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Stella Waitzkin
American, 1920 - 2003
by Charles Russell
All visual works of art are silent. But Stella Waitzkin=s closed, impenetrable books impose a heavy silence upon us. Humanity=s cumulative knowledgeBour ceaseless effort to make sense of existence through our wordsBseems trapped within her sumptuous, emotional libraries. But perhaps it=s merely suspended, a latent wisdom speaking to us in another voiceBthe voice of art.
Waitzkin began as an abstract expressionist. She studied painting with Hans Hofmann and life drawing with Willem de Kooning. In the 1960s and early 1970s, she expanded beyond painting to work first in sculpture, then performance art and film. Her early sculptures were made out of melted glass, but soon she discovered her signature medium, polyester resin.
After the sixties, her primary subject was the book. She cast old, leather-bound books as single objects and as elements of larger installations, including free-standing shelves, small book cases, or entire Alibrary@ walls. These constructions are composed almost entirely of cast resin tomes yet, on occasion, she included actual books. Often, she inserted other cast objects within her libraries: clocks, birds, fruit, human faces.
These are beautiful art works, colorful, translucent, luminous. The artist would suspend color within the resin and was especially sensitive to the visual play of hue, light, and shadow within each sculpture and installation. In them, we realize that Waitzkin never strayed far from her origins as an expressionist painter. Indeed, throughout her life she continued to paint, creating intensely expressive works on paper that extended the themes and imagery of her sculpture.
Stella Waitzkin=s sculpted libraries and individual books are powerful art works, both spiritually and emotionally affecting. There is an over-arching aura of mystery about them; yet they assert an intense physicality. Her use of leather-bound books for her molds calls up a distant past; her cast faces resemble cameos of another era. But we feel most immediately the embodied passion of the artist=s life, her deep understanding of human longing and loss, of personal desire and achievement.
Stella Waitzkin exhibited widely in Europe and America and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her works are in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, The Jewish Museum, the Everson Museum, and The Newark Museum, as well as the collections of Phillip Morris, Becton Dickinson, Dow Jones, and J.P. Morgan Chase.
Charles Russell is a Trustee of the Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust and a Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Rutgers University, Newark.
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A reclusive artist, Stella Waitzkin lived and worked for 35 years from a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea from where she cast sculptures in her living room with toxic resins. Through an agreement with the landlord, the apartment is now the Waitzkin Memorial Library Trust and houses her collection from which her work is dispersed by trustees to museums and other collectors.
She began her work as an abstract expressionist painter as a student of Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning, but by the 1960s had turned to melted sheets of glass resembling the pages of books. Shortly after she began what became her signature work---polyester-resin sculptures.
Source:
"Reviews", Art in America, April 2006
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