Milton Hebald

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While notably a New Yorker, Milton Hebald (1917-2015) lived and worked near Rome for fifty plus years.  Beginning with his receipt of the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome in 1955, Hebald made Bracciano, Italy the base of his operations. In 2004, Hebald returned to the United States, first to Santa Fe and then to Los Angeles, bringing his lifetime collection of work with him.

Hebald learned art literally from the streets of New York, drawing on the sidewalks in colored chalks, eventually realizing his true vocation when someone gave him a box of modeling clay. He spent significant amounts of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which he considered his own personal museum. He was strongly attracted to the sculpture on view, but his two favorite pieces were “Death and the Sculptor” by Daniel Chester French, and “Two Natures Struggling within Me” by George Grey Barnard. Through connections and his own fierce determination, Hebald managed to meet both sculptors and gained access to their studios. At the age of 10, he was the youngest student ever known at the School Art League. During his high school years, Hebald attended school during the day and the Beaux-Arts Institute at night. He spent most of his time after school at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, patiently copying Old Master drawings from Reproductions. Hebald believes passionately in the value of close study of the Master, especially in drawing.

His first show of wood and plaster figurative works was in 1938 in New York City at the ACA Galleries, where he sold his first piece of work. Hebald then began showing regularly at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He graduated from the W.P.A. teaching program into its creative project, the W.P.A. program and FEDERAL PROJECT NO. 1, as it was called, included many projects, among which were the Art, Music, Theater and Writers Projects. Government funding of the arts community continued until the mid 1940's, when the WPA was disbanded. Hebald won and executed a government commission for a five-foot wood carving for the post office at Tom’s River, NJ. His exhibitions began to expand and included Philadelphia and Chicago.

By this point married and faced with the reality of earning more income than his sales of sculpture provided, Hebald pursued work that not only provided him a steady income, but also enhanced his true vocation, sculpture. For example, for nearly a year he worked in a department store display firm making plaster models of floral arrangements and other decorative pieces. Llike numerous artists of his age, went into defense work, but again he was able to secure a position as a molder in the bronze foundries making submarine and airplane parts. Subsequently, he moved on to work at the Republic Aviation Company where he was assigned to making models for airplane parts. He developed his own process whereby he created plaster models, cut them into sections, cast them separately and brazed the parts together. This technique is used time and time again in his sculpture.

In 1945, he was drafted into the Army and served for one year at Camp Lee (now Fort Lee) in Virginia. Once again, he found a way for his work to broaden his skills as a sculptor, making models of weapons and other equipment as training aids. He also designed and cast in plaster, six Baroque columns for a Petersburg church attended by his colonial. Hebald was discharged from the Army in 1946 and returned to his professional life. He taught at Cooper Union and the Brooklyn Museum, becoming head of the Department of Sculpture at Brooklyn. He won the Schilling Prize in 1947, for which the judges were Walter Pach and Hugo Robus. The winning piece, entitle “Three Girls” was given by Hebald to the Philadelphia Museum of Art because of the long-standing interest in sculpture. That same year the Whitney purchased one of his first post-war woodcarvings, ‘Woman with Birds’.

Subsequently, Hebald had his first postwar one-man show at the Grand Central Moderns. He also taught for three summers at the Skowhegan Art School in Maine, spending the winters giving private instruction. He enjoys teaching because it is a form of contact. “The artist’s life is essentially a very lonely life, the creative part. You go off in your own direction and your own corner. Teaching gives you a proving ground for your own ideas. It’s a relationship that bears fruit on both sides.” Among his students during those years were Elaine de Kooning, Harold Altman, Al Blaustein, William King, Raymond Rocklin, Al Katz, Dmitri Hadzi, Harold Tovish and Stephen Werlich.

In 1952, Hebald won a large commission; a bronze group sixteen feet high for what is now the Nathan B. Etten Hospital of Albert Einstein University in the Bronx, NY. In addition to the opportunity to create such a large-scale installation, Mr. Hebald found himself in the company of Koren Der Harootian, Jose de Rivera and Donald De Lue, the well-established academic sculptor.

At that same time, he won another commission for a sculptural aluminum light complex in a stairway of the Isla Verde Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The architect of the airport, who commissioned Hebald for the project, was Walther Prokosch, who became a major collector of the artist’s work. Subsequent to this project, Mr. Prokosch would also commission Hebald to create another historically significant airport installation, the 220’ Zodiac Screen at the Pan Am terminal at JFK’s airport in New York.

However, it was the Isla Verde installation that opened the door to Italy for Hebald. Like most American sculptors, Hebald had long been aware that there were immense advantages connected with bronze casting in Italy. When the Isla Verde sculptural form was ready to be cast, he decided to have it cast in Milan. Hebald found in Italy what he had long, half-consciously, been vainly seeking in America – the opportunity to be “reinforced by being part of a continuous development from the past.” There is the baroque, for instance, which Mr. Hebald absorbed and granted a new meaning. In the seven-foot-high “Tempest”, the movement of hair and drapery can only be achieved by a master sculptor’s hand. Bodies have no Bernini opulence – they are desperately spare – but the drapery and the hair could have come off of a Bernini fountain or bronze alter piece.

In 1961 Pan Am commissioned Hebald to create a “Zodiac Screen” for their new terminal at Kennedy Airport, which at 220’ was the largest sculpture in the world. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey currently now owns the twelve large bronzes. His 7 1⁄2’ “Romeo & Juliet” bronze stands in front of the Delacorte Shakespeare Theatre in New York’s Central Park along with another of his larger bronzes “The Tempest”. Other casts (of six) of “Romeo & Juliet” are in front of Barbara B. Mann Concert Hall in Ft. Myers, FL, and the Philharmonic Center for the Arts/Naples Museum of Art, in FL, and the Hollenbeck Palms in Los Angeles, CA.

In his final years in Los Angeles, Hebald worked in varied media, from clay to computer-generated design. Throughout his eight decade career, he created expressions that reinterpret for our time the great tradition of sculpting the human figure.