A Family Show at Orphan Gallery
Written By: Miriam Dungan Cross
Because we knew Franz Sandow when he was a Berkeley boy called “Elliot," we attended the preview of the exhibit of his abstract figure sculpture and the various arts of his internationally recognized Israeli wife, Zahara Schatz, at the Orphan Gallery, 5809 College.
In the crowd we managed to talk to both artists and learn something of their motivations, to meet Director Wendell Lipscomb and his wife, Ellen, and to determine we’ve been missing some extremely inventive, exciting work.
This is the first duo-show for these Berkeley artist - teachers. Separately they have exhibited widely.
Zahara Schatz has exhibited in one-man and group shows in the Bay Area as well as New York, Europe (including the Venice Biannale) and, of course, Israel where she was bom in Jerusalem into Israel’s first family of art. Her father, Boris, founder of the Bezalel Museum and School, is regarded as the father of Israeli art. Her mother, Olga, is an art critic. Her brother, Bezalel, a painter. Zahara has won important prizes and executed commissions.
Franz also has won prizes (S.F. Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, etc.), was represented among many exhibits in the U.S. State Department International Traveling Show, and has done many architectural commissions.
Zahara, as versatile as she is talented, is featuring her new laminated plastic “see - through pictures.” Orchestrations of plane, pattern, texture and light, these compositions inter-relate and dispose in space geometric and free forms of colored glass, copper screening, steel mesh and foils.
These vital, light - reflecting and filtering explorations of space, on a larger scale, might well place her in the top vanguard of American art. Bits and pieces of these works are elegant extensions of Picasso's and Braque’s waste basket trash for collages and her own boxes of discard from which her young pupils draw their creative expressions.
In the figurative abstract collage “Eclipse” she combines poesy and science imaginatively to portray optical distortions and progress of the shadow on the sun. Her delicate, exquisitely fabricated mobile (silver?), suspended from a stabile like a jewelry setting embracing a stone, takes the breath away and only a breath to set its slivered parts in motion.
Suspended in the window at different levels are flat stained glass hands and feet in the Byzantine manner (Zahara has been called “a Byzantine in Paris” where she studied). Nails are translucent. The rest in rich hues of cathedral windows is made of crystals reflecting, shattering and filtering the light. Centered in each of these beguiling luminous works is a glowing eye. Thereby hangs a tale. Dramatic, black-eyed Zahara explained that when Franz was very ill, she created the hands to exorcize the sickness. They didn’t work, so she made the feet to “kick” it out which they promptly did.
Shown with these are symbolically related candlesticks (examples of the decorative objects which also have brought Zahara to world attention) made of glass - adorned old bottles and children’s baseball bats, perhaps, stuck with glass - studded nails like a witch doctor’s pin-pricked doll.
Franz’ dynamic, emotionally conceived figures in magnesite define and occupy space, more void than volume. In almost continuous movement, linear rhythms outline figures and create the equally important space within.
Both single and group figures are further opened, as in Henry Moore sculpture, with holes where nature puts protuberances. They rest on points or the very outside of curves and, like Zahara’s mobiles, all but defy gravity.
Symbolic themes, Franz said, are sex and protest — the one exemplified in the devouring kiss of “Dark Cry,” with its “Guernica” imagery, and the more complex “Night Song” reproduced here.
“Protest” is most obviously represented in the single figure “J’Accuse” with its offensive attitude of the boxer conceived in the lyrical rhythms of all his sculpture. Lyricism perhaps is not the best vehicle for social reform. Anyway, it's not clear whom is being accused or for what.
Sandow was born in Hawaii and came to Berkeley at an early age. His father was a doctor and his mother a member of the old Berkeley Elston family. In pointing out the protest motivation of his sculpture, he volunteered that as a young rebel he joined the Communist Party. “It broke my mother’s heart,” he said.
While it's never possible to explore fully art works amid the chit-chat of a preview, we wouldn’t have missed this one - an international, interracial party. Former Communist Franz Sandow brought back from the dead. Israeli Zahara Schatz, the Byzantine in Berkeley. Negro Director Wendell Lipscomb and his Caucasian wife. On top of that - our square Republican husband!
The exhibit is open daily except Monday, 1 to 6 p.m., to April 29.
