Herman Wald (1906-1970) was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in what was once

known – before the First World War – as Austria-Hungary. After studying sculpture successively in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London, he emigrated to South Africa in 1937. While there are a number of 20th-century sculptors of Eastern European Jewish origin like Lippy Lipshitz, Herbert Meyerowitz, Moses Kottler and Solly Disner who have been recognised as important South African artists, Wald’s story has so far remained untold. His obscurity seems ironic and surprising since he was the originator of a number of iconic public sculptures which are indelibly imprinted on the popular imagination in South Africa. Yet very few people are familiar with his name.

nlike most of the other practitioners of the art of sculpture in this country, Wald never had the luxury of a teaching post which would have enabled him

to support himself and his family while exploring an independent direction in his work. While schooled in modernism in Britain and Europe, he often had to adopt more naturalistic approaches to suit a wide range of clients and their demands. Modernism in art was not appreciated by South Africans and he was often forced to compromise his creativity, especially when it came to portraiture. The confl ict between Wald’s identity asas aa JJewewisishh scscululptptoror aandnd tthehe prohibition of the Second CoCommmmanandmdmenentt agagaiainsnstt ththee making of any ‘graven image’ led hihimm toto aadodoptpt aa ppololememicicalal sstatancncee to Orthodox Jewish thought on the issue.

When Herman Wald was in England between 1933 and 1937, he encountered the work of the Vorticists, who had earlier used a

fusion of Cubism and Italian Futurism to create a mechanised vision of the human form, partly as a dark comment on the mechanisation of killing in the First World War. Wald adopted this aesthetic in a number of his own works. Unity is Strength, a public commission for a building society, embodies Wald’s vision for South Africa: of the diff erent races pulling together for a better future.

Monument to the Six Million, which stands in Johannesburg’s Westpark Cemetery, is a major engineering achievement in bronze.

It is recognised world-wide as a major monument to the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. Six fi sts, each symbolising a million of the dead, emerge from the earth, each holding a ram’s horn trumpet (Shofar) through which they cry out the Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. The monument was close to Wald’s heart and he and his wife Vera lie buried next to it.

Perhaps the most popular public sculpture in all of South Africa, Stampede: The Impala Fountain was commissioned from Wald as a public memorial to the late Ernest Oppenheimer. Intended to reintroduce ‘nature’ into the soulless, built

environment of the Johannesburg CBD, it consists of 18 bronze impalas leaping in a continuous, graceful arc over jets of water. The dynamic movement of the impalas would seem to have been inspired by a number of possible modern sources, ranging from sequential motion photography and Italian Futurism to cinematic animation. In many ways Wald considered this to be his most successful work, appealing to artistic laymen and art experts alike. Restored in 2002 by the late artist’s son Michael, this fountain-piece has now been relocated outside the Anglo American Building in Main Street, Johannesburg.

W ��ings of the Schechinah: the Sculptural Art of Herman Wald tells the ��story of an artist who contested orthodox interpretations of the��Second Commandment against ‘graven images’, but who, at the same

time, produced expressions of Jewish spirituality of a high order in his synagogue commissions. The huge wings of beaten copper he made in 1967 stand within the ancient sculptural tradition of Bezalel, who was tasked by Moses to make the Holy Ark of the Covenant.

Afamous landmark, Wald’s Diamond Diggers’Fountain is synonymous with the city of Kim-��berley, South Africa’s diamond-mining mecca.

Situated in its Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Gardens,it consists of fi ve life-size mine workers in bronze, each personifying a principal mine in the area. Arms raised in unison, they support a huge diamond sieve through which a single jet of water rises. Referencing the concept of the heroised worker seen in monumental public sculptures in Communist Eastern Europe, Wald bends this visual rhetoric to the praise of capitalism.

“Unconditionally acclaimed by child, adult or connoisseur … [a work] unbound by time, fashion or ‘isms’” Herman Wald, on his sculpture Stampede: The Impala Fountain, 1960

Moses – the singularly most important of the Hebrew prophets – obsessed Herman Wald a great deal. The prohibition of the Second Commandment against “graven images” was something that Wald sought to interrogate.

