DAVID ARONSON'S ART

...His son Ben, 20, is a third year student majoring in painting at Boston University...

...But he kept on making pictures...

...He speaks gently, gracefully, articulately...

...He continued to exhibit in New York, and to receive a number of important awards from major art institutions in America...

...Ablow explains the work as "seven distended panels which make a series of frames into which are set seven groups of figures...

...The casting process of each piece of sculpture, an exacting and arduous art in itself, is supervised in each of its steps by the artist...

...He taught there through 1954, "when the school began to have a changed philosophy," he says...

...He remains true to his primary concern, the human form, and so the horses in the new pieces are most frequently smaller than their rider figures, the human remaining dominant...

...Aesthetic relevancies were set up and empathic relationships established...

...Yet I could see visual logic in a reciprocal relationship between the graphic and plastic arts, particularly in regard to my own problems...

...David Aronson is a Master...

...Aronson's most recent exhibit was held this summer at the Pucker-Safrai Gallery in Boston, which has represented him since 1974...

...Further, and perhaps in the long run even more important, the early paintings concentrated on what was to be the foundation of Aronson's work: his devotion to the human form, and particularly faces and hands...

...He speaks of an experience at Hecht House, a center for community activities in the then-Jewish Mattapan area of Boston...

...Hence, "these were Jewish paintings...

...And it's not just that the junk exists...

...There are some new juxtapositions in Aronson's most recent work, notably his horses and riders...

...Though the drawing and painting illustrated my subjects satisfactorily I felt a sense of failure in the realization of a more substantial space...

...When our students are through, they are prepared to leave us, to go out into the very fickle art world...

...The artistic and emotional ramifications were enormous...

...But the thought of doing sculpture as an end in itself stunned me...

...Young people want to be where the ferment is, and very often, that is exactly where they should not be...

...When Aronson enrolled as a full time student at the Boston Museum School in 1941, he began to study with Karl Zerbe, recognized as the most important artist teaching in New England at that time...

...And is that even a reasonable or relevant question of this most successful artist, whose accomplishments, awards, recognitions by major art institutions, and critical accolades fill pages, whose letters and personal effects have been requested by the Smithsonian Institution for microfilming...

...He strayed with abandon into the remote reaches of his imagination, weaving a web of allegorical exposition which illuminated and spiritualized the text...

...During the period I grew as an artist, the figurative image was The Entertainers, bronze 34, Moment frowned upon...

...In fact, the interest, the joy, the caring of each member of the Aronson family for the others are abundantly clear in their home, which they built more than 20 years ago in a hidden-away spot not far from Boston...

...And though I developed as an artist in a period when the figurative image was no longer taken seriously, I have found it necessary to use it as the essential focus of my work...

...Though there was still a great deal of back and forth, the work was becoming more serene...

...The artist smiles...

...I painted a picture called 'Joseph and the Ishmaelites,' in which I characterized Joseph as a precocious, insufferable young prattler in the center of a booth where some traveling Midianite merchants displayed their wares...

...Born in Lithuania in 1923, Aronson and his family emigrated to the United States when he was six, and settled in Boston...

...In many art schools, the student was encouraged to embrace a current mode as the major part of his training...

...It was the confrontation with the religious subject of seeming incompatibles and incongruities, presented quite unconsciously, that became the recurring theme in my work as a professional artist...

...Aronson is now considered the foremost expert of the medium in the country...

...Certainly," he says, "the subjects would encourage these two institutions to show the work...

...In it, and in the other paintings of that period, the artist's struggles with good and evil, with art as a powerful force that could influence events versus art as statement, a companion to events, are clearly evidenced...

...Silberschlag [then his teacher, later the Dean of HTC] that I should have larger pieces of paper to work with...

...And the best testimony to his own personal and artistic commitments...

...In 1954, the artist read Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, which had a profound effect upon his own work...

...The public has been poisoned, conditioned to it...

...And my own work remained independent of these developments...

...The subjects in the New Testament had supplied rich material for the Old Masters...

