Reuben Kadish

His father, Samuel Kadish was a painting contractor by trade but also harbored strong political interests having been, while a young man in pre-revolutionary Russia, a member of the Marxist-oriented General Jewish Labour Bund in Kovno.

Guston and Kadish soon grew tired of Otis and set up a studio nearby where they continued their self-taught apprenticeship to Renaissance painting and the growing movement of the Mexican muralists.

Kadish had volunteered his services to the charismatic Siqueiros and chauffeured the famed artist around Los Angeles and assisted him in local outdoor mural projects such as the Plaza Art Center in 1932.

The ambitious, wall-sized composition, titled The Struggle Against War and Fascism, encompassed both Renaissance and Surrealist influences, complete with dangerous looking hooded figures strongly reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan thugs and their forebears from the Spanish Inquisition.

As a WPA artist during the Great Depression, Kadish executed the brilliant and still extant A Dissertation on Alchemy mural in the Chemistry Building at San Francisco State University in 1937.

He worked for twenty-five cents per impression in a part-time job for Stanley Hayter's storied Atelier 17 in Greenwich Village, printing editions for the likes of Joan Miró, André Masson and other European Surrealists.

Keen on living in New York City (a dream he had ever since his first boyhood visit in the mid-1920s when he saw a Courbet nude at The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Kadish wanted to join old friends like Jackson Pollock who were migrating to the eastern end of Long Island for cheap housing.

So Kadish, after a ten-year exile, returned to the then booming New York School scene that still championed Abstract Expressionist painting and largely ignored sculpture, except for the legendary likes of David Smith.

Apart from his teaching and art-making in the late 1950s and 1960s, Kadish also moonlighted as part-owner of the White Horse Tavern, the legendary Greenwich Village bar where the British poet Dylan Thomas died from alcohol poisoning in 1953.

In 1977, Kadish led a group of students in completing the restoration of the historic Foundation Building at Cooper Union, casting missing and broken pieces of the cast-iron lamps and capitals in the shop's foundry, saving the school approximately $40,000.

[2] Kadish created an impressive oeuvre of deeply scored terra cotta and bronze sculpture that was viscerally reflective of his Abstract Expressionist roots and hammered out a respectable exhibition career.

Even during his most prolific period during the mid-1980s when he executed his brutally expressionistic caste of terra cotta and bronze portrait heads, most attention from critics, art historians, and filmmakers were centered not on Kadish's artworks but his raconteur-like recollections of the deified Jackson Pollock or his personal brushes with Siqueiros and other artistic titans like Joan Miró.

It's simple and straightforward: distributing Kadish's sculpture and graphic work to museums and public collections in order to make his name and contribution to the annals of American Art better known to new generations.