watercolor from 1932:

Rather than studying their expressions, Walkowitz studies the relationships of the bodies and their movement to and fro. Bodies in motion is the subject of Walkowitz’s great painting, Circus, which Chaim hung for many years in his living room:

All of the works here are available for viewing and study at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation.

Here’s the opening wall text written by our guest curator, Kristen Windmuller:

For almost three centuries, the Asante of Ghana weighed gold dust with the aid of elaborate weights—mrammuo—cast in the shapes of humans, animals and objects. Talented Asante goldsmiths are estimated to have cast some three million of these brass weights, whose functional forms also represented proverbs.

Beginning around 1946, Chaim Gross bought his first goldweights, sparking a lifelong passion. His collection started with just nineteen weights, and as the years progressed, grew into the thousands. To look into his cabinets and drawers of weights is to be captivated by a blur of brass, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. Each weight demands a closer look, and slowly, individual forms take shape; a bird drinking from a basin, a mother cradling her child, an inept hunter reversing roles with his prey. Just inches high, every expertly sculpted weight is a piece of life in miniature, reflecting the people and culture from where it came.

Gross also collected a variety of carved wood objects from Ghana that are featured in the exhibition, including a splendid game board and elegant polychrome bird whose forms were also cast as goldweights. Together, these objects—both large and small—reflect the artistic sensibilities and cultural values of the Asante and their neighbors.

by Alex Kelly, Oberlin College ’13

For an Art History major at a liberal arts college, graduation day approaches like a threatening deadline – representing the moment we must cast aside the comfort of textbooks and research papers and enter “The Real World.” It is in this the moment we must confront the question that we have been avoiding since declaring our major: “what are you going to do with that?” Can one write papers for a living? For many of us, that’s our most marketable skill.

Fortunately, Oberlin College gives its students the opportunity to dip their toes into The Real World each January for a Winter Term. We have one month to get an internship, take a class, or undertake a project of our choice. This January, I applied for a curatorial internship at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. An artist’s foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the work of a single artist. This type of organization is a fairly recent phenomenon, and most artist’s foundations are committed to contemporary artists. For example, The Calder Foundation, The Willem de Kooning Foundation and the Judd Foundation are all artists’ foundations based in New York City. Artist’s foundations are not necessarily museum spaces, and no two organizations operate in exactly the same way.

The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation is singular in that it operates out of the former home and studio space of Chaim Gross, and maintains not only a permanent collection of Gross’s work, but also his outstanding personal collection of African, Oceanic, Pre-Columbian, European and American art. The townhouse in which the Foundation is located is at once a library, an office and a gallery space. Working at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation means that not only do you work with art objects, but you live with them. Each morning I would walk past a gallery dedicated to the sculptures of Chaim Gross, eat lunch with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec drawings while being watched by rows of African masks, and typing under the eyes of a Fernand Léger.

Working at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation for a month provided me with the opportunity to develop an understanding of how an Arts not-for-profit organization operates, while learning and developing skills that an Art History major can apply to working in The Real World. I greatly appreciate that the Foundation is a small organization with big ideas. As an intern I was able to wear a variety of hats, so to speak; I met each employee and learned about their current project. The Foundation is currently undergoing the enormous task of compiling a catalogue raisonné of Chaim’s work. At the same time, they maintain a permanent exhibition of Chaim’s sculptures on the first floor of the town house, and are installing a second show featuring Chaim’s Asante goldweights from his collection of African art.

Working with the Foundation’s coming exhibition, Life in Miniature: Asante Goldweights and Sculpture, curated by Kristen Windmuller, a PhD student in African Art at Princeton University, was an amazing opportunity to observe the behind-the-scenes of an art exhibition. It was fascinating to watch Ms. Windmuller collaborate with the staff of the Foundation in order to actualize her concept. By observing and participating in this process I was able to appreciate the value of The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation as an alternative to a museum space for the exhibition and display of art objects. Collaboration and innovation are required when working with a limited display space and a seemingly limitless collection of objects. Ms. Windmuller and The Foundation’s staff creatively utilized the Foundation’s resources in order to include a variety of media as well as interactive materials, resulting in an exhibition that is both educational and aesthetic.

My internship at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation has been a unique and invaluable experience. It has shown me that working in an artist’s foundation is a dynamic way to apply my Art History degree. Also, because of the new and intriguing challenges presented by this emerging type of Arts organization, working for an artist’s foundation would require a constant expansion of my arts education. I am grateful to The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation for providing me with an enjoyable and informative encounter with The Real World.

The Foundation’s next special exhibit, Life in Miniature: Asante Goldweights and Sculpture, will feature around 70 works from Chaim Gross’s renowned African art collection. It will also include travel sketchbooks and photographs from Chaim’s trip to Ghana in 1968 and works by him related to African art. Read the press release here: Asante Press Release

Happy Holidays from all of us at the Foundation!

