House museums #54: sculptor Chaim Gross

On a leafy street in Greenwich Village, the former home of the sculptor Chaim Gross sits peacefully among buildings that are now owned by New York University or rented by consultants and bankers. When he and his wife Renee bought the century-old hat factory in 1963, the neighbourhood was still cheap, full of artists and vibrantly alternative.

They turned it into a studio and home, with a rental apartment on one floor to help support the family. Gross designed the ground-floor studio, its huge skylight immersing the space in light. It remains as he left it, full of tools and crowded with sculptures. The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation, created in 1989, welcomes visitors into both the studio and the residence.

Gross worked primarily in wood, but also in stone and bronze, often sculpting totemic figures of women. His name is hardly known outside New York, despite his work’s beauty and success: he participated in exhibitions at the Whitney, Metropolitan Museum, Jewish Museum, Smithsonian and many more.

It’s never easy to understand why some artists join the canon and others don’t, not least in the case of this introspective, kind man who was barely able to make ends meet for most of his career, but never wavered from his commitment to art.

Gross was born in 1902 in a village in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in what is now Ukraine. His family was displaced by Russian invaders during the first world war, and eventually moved to Hungary, where Gross began studying art. They were forced out of Hungary during the White Terror of pogroms against Jews and other foreigners and spent a few months in Vienna before Gross permanently relocated to New York City in 1921. He was so poor when he arrived that his friends recalled him eating the fruit from still life scenes in his art classes.

He joined a community of immigrants from eastern Europe, many of them also Jewish, such as Mark Rothko, Ben Shahn and Louise Nevelson. His vast art collection, on display much as Gross left it in the charming living quarters, includes works by Chagall, Picasso, Max Weber, Paul Klee and Toulouse-Lautrec among others, as well as many West African and pre-Columbian objects.

Those by Chagall, whose life and art embody the forced transience of European Jews in the 20th century, are especially poignant. You really get a sense of Gross’s taste as you move through the warm, overflowing rooms of his home.

In his book The Technique of Wood Sculpture, first published in 1957, Gross emphasised the sense of touch as integral to a full understanding of sculpture. “We have worked with this philosophy in many ways,” says Sasha Davis, the foundation’s executive director. Visitors are always encouraged to touch the unfinished work in Gross’s studio and the museum has hosted exhibitions and programmes that encourage this among a wider range of works in the collection.

“It is really enlightening to see how people react to the invitation to touch,” Davis says. “Some are reticent, even fearful, whereas others act as though they have been longing to touch a piece.”

I fell into the latter camp. I had to pull myself away and restrain the desire to touch everything in sight.

rcgrossfoundation.org

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