The Studs Terkel of Clay: Jo Davidson

His mother's yelling him up for dinner from a Lower East Side street in the 1890's is what prompted America's best known sculptor between the World Wars to shorten his name to Jo Davidson. It was typical of this shamefully forgotten artist the centenary of whose birth we aren't properly celebrating on March 30. Joie did everything that way: he was a quick study, a spontaneous decider, and a pragmatic man whose one-day sittings astonished both sittees and fellow artists.

His style and his achievement were best explained in his wholly engaging Between Sittings: an informal biography (The Dial Press, 1951), a paperback reprint of which would be a befitting way to begin to memorialize one hundred years after he was born to immigrant Russian Jews, his mother "full of an unquenchable fire that brought life to everything around her" and his father "always praying and a sign of affection from him was a rarely given luxury."

His childhood memories were "vague and shadowy"--but dominated by recollections of "long, dark halls, crowded tenements, strange smells, drab unpainted walls and moving--we were always moving." But Jo's no whiner--he recalls going every Saturday and Sunday to the Metropolitan Museum with his pal Sam Halpert, the painter to be. They reveled in its glories.

But becoming an artist was the last priority on the financially beleaguered family's agenda. They regarded an artist as "a loafer, a perpetual pauper, an absolutely useless person." So Jo began a series of work experiences that would have driven Studs Terkel to euphoria: hawking newspapers at the corner of Duane Street and Broadway (he was muscled out), apprentice to a house painter and paperhanger (he prepared the paints and glue pots), Western Union messenger boy, errand boy for the publishing house of Truslow, Hanson and Combs (they peddled Madame Blavatsky and other theosophical sages), all this punctuated by obsessive reading at Rabinowitz's Bookstore, where the highlight of his burgeoning consciousness was to be able to scrape together a dime to buy Tom Paine's The Age of Reason.

His sister Rachie talked someone into sponsoring his tuition for a year at the Art Students League. There he met an artist who moonlighted in the new pop art of pyrography--burning Indian heads on leather skins. He was so good at it he was transferred to the design department, and then to a wooden box company where he burnt designs into wood.

His sister Nancy married David Bercinsky in New Haven where they opened a pharmacy to pay David's way through Yale Med. Quick-witted Jo borrowed photos of Yale's new president--and quickly had burnt the man's portrait, which was so good the college photographer displayed it in his store. That got him a patron fro entrance into Yale's Art School.

Repetitive drawing assignments over the same nude male model was grinding him down until, "wandering through the building, I found myself in the basement in a room full of plaster casts and modeling stands--and not a soul in it. I found the clay bin, put my hand in it, and I touched the beginning of my life."

He copied a mask of St. Francis so well the sculpture teacher thought he was an experienced artist. "I said that his was the very first time I had touched clay. He did not seem to believe me, which gave me the feeling I wasn't too bad." Ha. Pretty good indeed.

He signed on as a four dollar a week drudge for Herman A. MacNeil who was hard at work making the "Fountain of Liberty" for the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. "It consisted of colossal rampant seahorses, cavorting over a cascade of waves, sea formations and variegated seashells. At the other end of the studio there was an immense group in clay of two Indians--the older Indian standing on his tiptoes with his arms folded across his chest, looking into the distance, the younger Indian with his left arm on the old man's shoulder and in his right hand waving an olive branch. The title of the group was 'The Coming of the White Man'." Jo was as good at ironic prose as he was at shaping up three dimensional poses.

His career took off so fast that during World War I he began a clay encyclopedia of the leaders of the Western World. He had a gift for gab that eased his sitters into an emphatic state as fast as you could shout, "Jo-eee!" Few newsmakers eluded his facile fingers.

Whenever I visit the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, I end my visit with a tour of the room full of his best pieces--the sitting Buddha Gertrude Stein being my favorite. But he's as fresh and perceptive about John D. Rockefeller--and Walt Whitman (an intellect idol of his)--as he is about cultural celebrities.

Jo was in fact our first--and apparently last--3-D photojournalist, the Studs Terkel of clay. The summer of 1982, when three thousand sculptors from all over America assembled in Oakland for their biennial romp, I must have asked half of them what they thought of Jo. Who? His feisty Georges Clemenceau was there at the Palace of the Legion of Honor sculpture retro for them to see and savor. But all I got was a bunch of bored "Who's?" from those Sons of Jo.

Heh, even in these United States of Amnesia, Andy Warhol pre-tem Prez, we ought to be able to do better by Jo than that.