Since the Ten Commandments, he argued, had been carved on tablets of stone: they were both three-dimensional and monumental, qualifying in an ironic sense as enduring works of art in themselves. Moses was thus, in a way, the very fi rst Jewish sculptor. Wald even went so far as to state his belief that too literal an interpretation of the Second Commandment had led to a diminishment of Jewish cultural life.

Diamond Diggers’ Fountain Unity is Strength Monument to the Six Million

Cover of a 1974 vinyl record cover showing Cantor Shlomo Mandel in front of the Aron Hakodesh of the Berea Synagogue. Photo: Paul Vink

Moses

A notable aspect of Wald’s work dealt with subjects that he thought would appeal to a specifi cally Jewish clientèle. This was a series of sculptures on the theme of traditional Jewish life, largely based on his memories of his

childhood in Hungary. Although Wald’s rabbinical family was fairly prosperous, the Jewish community of which it was a part was a highly diverse one, often at odds with itself over matters of theology and the interpretation of tradition. The appeal of many of these sculptures is essentially nostalgic, refl ecting on a Jewish communal life that was essentially wiped out by the Holocaust. In making them, Wald resorted to a loose and expressive style of modelling.

I n 1951 Wald was commissioned to carve a choir screen for a new synagogue in Springs. This was the fi rst of his large-scale religious works. The commission was signifi cant and symbolic in personal terms as it reminded him of the diffi culties he

had as a youth in convincing his Rabbi father of his decision to become a sculptor. He was also an accomplished singer and had sung behind many such choir screens in European synagogues. Designed for an architectural setting, the central subject of Sanctum is an apotheosised seven-branched Menorah candlestick, with the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

In 1959 Wald held an exhibition entitled ‘The Bible in Sculpture’ in Johannesburg. In many ways it was a project that went against modernist precepts, which had abandoned literary or moral themes in art. He was not alone in this as Marc

Chagall, for example, had also set himself the task of illustrating scenes from the Bible. For Wald, the Biblical themes he selected were related to what he termed ‘our present day happenings’. It was also an opportunity for him to take issue with the Jewish community itself on the subject of art.

Selected for inclusion on the exhibition of the South African Academy in 1944, Russian Girl is one of the few surviving works by Wald

carved in marble. Its idealised features of what seems to be a worker peasant girl recall the spirit of Socialist Realism predominant in offi cial Russian art under Stalin at the time, best represented by the work of the sculptor Vera Mukhina. This optimistic and idealistic socialist ideal was also embraced by the farmer-worker settlers who fl ocked to Israel when it was founded in 1948. This accounts for the perceived signifi cance of this work in the early 1950s, when it was used on the cover of the magazine, Jewish Aff airs.

Abstraction was dominant trend with the international avantgarde in the 1950s and 60s when Wald was most active as a sculptor. Like many practising sculptors he opted to work in a variety of fi gurative styles, with occasional

forays into abstraction. The latter only really took place late in his life, between c.1968 and 1970. Works such as Birth of an Idea, Têtê à têtê and were all produced just before his untimely death at the age of 64. They evidence his experimentation with techniques such as ceramic slip-casting and resin casting. They have seldom, if ever, been exhibited in public before.

W ald’s ‘African’ works form only a small part of his artistic output. Like many artists of European origin, he felt the attraction

of the so-called ‘exotic’ when he came to Africa. Attracted by the colour and quality of local South African hardwoods, he carved a number of pieces on African themes, with highly-polished surfaces and fl owing concavities, such as Mother and Child III (1955-65). The latter approximates the totemic quality of European prehistoric objects that he had seen in European museums. Apart from carving techniques, Wald also tackled African subjects using modelling and casting techniques, as in works such as Zulu Protector (1968-69). Here, once again, his evocation of the totemic seems strongly in evidence.