The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi in France, and later Henry Moore in England, played key roles in inspiring these American sculptors. Chaim Gross, for example, was a great admirer of Henry Moore. He was inspired by Moore’s sculpture of the 1930s, as suggested by notes in a sketchbook in the Foundation’s archives, dating from 1934-35. It contains Gross’s handwritten notes from Herbert Read’s 1934 book, Henry Moore:

Gross’s notes read:

Sculpture is certainly most difficult of al [sic] the art [sic] – most difficult of all arts to master, most difficult to appreciate. Some of the difficulties are incidental: the materials need [?] and patience to handle; and when this work is finished there is no predestined place for it

Gross emulated Moore’s smooth, organic forms in some of his own wood carvings, particularly those in ebony. His 1935 ebony Black Figure at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation, and especially, his 1944 Vanity, also in ebony and at the Hirshhorn Museum, reveal him thinking about Moore. As Smithsonian curator George Gurney notes about Vanity in his text for the 1996 online Smithsonian exhibit, Chaim Gross: A Celebration:

This is one of several similar figures carved over a ten-year period in the 1930s and 1940s. These works are executed in polished dark woods without tool marks to highlight various features. The simplified organic forms suggest the influence of the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986).

Gross didn’t meet Moore, however, until the 1950s. The two became friendly during Gross’s trips to London in 1951, 1957 and 1958 when Gross also worked with the British sculptor Jacob Epstein. (Moore came to the United States for the first time in 1946, on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, though there’s nothing in the archive to suggest the two met then).

It was probably during these visits that Gross also collected works on paper by Moore. These five drawings and watercolors owned by Gross are now on view at The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation. They include Moore’s 1940 pencil and wash drawing of sculpture studies:

and this striking 1948 watercolor, pen and ink drawing of reclining figures:

Gross expressed his admiration for Moore in his Homage to Henry Moore, which he donated to the Hirshhorn Museum in 1974. The sculpture was made in 1944, when Moore’s influence on Gross seems to have been at its strongest.

Susan Fisher

Chaim Gross reading J.V. Lombardo's catalogue raisonne, Chaim Gross, published 1949

One of the most fascinating aspects of working at an artist-endowed foundation is facilitating and helping to shape the ongoing construction and reevaluation of an artist’s biography and oeuvre. Each new generation of scholars and curators sees artists, their work, and their relationship to the broader social history of the period differently. Each uses the primary source material in a new way, bringing their own critical framework to it.

A key element in the construction of art history is the archive. The increased attention to and allure of the archive was stressed last week during New York Archives Week, coordinated by the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York. Among the many activities was a two-day panel about Artists’ Records in the Archive, with archivists from New York City museums, artist’s foundations, universities, and the Archives of American Art. The speakers talked about relationships between artists’ records and art history, processing, collaboration, and especially, digitization.

Also last week was a fascinating, related symposium “Artists’ Archives.” It was organized by the Dedalus Foundation for the Council of Artists Foundations. The speakers were all phenomenal: Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art; Liza Kirwin, Curator from the Archives of American Art; Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Founding Director of the Harvard Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art and founder of the Artists Documentation Program; Christine Vincent, author of the seminal recent report on the growing field of artist endowed foundations in America; MoMA archivist Michelle Elligott, and Carolyn Somers from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. There were so many important points made by these fascinating and passionate speakers, but the main takeaway was the importance of saving everything, since each new generation values certain archival documents over others. Another key point was accessibility. It is a Foundation’s obligation as a charitable entity to make their archive as open as possible to all scholars.

During his lifetime, Chaim Gross worked with the Archives of American Art to create the Chaim Gross Papers. The materials are chiefly correspondence (to artists, curators, dealers, government officials regarding WPA commissions, and others); postcards; hand-drawn records by Gross of each of his sculptures; sketchbooks from his entire career; and photographs of Gross, his family, and art-related events. The materials date from 1920 to 1983. At the AAA, all the documents are on microfilm, and the correspondence and postcards can be viewed in the original. The sculpture records, sketchbooks, and photographs can be viewed in the original at the Chaim Gross Foundation in New York City on Tuesdays through Fridays 10-4 by making an appointment. At the AAA, there are also three oral history interviews: two by the AAA from 1964 and 1981, and another from 1981 by renowned writer and historian Avis Berman.

[A side note: though the Gross papers are on microfilm, the AAA has undertaken a huge digitization project of their materials. Their website details the Terra Foundation Digitization Project, begun in 2005, along with a close look the procedures for digitization. It's a great resource for other organizations, including us at the Gross Foundation, embarking on digitization projects.]

A second, less extensive source for archival material related to Chaim Gross are the Chaim Gross Papers at Syracuse University, which cover 1936-64 but are primarily related to his career during the 1960s.

Susan Fisher