...He is dedicated, simply, profoundly, totally, to his craft He is in every sense, and with every sense, an artist, with all the joy and agony, exploration and insight, skill and sensibility, that that implies...

...clearly out of step with the fads that had invaded the art world...

...For two years, David attended Hebrew Teachers' College...

...Even in those early years, his talent did not go unrecognized...

...After all, there was no tradition of so-'called Jewish art to be inspired by...

...As I worked on the first pieces I saw myself as a defector from the ranks of painters, and an interloper among sculptors...

...It stands eight feet high and is four feet wide...

...Critics have said that Aronson devoted his early works to themes from the New Testament out of defiance...

...I don't recall what he thought of the drawing, but he autographed it, and I still have it in the studio...

...Except the religious critics," the artist wryly notes, "Jewish and non-Jewish...

...And, equally, in his two daughters, Judith, 21, who majored in science at Boston University in preparation for a career as a veterinarian, and Abby, 13, a student at Milton Academy...

...She is a vocal soloist who has performed throughout the area, and plays piano and harpsichord as well...

...My colleagues and I see the work of hundreds of such students, each of whom has spent at least four crucial years and thousands of dollars learning to paint pictures in pastiches of currently popular styles, without foundation and ill prepared to meet the conditions of a demanding profession...

...He was very wise...

...He became Zerbe's teaching assistant in his second year at the Museum School, and it was in that year that he produced his first major painting...

...Through the medium of the drawing, many of which are six and seven feet high, and produced with varying tones of brown pastel and in charcoal on toned paper, Aronson was able to concentrate on the elements of light and shade, the chiaroscuro of Leonardo, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt...

...Even then, he recalled, "I experienced enormous conflict, and what was to be the beginning of a significant rebellion...

...That his early paintings were a manifestation of his own rebellion is clear, but, the artist explains, "my interest in the New Testament was also something that was thrust on me...

...Reading the panel from top to bottom and left to right there are moonworshipers, an angel choir, a golem being levitated, metaphysicians exorcising a dybbuk, idiot apprentices from the golem legend, two musicians and, in the lowest panel, a group of musicians in ecstacy...

...It was a first for me in many ways," he says...

...It was clear to Dr...

...Aronson had fought the battles of philosophy, of message and of meaning, and of graphic imagery, of the manipulation of forms, in his work...

...He had one more show with the dealer and then left the New York art scene for a period of about seven years, "while my work was undergoing severe growing pains...

...Thus, David was schooled in Jewish tradition from his youngest years— and traces back his interest in graphic art just as far...

...Trinity," an oil painted in 1942-43, was not only an expression of what bothered him about religion, it was also a concern for "the illusionistic properties oflight and dark...

...And so it is not difficult to understand why he has always been an extraordinary teacher, which he has continued to be since his teaching assistant days at the Museum School in Boston...

...My work in class— aside from my simply being there and taking in what was being said—consisted almost entirely of what was interesting to me...

...Of course, there were some problems when I dropped out, because everyone in my family had graduated...

...Karl Zerbe left in 1953 to teach in Florida...

...For David Aronson is also a thoroughly nice person, with deep concerns that are reflected in his relationships with his wife and his children, with his colleagues and his students...

...As a gifted student, he was permitted to leave his high school classes early three days a week to attend special classes at the Museum of Fine Arts School...

...That charge, if it is a charge, ignores both the essence of the man and his absolute devotion to the great art tradition that is his personal commitment...

...This commitment to manner before a period of exploration denied the young artist the very essence of a meaningful and profound self-discovery...

...The first real confrontation came when, at 13, David refused to become a bar mitzvah, a decision he describes as largely instinctive...

...I was about 14.1 did a head and torso that was about four feet high...

...The artist's concern with religion, magic, the Kabbalah, astrology, Hasidism, all represent methods of leaping through the door...

...And the result was something less than a resounding success...

...Light, reflected in color and value, also continues to be an essential element in each work...

...What may have been, in retrospect, a natural transition was a bold and daring step for Aronson, by now an accomplished artist of high reknown...

