The Art of Jean Seidenberg - 4

Seidenberg opened his first foundry in 1963, an event that signaled a huge shift in his art and his personal life. In the coming decade, he would drift away from painting — the vehicle for so much agonized contemplation of domestic life and losses — and take up a public role as a sculptor. Seidenberg has often described this change of media as the practical decision of an artist who needed to support his family. With a vast building boom transforming New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, he found a ready market for sculptures in public buildings and churches. But casting bronze also became an act of liberation in a decade when liberation was very much in IN THE SCULPTURE YARD c. 1968 Photo by David Rieff the air. Instead of sitting alone in his painter’s studio, he would learn to work closely with architects, becoming a problem-solver, a craftsman who could bring in projects on time and on budget. While his painting studios had always been in his home or close by, the foundry was necessarily distant — a steel-frame warehouse in an industrial park. The foundry became a social center for Seidenberg. He began to work at night, avoiding the daytime heat of New Orleans. He surrounded himself with fellow artists and studio help. Gradually, the disciplined, domestic painter of the 1950s became the bushy-headed sculptor of the 1960s. He hosted “Happenings” at the foundry, drank vodka after midnight bronze pours, reveled in the physical demands of casting, and kept away from home as the marriage he’d entered at age 19 began to dissolve. The new work looked as different as he did. For the first time, Seidenberg began to create and exhibit abstractions. His subjects were often erotic. The sandwiched waveforms of “Celebration,” (pp. 38–39) and the interlocked, pelvic curves of “Two Forms,” (p. 42) seem caught in an act of coitus. He populated his studio with abstract maquettes — one series titled “Walking Woman” (p. 44) and another called “Stacked Forms” (p. 44) — which appear to be composed of breasts, buttocks, and jutting limbs tugged in every direction. Pleasure and anxiety meet in these erotic works. Seidenberg was no bead-draped guru of free love. In fact, the culminating emblem of his foundry nights is the massive “Guillotine,” (p. 46) a weighty bronze monument to castration fears and sexual guilt. When Seidenberg returned to painting, the crisp clarity of the work reflected a new calm in his personal life. In 1981 he married the garden writer and naturalist Charlotte Seidenberg — and he celebrated their flowering relationship with a series of portraits in egg tempera. Seidenberg had taken up tempera for practical reasons. The new medium gave him a painter’s advantages — color, scale and a practiced vocabulary of brush marks — while letting him retain the precise contours and photographic polish of his graphite drawings. At that time, commissioned pencil portraits were an economic mainstay for Seidenberg.

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