A Family Show at Orphan Gallery
Written By: Miriam Dungan Cross
Because we knew Franz Sandow when he was a Berkeley boy called “Elliot," we attended the preview of the exhibit of his abstract figure sculpture and the various arts of his internationally recognized Israeli wife, Zahara Schatz, at the Orphan Gallery, 5809 College.
In the crowd we managed to talk to both artists and learn something of their motivations, to meet Director Wendell Lipscomb and his wife, Ellen, and to determine we’ve been missing some extremely inventive, exciting work.
This is the first duo-show for these Berkeley artist - teachers. Separately they have exhibited widely.
Zahara Schatz has exhibited in one-man and group shows in the Bay Area as well as New York, Europe (including the Venice Biannale) and, of course, Israel where she was bom in Jerusalem into Israel’s first family of art. Her father, Boris, founder of the Bezalel Museum and School, is regarded as the father of Israeli art. Her mother, Olga, is an art critic. Her brother, Bezalel, a painter. Zahara has won important prizes and executed commissions.
Franz also has won prizes (S.F. Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, etc.), was represented among many exhibits in the U.S. State Department International Traveling Show, and has done many architectural commissions.
Zahara, as versatile as she is talented, is featuring her new laminated plastic “see - through pictures.” Orchestrations of plane, pattern, texture and light, these compositions inter-relate and dispose in space geometric and free forms of colored glass, copper screening, steel mesh and foils.
These vital, light - reflecting and filtering explorations of space, on a larger scale, might well place her in the top vanguard of American art. Bits and pieces of these works are elegant extensions of Picasso's and Braque’s waste basket trash for collages and her own boxes of discard from which her young pupils draw their creative expressions.
In the figurative abstract collage “Eclipse” she combines poesy and science imaginatively to portray optical distortions and progress of the shadow on the sun. Her delicate, exquisitely fabricated mobile (silver?), suspended from a stabile like a jewelry setting embracing a stone, takes the breath away and only a breath to set its slivered parts in motion.
Suspended in the window at different levels are flat stained glass hands and feet in the Byzantine manner (Zahara has been called “a Byzantine in Paris” where she studied). Nails are translucent. The rest in rich hues of cathedral windows is made of crystals reflecting, shattering and filtering the light. Centered in each of these beguiling luminous works is a glowing eye. Thereby hangs a tale. Dramatic, black-eyed Zahara explained that when Franz was very ill, she created the hands to exorcize the sickness. They didn’t work, so she made the feet to “kick” it out which they promptly did.
Shown with these are symbolically related candlesticks (examples of the decorative objects which also have brought Zahara to world attention) made of glass - adorned old bottles and children’s baseball bats, perhaps, stuck with glass - studded nails like a witch doctor’s pin-pricked doll.
Franz’ dynamic, emotionally conceived figures in magnesite define and occupy space, more void than volume. In almost continuous movement, linear rhythms outline figures and create the equally important space within.
Both single and group figures are further opened, as in Henry Moore sculpture, with holes where nature puts protuberances. They rest on points or the very outside of curves and, like Zahara’s mobiles, all but defy gravity.
Symbolic themes, Franz said, are sex and protest — the one exemplified in the devouring kiss of “Dark Cry,” with its “Guernica” imagery, and the more complex “Night Song” reproduced here.
“Protest” is most obviously represented in the single figure “J’Accuse” with its offensive attitude of the boxer conceived in the lyrical rhythms of all his sculpture. Lyricism perhaps is not the best vehicle for social reform. Anyway, it's not clear whom is being accused or for what.
Sandow was born in Hawaii and came to Berkeley at an early age. His father was a doctor and his mother a member of the old Berkeley Elston family. In pointing out the protest motivation of his sculpture, he volunteered that as a young rebel he joined the Communist Party. “It broke my mother’s heart,” he said.
While it's never possible to explore fully art works amid the chit-chat of a preview, we wouldn’t have missed this one - an international, interracial party. Former Communist Franz Sandow brought back from the dead. Israeli Zahara Schatz, the Byzantine in Berkeley. Negro Director Wendell Lipscomb and his Caucasian wife. On top of that - our square Republican husband!
The exhibit is open daily except Monday, 1 to 6 p.m., to April 29.