...Aronson uses patina in much the same way that he uses pastel or paint to heighten the subject and infuse it with a sometimes unearthly, mystical aura...

...The groups, of varying size, weave freely in and out of their frames with great abandon...

...The Joseph subject, which the artist used in several paintings, became the inspiration for yet the next evolution in his work...

...With a faculty of accomplished artists and a fine collection, the Museum afforded the aspiring young artist the best possible working start...

...It was my first work in encaustic, and in it, I found a very meaningful fusion of technique and message...

...The whole panel buzzes with twittering, twitching figures, swarming in clusters...

...As an artist in the expressionist tradition from the very beginning, it is not surprising that, as he began to "come back" to subjects that were a part of his own life and studies, Aronson turned to the rich mystical imagery of the Kabbalah...

...Now I had often resorted to making clay studies of figures, their parts and drapery, since I rarely used live models...

...Although Aronson characterized the piece as "a flippant observation on society," there is much in that first painting that continued to be important...

...Aronson remained as chairman of the department until 1963...

...Called "The Paradox," it juxtaposes the curiosity— and the conflict—of the artist in dealing with organized religion and the outside world...

...Clearly, David Aronson as artist is his own most severe critic, his sternest taskmaster...

...And with all this, I found myself working for the first time with subjects from the Old Testament—subjects with which I could not until now become involved Joseph and (he Ishmaelites #2, encaustic 30, Moment without sufficient detachment from the highly charged emotional overtones of the early religious background...

...I did a tremendous amount of drawing in the margins of my notebooks...

...It is so much harder to be an art student today," he says...

...But there is, in the end, only one real test: artistic value...

...His first one man show held in New York (he was 22, and still a student) was a sell-out, and highly acclaimed by the critics...

...Simplicity began to speak more eloquently than the frenzied intricacies of the earlier work...

...We have done things differently...

...Visually, the world has changed, and things are seen and perceived differently today...

...It is as if the artist is making a statement about the relationship between the two in size and intellect, allowing the rider to reach toward a new level of aspiration, a higher goal, in his sometimes unlikely angle on the horse...

...The first casting of "The Door" took eight months to complete...

...Sholom Asch was coming to visit, and I was asked to do a large charcoal portrait of him...

...The philosophy, the point of view of that department, was an emulation of Aronson's own insistence upon a thorough grounding in the basics, emphasizing drawing, anatomy, the classical, formal, traditional training of the great art past...

...It did not, however, mark the end of his formal Jewish training...

...And in his wife, Geor-gianna, an artist and a musician...

...The source became, for him, a vast wealth of artistic possibility, as well as a philosophical foundation for his expression of the transcendental relationship of man and the universe...

...The artist wrote back, saying that he thought there was still a little left of this subject for him...

...And I feel that Boston University has become the best art school in the country...

...Further, his strict attention to technique, to his craft, remains a dominant concern...

...My own religious background was deeply woven into the fabric of the work...

...I approached sculpture much as I did drawing and painting and the transition was natural and developmental...

...Describing the discoveries in a 1967 lecture presented at Boston University, Aronson says, "Mann...

...His father, a rabbi, fully expected his young son to follow in that tradition...

...The Young Christ," painted in 1945, marked several important developments for Aronson...

...In a sense all of his characters are attempting to transcend themselves...

...And a year later, in 1946, he was included in the 14 Americans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan...

...Astrology, numerology, music and ritual, devils (dybbuk-im), the golem (an embryo, a thing not fully formed, created by a Ba'al Shem who would then become its master), the writing of amulets and sublime levitations provoked, for the artist, "dazzling images," human forms—sages, scholars, saints, moonworshipers, visionaries, and false messiahs—engaged in their own private visions, responding to the inner music and torments of their thoughts, their dreams, their souls...

...My interest in making images—a violation of the second commandment—provoked a lack of understanding if not downright antagonism among those with whom I lived...

...In 1963, he began working on "The Door," called by Joseph Ablow in his essay on Aronson in 1969 (the year in which the work was completed), "the fullest manifestation of Aron-son's aesthetic...

