Max Kalish

Max Kalish (born Kalashick; March 1, 1891 – March 18, 1945) was a Belarusian-American sculptor in Cleveland, Ohio, best known for his sculptures of laborers.

Early life

Kalish was born in Wolozyn, Russian Empire (now Valozhyn, Belarus), to Yoel Kalashick (also spelt Kolasik or Kalatzik) and Anna Levinson.

His Orthodox Jewish family emigrated from the Russian Empire to Cleveland in 1898, when he was 7 years old. His father worked as a cigar maker. He had three brothers, Abram, Arthur, and Jacob (Jack). He began to show artistic talent as a boy and won a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art.

Washington, D.C. publisher Willard M. Kiplinger commissioned Kalish to create fifty portrait statuettes of prominent figures in World War II era politics, arts and sciences. Kiplinger donated the statuettes to the Smithsonian Institution in 1944.

Kalish was the author of Labor Sculpture, largely a collection of photographs of these statues of workers. Most of those statutes were in a Social realism style. Critic Emily Genauer wrote in 1938, "It is the workmen who dominate the American scene, and who have become as surely symbolic of their time as the pioneers in covered wagons, and the robber barons and the great merchant princes were in their respective eras." This was what Kalish portrayed in his art.

Personal life

Kalish married Alice Neuman in 1927. They had two sons, Richard and James. They lived in Paris until World War II. Baby’s Head, Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery, Canajoharie, New York Old Man Resting, Massillon Museum, Massillon, Ohio Portrait of a Boy, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina Gold Prospector, Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio Head of Louis Kronberg, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Torso, Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland Laborer at Rest, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey Torso (1925), Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio Woodcutter (c1926) The Steelworker (c1926) The Discard (c1926) Spirit of American Labor (c1927) New Power The End of Day (1930), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln (1927–32), Board of Education, Cleveland, Ohio Man of Steel (before 1933), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.