Reuben Kadish Survey
Timothy Taubes
Artists Choice Museum
1986

The Artists’ Choice Museum will present a fifty year survey exhibition of sculpture and works on paper by Reuben Radish, to open Saturday, January 11th and continue through Saturday, February 22, 1986. Approximately forty terra cotta and bronze sculptures dating from 1955 to the present and works on paper dating from the early 1930’s have been selected by the guest curator, Judd Tully.

In his catalogue essay, Tully writes: ‘Radish harbors a passion for cultural anthropology, the bulging figure of the Venus of Willendorf and her ivory sister the ‘Venus’ of Lespugue. He uses archaic Greek and Egyptian myths and tempers them with Hebraic wisdom, from the ‘Wandering Oedipus’ to the grieving ‘Demeter’, a pantheon most mortals have lost touch with. The fantastic stories that cling to their names, fit seamlessly into Radish’s world.”

Born in Chicago in 1913, Radish and his family moved to Los Angeles where his close friendships with Philip Guston and the Pollock brothers, Sandy, Charles and Jackson took shape. Radish apprenticed as a fresco painter under David Alfara Siqueiros and teamed up with Guston to paint major murals in Mexico and California during the 1930’s. It wasn’t until after World War II and his stint as an Army combat artist that he moved to New York with his family and made the transition from painting to sculpture.

Radish quickly detoured from the downtown “New York School” route and became a successful dairy farmer in New Jersey. It was there — amidst the fertile soil — that his sculptural vision germinated. Though his sculpture was widely exhibited in the early 1960’s and included in the finest of international surveys of contemporary art, Radish’s more recent oeuvre is not as familiar to younger audiences with the distinct exception of his students at the Cooper Union where Radish is a master teacher of sculpture. This survey will merge the past and present work and give for the first time a ‘wide angle” perspective to this unique artist.

A fully illustrated 24 page catalogue with an essay and bibliography by the curator accompanies the exhibition. A reception for Reuben Radish will be held Saturday, January 11th, 6:00-8:00PM.