The Art of Living: Margaret Brassler Kane's Avocation and Vocation Became One During 50 Years of Making Sculpture in Cos Cob
The Art of Living: Margaret Brassler
Kane's Avocation and Vocation Became One During 50 Years of Making Sculpture
in Cos Cob
April 23, 2006
by Keach Hagey
Chisels lie in neat rows on a low table in Margaret Brassler Kane's Cos Cob studio.
Eight-foot scaffolding is tucked in the corner, scaffolding the petite woman climbed to carve her 6-by-6-foot panels, even as she was well into her 90s. The final panel of the five-part series that she started in the Depression hangs on the wall, unfinished, its geometric shapes just beginning to be transformed from pencil markings to three-dimensional forms.
On the wall, next to clippings from science magazines showing the galaxies she hoped to carve out of the wood, is a motto: "The master of the art of living is the man who makes his work his play and keeps his labor the same as his leisure."
Those who knew Kane, who died April 10 at the age of 96, say they knew no one who better embodied those words.
Her work — more than 30 pieces of sculpture, most carved directly from stone or wood — now fills her 18th-century home overlooking the Mianus River. At the urging of her husband who died in 1971, businessman Arthur Ferris Kane, she kept all the originals, except for the bronze casting of her most famous piece, "Harlem Dancers."
The marble original was accepted into the permanent collection
in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art in 1993.
That acceptance was the crowning achievement of a long and varied career that
friends, family and colleagues said was marked by originality, integrity and
a rigorous work ethic.
"She did not like to use her time for anything that wasn't directly related to her doing sculpture," said her son, Jay Kane, 74, also of Cos Cob. "To do original sculpture, she felt that she had to have complete solitude and just none of the distractions of everyday life."
One of the few distractions she did allow herself was membership in the Greenwich branch of the National League of American Pen Women. During the last years of her life, she invited members of the group of writers, artists and musicians to tour her studio and watch her work.
"We would just be floored," recalled Ann Caron, incoming president of the Greenwich branch. "How she created those (panels) was an unbelievable feat. She was a very delicate, and yet could create these immense, very mythical kinds of pieces. You would expect someone who was 6 feet tall and very strong, and it was just the opposite."
Group member Betty Willis became close friends with Kane during the last decade of her life, and was awed by her dedication to her craft. "She worked all the time," the writer and Greenwich resident said. "She didn't take any time off for herself, because she wanted to get everything finished and done."
Kane made a commitment to her artwork, and received acclaim for it early in life. Born in East Orange, N.J., in 1909 to Mathilde and Hans Brassler, a jeweler, she considered careers in music and writing briefly before her father encouraged her to study sculpture.
In the late 1920s, Kane studied in New York with Edward McCartan at the Art Students League, but grew bored with representational copying of the human figure, her son said. In 1931 she joined small number of art students to learn stone and woodcarving in the studio of John Hovannes.
"The necessity to be original in one's work was at the core
of his
teaching," she wrote of Hovannes. "I can recall words to this effect:
If you make something that reminds you of work you have seen before - destroy
it!"
Just barely in her 20s, the young sculptor established a Manhattan studio with two colleagues and was an active part of New York's art world, becoming a charter member of the Sculptor's Guild in 1937. The following year, she received honorable mention at the Whitney Museum of American Art for the very first piece that she showed, "Harlem Dancers."
She went on to exhibit her works in many prominent museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art , the Chicago Art Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Sculptors Guild and the National Academy of Design.
She created more than 100 pieces, ranging from whimsical representations of animals to cerebral social commentaries on poverty and war. Her private collectors include Donald Trump and the late Greenwich resident Rene Anselmo. One of her pieces, depicting an abstract pair of fish, is part of the Bruce Museum's permanent collection.
Jay Kane said that, in the early years, this work was made possible by the fact that the Depression had forced the family to move in with the sculptor's parents in Brooklyn. Her mother and aunt raised the two children, he said, while her husband supported the family with a job in middle management. Six days a week, Kane took the train at 8 a.m. to her studio in Manhattan, and returned in the evening, he said.
"He just supported it," he said of his father. "He kept her going at this so she didn't have to work."
In 1948, she sought an escape from the distractions of the New York art world by relocating to a 1749 Colonial house - once featured in a painting by Childe Hassam now part of the White House's art collection - just down Strickland Road from where the Cos Cob art colony flourished a century before.
"She was attracted to the fact that it had attracted other artists 100 years before," Jay Kane said. "She wanted the quiet of the studio on the water in Cos Cob, and so, aside from the Pen women, she didn't socialize a lot."
Instead, she worked, devoting her energies to expanding the theme she began with, "Symbols of Changing Man," her first 6-foot-by-6-foot panel that depicts events from the Middle Ages to the beginnings of World War II. That acclaimed panel was widely shown, including displays at the Whitney and Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The second panel, "Earthbound," tells the story of man's evolution; the third, "Tracing the Origins," shows how life proceeded from the sea to reptiles and dinosaurs; the fourth, "Micro-Macrocosm," begun in 1961, is a "synthesis of the exploration of inner and outer space," she wrote, that depicts music, chemistry, physics and space travel.
Willis noted that Kane carved the image of the moon landing into this panel years before the actual one happened in 1969. "The men who went to the moon, she depicted the whole thing," Willis said. "Her husband called her the day they saw it on television, and he said, 'Look, Margaret, you've done this before.' "
The unfinished fifth, "Reaching the Galaxies," sought to capture the concept of the galaxies and Big Bang theory of the beginnings of the universe. In a journal dating from 2001, Kane laid out her reasons behind the panel series, which she began in the 1930s. "I wanted fresh, new answers to the questions, 'Where did we come from? Where are we going?' With that I began to research scientific material."
She wrote about the advances that were made in space photography during the 1990s, and pasted in a few pictures of them as references.
Although she left behind two children, two grandchildren, four
great-grandchidlren and a historic house filled with museum-quality sculpture,
in some ways Kane's legacy could best be summed up in one of her final wishes
which she recorded in a notebook in 2002.
"I wonder if I can live long enough to finish the galaxies.
Try and the
answer will be clear."