...Then, with the philosophy and a committed faculty firmly in place, resigned the administrative post and became Professor of Art, a position in which he continues...

...He explained the departure in his Boston University lecture...

...The door acts both as a surface on which they are set and the space through which the move...

...Yet, as father and as teacher, Aronson clearly takes great delight in his son...

...In my day, you either made it or you starved...

...Aronson's remarkable talent brought him stunning success...

...All of the characters with their attenuated limbs and nervous, fluttering drapery are wrought with great delicacy and elegance____'The Door' is an amalgam of many of the themes that have concerned Aronson for the last 15 years...

...His musicians, whether human or angel, are profound...

...Also, my characterizations were becoming more specific, heightened...

...From a distance the surface seems to be pulsating and in a state of dissolution...

...The very notion of images, to my strictly Orthodox family, was threatening, to say the least...

...Today, there are so many choices, varieties of styles, pressures of the art establishment...

...The household was a predictable carryover from its east European shtetl origins and was centered around religion and livelihood...

...His life is about his art, although art is not, exclusively, his life...

...He is now dividing his time between studio and foundry in New York in preparation for two major exhibits: one at the Rose Art Museum on the campus of Brandeis University to be held from February 4 through March 18, the other at the Jewish Museum in New York from June 5 through September 4. Do these shows represent, finally, an acceptance of Aronson's work by the Jewish art establishment...

...He felt that my work should be encouraged and in fact to this day takes the credit for my decision to become an artist...

...I could allow my imagination to roam freely through time and to shuffle its sequences like the medieval metaphysical conjurers...

...However it was fairly easy for me to realize that my artistic salvation did not lie in the tension between two different reds on opposite sides of a canvas or that a plastic hamburger had little relevance to my existence...

...The instruments on which they play appear to be extensions of the performer—of the artist, if you will—and the music they hear, expressed in their hands and their faces, is an inner music, perhaps divinely inspired...

...It is filled, of course, with art, and with the less tangible treasures of their lives— not the least of which is the perceptible energy exerted by five intense and creative people—with warmth, and music (each plays at least one instrument...

...He turned his attention to drawings, not as studies for paintings but as finished products...

...He is a good listener...

...Yet an artist's work is based upon his own experience and perceptions...

...We train the student to be an artist...

...You had to wade through less to get to the point...

...Resurrection," completed in 1945, is a seven foot high rendering of deeply troubled figures, faces that cry out the message of social injustice...

...Of the precarious road ahead for Ben, and for other young artists, Aronson says, "When art becomes as commonplace and available as it is today, it's very hard to be a worthwhile contributing artist...

...Then, in the following year, I was asked by Harold Case (then President of Boston University) to organize an art department there...

...It was from Zerbe that he learned, then mastered, the very difficult (and ancient) medium of encaustic, a blend of wax, resin, varnish, and oil fused together by heat...

...Chronometers co-exist with ancient coins and parchments, lockets containing miniature unknown portraits hang alongside a Venetian picture postcard and the Jewish Daily Forward contrasts with fragments of Aramaic hieroglyphs...

...The previous year, he had been awarded both the First Judges Prize and the First Popular Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston...

...Then there was a falling out with his dealer, who wrote to Aronson suggesting that perhaps he could work without using religious themes...

...Of course there will still be good artists, but they've got to fight through and push through so much junk...

...allowed himself to luxuriate in his fantasies with complete latitude...

...The luminous, waxy colors offered a deeply religious aspect to the proceedings, like a stained glass window in a church that thrusts you into a mood or state of mind...

...I would play a light on them to materialize an imaginary lighting situation and I would study their perspectives for the purpose of solving painting problems...

...The shift in emphasis from painting and drawing to sculpture began in the early 1960's...

...And separated by a wooded path some several hundred feet from the house is the artist's studio, fairly alive with a score or more of projects in various stages of completion...

...And the only answer was to draw with a material that had more substance to it—such as clay...

...His very earliest sculptural works were low reliefs and the artist moved rapidly into fully formed sculptural statements...