Rethinking A Maverick
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

William King is best known for huge, coolly humorous, figurative constructions in steel. Feats of engineering as much as sculptural wit, they are usually placed outdoors in sculpture parks and city plazas. The elements of his style were already present, however, in the precocious, intimately worked and scaled sculpture he produced in his 20s, fresh out of Cooper Union and an ambitious, if obstinately unfashionable, young artist on the New York scene. Thirty sculptures from 1949–62 are the subject of a focused, exquisitely installed loan exhibition from museum and private collections organized by Sanford Schwartz at Alexandre Gallery. This is a show that will force a rethinking of an artist who, at 81, is still more a maverick than the institution he deserves to be.
These early works may contain the clue, however, to both his appeal and his relative marginalization. Worked mostly in wood or terra-cotta, they bubble with warmth and whimsy. It is difficult to exaggerate the utter delight of this exhibition, its formal variety, and Mr. King’s unfailing combination of generalized form and particularized individuality.
From the outset, there has been a satirical bent in Mr. King’s aesthetic, and an acute social observation in the handling of body language. But he seems constitutionally incapable of cruelty. While alive to the self as social construct, he portrays real people — invariably close friends, family, lovers — rather than mere types. There is a lot of love in these sculptures, both for the people depicted and the surfaces worked. Yet however winning they are, the critical mind set of the modern art world is set up to resist charm.
The steel constructs that came later moved him toward the universal, although humor, sexiness, and understanding of human foible always keep his work outside the enclave of abstract purism. The early work shows the degree of sentimentality of which even the most streamlined of his later works always seem capable.
There is a sharp-edged sweetness to the early Mr. King that he shared with several Cooper Union classmates, most notably his first wife, Lois Dodd, and their friend, Alex Katz. These artists resisted abstraction, which they found to have become academic and formulaic by the time they hit the scene. They embraced figuration as a radical rather than conservative alternative, although this didn’t prevent detractors from seeing their figuration as retardaire. The artists evolved a kind of urban primitivism as a way to achieve a balance between compelling form and representation of the world around them: Where Mr. Katz found inspiration in Milton Avery, Mr. King could look to a sculptural equivalent in Elie Nadelman, the Polish born French-American who had died in 1946.
Nadelman’s oddly bulbous figures observed in society provide a clear point of departure for Mr. King’s “Shirley” (1952), a portrait of the woman who became his second wife, Shirley Bowman. (Later, as Shirley King, she was a renowned food writer.) Delicately and yet at the same time robustly carved from wood, at just over 18 inches high, the work has a fidgety fluency. Like Nadelman, “Shirley” is at once sweet, streamlined, and sensual.
The portrait bust of the same sitter from 1953, on loan from the Guggenheim, a gold painted carving in basswood, has a mix of the primitive and the classical familiar in pre-war French sculpture. While clearly faithful to Shirley’s features, it has an aloofness that recalls Brancusi. The bust is just off-kilter enough to convey a sense of itself as an autonomous form.
Another portrait of her, this time seated, similarly captures the elongation of neck and the delicate way the head almost floats rather than sits on the rest of the body. “Miss Bowman” (1953), on loan from Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, hints at Mr. King’s future antics with gravity. The seat in which the figure sits cross-legged is indicated by two metal prongs holding her aloft.
Like several works in the show, “Miss Bowman” is polychromatic, which gives the work both a tribal feel and a modernity. Often, the different treatment of the face to the rest of the body, and the artist’s play with scale, puts you in mind of sacred dolls intended to be dressed.
Mr. King shares with Mr. Katz an uncanny ability to convey the essence of a sitter while drastically reducing the amount of visual information. The painted, plaster figure “Angelo” (1955) is a portrait of the abstract painter Angelo Ippolito, a founder member, along with Messrs. King and Katz, of the Tanager, an important collective gallery in Greenwich Village. The figure perfectly captures a sense of a young artist who is at once assured and on edge.
With the early Mr. King, it seem that the smaller, tighter, and slighter the work, the more insouciantly he could invest the subject with a compelling presence. A 9-inch-by-7-inch piece in cut out flat painted metal mounted on wood, “Sonny Greer and Jimmy Archie” (1953) is at once cool and intense, like the jazz playing it depicts — there is just enough information to sense a man drumming, his fellow crouched over his horn, while conveying nonchalance, a sense of the throwaway, of improvisation.
There is rarely stasis in these sculptures: They are all about animation, sociability, compacted energy, expansiveness. Figures are at once preening and introspective. The surface treatment in the roughly chiseled woman holding up her skirt in “The Nylon Dress” (1954), also from the Hirshhorn, mirrors the expression of the woman herself — coy and bemused. “Andrew, Angry” (1953) is a bawling baby on his back, his body coiled in indignation and his head convulsed into a web of bulging veins and carved grimace. The body has the charge of a pre-Columbian carving while the face recalls both the farcically exaggerated facial expressions of the 18th-century Austrian Franz Xaver Messerschmidt and the hefty grooves of German Expressionist wood carving.
Mr. King’s bent toward social observation and human interaction found its breakthrough form in his sculptures of couples. “Bob and Terry” (c.1954), in painted terra cotta, forms a single sculptural form out of two busts that strain to present a single smile to the world. The spectacled face on the right leans into his bemused partner, like one tree growing toward another. “Daphne and Charlie” (1954) stains each partner in a different tone, though they remain wedded as a single piece of wood. The fellow gazes at his gal in a public, almost bravura display of intimacy. Meanwhile, she looks toward the viewer, wholly absorbed.
Until January 20 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-755-2828).