Aarons later moved to New York City to study with Jo Davidson, and other Paris-trained masters at the Beaux-Arts Institute.
He produced several projects for the Works Progress Administration including a group of three figures for the Public Garden (Boston), a longshoreman, fisherman and foundry worker,[1] as well as a large relief (1938) for the South Boston Housing Project and façade of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregational Building (1956).
He produced five He did reliefs for Siefer Hall at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts (1950); Edward Filene (the founder of Filene's Department Store and a philanthropist) on the Boston Common;[3] Fireman's Memorial in Beverly, Massachusetts; a memorial to Mitchell Frieman in Boston; the U.S. Post Office in Ripley, Mississippi; and at the Cincinnati Telephone Building; the Combined Jewish Philanthropies building in Boston (1965); and a commemorative medal for the 350th Anniversary of the City of Gloucester, Massachusetts (1972).
Characteristic of his era, George Aarons was among the foreign-born American sculptors of the early 20th century who started their careers as academicians and evolved into modernists and increasingly abstract artists.
Over thirty pieces spanning the length of this sculptor's career were featured in this exhibition, including work in various medium bronze, wood and original plasters.
Like his contemporaries, Aarons experimented with direct carving in wood, and he was one of the few academically trained sculptors who consistently cut his own works in marble.
Some of his most powerful sculpture comes from his middle period, when he worked through his emotional pain following the global realization of the Jewish Holocaust.
Aarons summered and taught classes on Cape Ann for many years before moving to Gloucester full-time with his wife about 1950.
While Aarons is best known locally for his domestic-scale works, he also executed numerous monumental, public commissions that can be found throughout the United States in cities such as Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland; and Cincinnati, Ohio; as well as in France and Israel.
[5] [6] As noted in a Gloucester Daily Times Article, Aarons wanted his sculptures to honor the struggles and nobility of people and rail against the evil done against them.
He wants you to be able to look at a piece and identify with it and feel basic human emotions that he values and also that he wants you to experience because he sees something as wrong in the world and the only way something's going to happen is if you're sympathetic," says Rebecca Reynolds of Rockport, who organized the current retrospective exhibit of sculpture by the late Gloucester artist at the North Shore Arts Association's hall on Pirates Lane off East Main Street in Gloucester.
Aarons told the Gloucester Daily Times in September 1954 that he found it hard to remember at just what age he started studying art, but he recalled that the nude model had to partially dress when he was in class because he was so young.
He initially studied painting and drawing at the museum school, but he once said he became fascinated by sculpture when he met an established sculptor at the Copley Society in Boston who invited Aarons to his studio and offered him some clay to "play around" with.
A painted portrait of the young Aarons that is included in the North Shore Arts Association exhibit shows a determined fellow with dark brown hair, a suit and bow tie.
Aarons made money, as he would all his life, from commissions, selling his personal work and teaching sculpture, but the Depression of the 1930s was tough for everyone.
The raise convinced him he was fit to marry and he proposed to Gertrude Band, an attractive brunette dancer whom he had been dating for more than a year.
Aarons' design featured a brawny, larger-than-lifesize fisherman, longshoreman and a laborer flanked by a boy and girl at either end to portray the children who would live in the apartments.
Aarons elected to do the piece in cast stone to employ carpenters and laborers as well as craftsman for a total of 10 men.
"George was a very small guy, very friendly, very warm, loved little kids," said his brother-in-law Spartico Monello of Rockport.
In his sculpture, Aarons focused more and more on the theme of oppressed people as he worried about the spread of fascism and Nazism during the 1930s, World War II and after.
He had done pieces during the mid-1930s about the oppression of African-Americans, including "Negro Head," which is in the North Shore Art Association retrospective.
An example of this is Aaron's depiction of the prophet Jeremiah from 1945, which is on display at the Cape Ann Historical Museum in Gloucester.
But Aarons, also sculpted sensual sexual nudes, like Adolescence of 1948, also at the Cape Ann Historical Museum and several in the North Shore Art Association retrospective.
In 1953, Aarons received a commission to carve a series of reliefs into limestone blocks on the facade of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation in Maryland.
"I am essentially interested in humanity," Aarons wrote in 1956 letter, "and have a sympathetic feeling and consciousness of the process man must experience to achieve his aspirations: the suffering, the struggle, the pleasures and pains.
"Duo" from 1962, which is included in the North Shore Arts Association retrospective, depicts a man and woman locked in a jagged embrace with their heads and groins fused together.
"My development starts with everyday life, which affects me, I would say, in a personal or worldly way," Aarons told the Gloucester Times in 1970.
His statue of Thomas Jefferson decorated the office of the secretary of the treasury in Washington, D.C. His memorial to Edward A. Filene sat in Boston Common.
In his eulogy for Aarons, Rabbi Sanford Shanblatt of Temple Israel in Swampscott said, "His genuine affection for people and his utter concern for life made him extraordinarily sensitive to the world about him.