Like many of the modern sculptors that he encountered in his wanderings as a student in Europe, Wald was

preoccupied with sculptural approaches to the human form. During the four years he spent in England (1933-1937), he became familiar with the work of three important sculptors: Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore and Frank Dobson. Virtually all of Wald’s works produced in Europe have been lost and we only know of them from photographs. Many of these have been included in this exhibition to give visitors some idea of the scope and range of his work. It is perhaps this range and diversity that critics perceived as a weakness rather than a strength.

Gassed (1939) is a work that Wald made in South Africa as a warning against a repeat of the horrors of

the First World War (1914-1918), when poison gas was used as a weapon in trench warfare. This contorted human fi gure, made in February of 1939, prophesied the outbreak of war in September. It was a war that would lead to the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the murder of Wald’s Hungarian family at Auschwitz. In some ways Gassed prefi gures Wald’s other works that deal – either directly or through literary allusion – with the Holocaust. Works such as Job and Cain relate this, as does of course his Monument to the Six Million.

Gassed

Mother and Child III Birth of an Idea

Têtê à têtê

Russian Girl

Man and his Soul

La Femme

First Consciousness

Job I Jacob Wrestling with the Angel

Religious DiscussionThe Scholar

Torsos

Drawing of La Femme

Erotic and literary themes abound in Wald’s work, and in this sense it can be seen as being part of the Symbolist tradition in European art, which was little understood or appreciated in South Africa. In Wald’s work the human body

becomes a vehicle for spirituality and abstraction; a merging and interpenetration of male and female. This is especially seen in his Man and his Soul, The Lovers and most remarkably in La Femme. The latter, a late work, is reminiscent of the highly abstract yet allusive work of Constantin Brancusi. It is highly phallic, but at the same time unmistakably female.

Photography: Jac de Villiers

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ald’s ‘African’ works form only a small part of his artistic output. Like many artists of European origin, he felt the attraction

of the so-called ‘exotic’ when he came to Africa. Attracted by the colour and quality of local South African hardwoods, he carved a number of pieces on African themes, with highly-polished surfaces and fl owing concavities, such as Mother and Child III (1955-65). The latter approximates the totemic Iquality of European prehistoric objects that he had seen in European museums. Apart from carving techniques, Wald also tackled African subjects using modelling and casting techniques, as in works such as Zulu Protector(1968-69). Here, once again, his evocation of the totemic seems strongly in evidence.

ike many of the modern sculptors that he encountered in his wanderings as a student in Europe, Wald was

preoccupied with sculptural approaches to the human form. During the four years he spent in England (1933-1937), he became familiar with the work of three important sculptors: Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore and Frank Dobson. Virtually all of Wald’s works produced in Europe have been lost and we only know of them from photographs. Many of these have been included in this exhibition to give visitors some idea of the scope and range of his work. It is perhaps this range and diversity that critics perceived as a weakness rather than a strength.

assed (1939) is a work that Wald dmade in South Africa as a warning against a repeat of the horrors of

the First World War (1914-1918), when poison gas was used as a weapon in trench warfare. This contorted human fi gure, made in February of 1939, prophesied the outbreak of war in September. It was a war that would lead to the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the murder of Wald’s Hungarian family at Auschwitz. In some ways Gassed prefi gures Wald’s other works dthat deal – either directly or through literary allusion – with the Holocaust. Works such as Job and Cain relate this, as does of course his Monument to the Six Million.

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rotic and literary themes abound in Wald’s work, and in this sense it can be seen as being part of the Symbolist tradition in European art, which was little understood or appreciated in South Africa. In Wald’s work the human body

becomes a vehicle for spirituality and abstraction; a merging and interpenetration of male and female. This is especially seen in his Man and his Soul, The Lovers and most remarkably in La Femme. The latter, a late work, is reminiscent of the highly abstract yet allusive work of Constantin Brancusi. It is highly phallic, but at the same time unmistakably female.

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