Mitchell Fields
Fields continued living in New York, where he belonged to an informal circle of predominantly Jewish artists whose work was for the most part representational: Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Ben Shahn, De Hirsh Margules, James Lechay, Myron Lechay, Joseph Kantor, Saul Berman, Tully Filmus, were among the painters; while after World War II the informal "circle" of which he was part included the sculptors Clara Bratt, Chaim Gross, Alexander Archipenko and Jacques Lipchitz.
On occasion Fields produced works with a political message: in 1935 he sculpted a monument to the civilians killed in the February 1934 Vienna Uprising, also known as the Austrian Civil War.
From the late 1950s until his death in 1966 Fields spent long periods of time in Israel, where he had a studio at 16 Da Modena St., Tel Aviv.
These personages included Yehiel De-Nur (Ka-tzetnik), author; Yosef Sprinzak, first Speaker of the Knesset; Prof. Chaim Sheba, head of the Medical Corps of the Israel Defense Forces and later director of the Tel Hashomer Hospital and Medical Center, which now bears his name; Member of Knesset Avraham Hertzfeld, as well as works now in private collections.
Fields also attempted a portrait bust of Anne Frank as she might have looked during the last months of her life in hiding with her family in Amsterdam, based upon available photographs from when she was younger.
His statue "Young Woman Holding Wounded Bird" is in the School of Nursing of the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer.
Fields made the acquaintance of Batya Lishanski, who was awarded the Dizengoff Prize for her sculpture, and of Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dada school of art.
Although he was only five years old when his grandfather died, Sadeh, who lived and worked in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina, grew up surrounded by Fields's sculpture.
Having been educated in the tradition of Realism, which subscribed to an ideology of objective reality and rejected what its practitioners saw as the exaggerated emotionalism of nineteenth-century Romanticism, he created life-size (and on occasion over-life-size) statues of the human body, both female and male.
Even after World War II, when many American artists moved in the direction of Abstract Expressionism, Fields continued to create within the realist canon.
His ceramic art work, with its richly toned glazes and whimsical shapes, was his only attempt at adopting a semi-abstract idiom.
