Happy Sculptor

Sculptor Chaim Gross's father was a lumber merchant, and Chaim began his career, appropriately enough, as a sculptor of wood. Among the first sights Sculptor Gross saw in his native Carpathian Mountains were towering forests of firs and pines; among the first sounds he heard were the bite of ax in tree and the screech of sawmills slicing logs into boards. "Smelling the odor of a pine or some other tree," he says today, "I feel like pressing close to its fragrance."

In time, as he moved on from Austria to Hungary, and finally to the U.S. in 1921, Sculptor Gross came to feel the same sense of intimacy toward stone, and finally to forms cast in bronze. Last week a one-man show of 30 of his wood, stone and bronze pieces opened at Manhattan's Duveen-Graham gallery. By late afternoon a long line of visitors stretched in front of the gallery, patiently waiting their turn to see what was inside.

They were not disappointed. His wood carvings included a shapely girl Performing, a Young, a Proud and a Happy Mother, and a Family of Three, one of whom delightfully defied gravity in its mother's arms. In stone, he shaped a tender and telling Day Dreamer in white alabaster, a dark and moving image of Naomi and Ruth in lithium stone, a deeply sensual, semi-abstract Reflection in pink alabaster. In bronze, he achieved a rare sense of movement with his Dancing Mother. Happy Baby and Unicyclist. Whimsical and witty, all had the vigor and balance of circus performers; each in its own way celebrated Sculptor Gross's feeling for the beauty and joy of the human body.

A gentle, ruddy-faced man of 53 with curly, greying hair. Gross haunts the lumber yards of New York searching for wood, particularly such exotic varieties as the bright red cocobola from Colombia, ebony from Africa, red-brown rosewood from Brazil, golden-brown teakwood from Burma, striped tigerwood from Nigeria, dark red snakewood from British Guiana and his favorite lignum vitae from Jamaica. In his littered Greenwich Village studio he chips away at them with a caressing affection for the material, slowly turning out the figures that express his own sunny philosophy.

"I was brought up." he says, "to rejoice in God and life and to have a gay and festive spirit." He does not understand his more somber-minded colleagues and their preoccupation with the tragic and grotesque. "We are alive." he insists. "Why act as if we were dead?"

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