William King: Humor And Humanity
The first emotion on seeing one of Bill King's sculptures - as spindle-shanked and lanky as the artist himself - is a rush of delight and a smile of recognition.
Delight at the work's energy and wry humor, and recognition of a small social gesture - a bend of the knee, a sharp-elbowed hands-in-the-pocket stance, a certain inclination of the head - that we have seen a thousand times before.
The second emotion is a momentary guilt. We look around furtively, to see if anyone is watching. This is sculpture, after all. It's a serious matter. Should we really be smiling?
Gentle Humor
In an art world that has an insatiable appetite for the dark side of experience, that lavishes exposure on artists willing to pick at the scabs of pain and perversity, it's a brave artist who persists through the decades in depicting the gentle humor of everyday existence.
Mr. King's imagination never seems to flag, nor does his obviously intense hands-on enjoyment of different materials.
At his house in Northwest Woods, tall aluminum figures stride among the trees, watched through the windows by a phalanx of self-satisfied businessmen, broad-bodied and aggressive in their vinyl suits and blackjack ties.
Bach With A Harpsichord
A painted wooden dog, "Bill Dog," has the sculptor's face and a broken branch clenched between its teeth. In "Caffeine," a strung-out, spiky figure made from cedar shingles has a headful of staticky wire hair.
In a bronze tableau of Bach leaning over a harpsichord, it is easy to see the wood and cloth which was burned away during the lost-wax process.
There are rusty-patinated figures in cast iron, a passionately embracing pair of musicians in balsa wood, a "Paganini" in blue nylon, ceramic boxers, and a painted wooden figure of a man sitting on a stool, his knee sticking out at an ungainly angle as he pulls on a sock with a hole in the toe.
No Engineer He
Mr. King didn't come from an artistic family. Born in Florida, he descends instead from a long line of "engineers and exploiters."
His father was so determined the tradition be carried on that, according to family legend, he would lean over the cradle of Mr. King's elder brother and intone, "You're going to become an engineer. You're going to become an engineer."
"And," said Mr. King, "he did."
But somewhere along the line, he said, his mother must have decided to point him in another direction. She pushed him out of the nest, telling him Florida was no place for a young man and to get out and not come back until he was 65.
Fateful Crash
He set out for California to study to be an architect, but fate intervened on a brief detour to New York City, in the shape of a small plane that crashed into the Empire State Building. It was a headline-making event that got almost as much press coverage as the crash of the Hindenburg.
Mr. King was staying right around the corner. "I heard this terrific noise and rushed out, and there was all this smoke and flames."
" 'What a place!' I thought. 'This is where I want to be.' "
It was 1945. He signed on at Cooper Union, still intending to study architecture. But his drawing teacher took the class to see an exhibit of the sculpture of Elie Nadelman, and that changed Mr. King's direction.
"With all the arrogance of youth, I said, 'I could do that.' "
He Really Could
Most youthful arrogance soon comes up against the roadblock of reality, but in Mr. King's case it turned out that he really could do that.
His sculpture teacher was impressed with his early efforts, Mr. King remembered.
" 'That's pretty good,' he said to me. 'I bet you could sell that for $50.' Sell it for $50! In 1945! It made my head spin. The idea of making a living doing something you liked was unheard of where I came from."
"I'd have liked to be a pilot, but my eyes weren't good enough and I wasn't brave enough to be a bronco-buster, so I'd thought I was doomed to a life of drudgery and disappointment."
First Sales
He did indeed sell the sculpture for $50, and then sold others. In his final year at Cooper Union, he won a citywide competition for a scholarship, and the RoKo Gallery showed the winners. When the show ended, he had sold two of the three pieces and the gallery owner asked if he had any more.
"That was a riot!" said Mr. King. "Had I got any more? I went straight out and started making more."
He had signed with a gallery and made his first sales. He was on his way, and from then on he never looked back.
"I'm one of the lucky ones," he said. "I've made a living at it, most of the time. It's very cyclical - good years and bad years. For instance, one year I made $180,000, the next year I made $18,000, and the one after that I only made $1,800 - those numbers stick in my mind."
Italian Idyll
Shortly before Mr. King graduated from Cooper Union he received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Italy.
Leaving art school, he said, "was traumatic. I was so scared, I got married."
His first wife was a fellow student, the artist Lois Dodd. The couple spent an idyllic year in Italy, riding around on a motorbike and living in a Rome apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps, a year that Mr. King considers to have been absolutely essential to his development as an artist.
"In America, there's still this leftover Puritanism - art should uplift. If it's a sheer sensuous experience everyone gets uneasy."
Explosive Love Life
His first solo show was in 1952, at the Alan Gallery in Manhattan. Since 1961, he has been with the Terry Dintenfass Gallery there. Other solo exhibits form an orderly punctuation through the decades.
But if Mr. King's career as an artist followed a steady track, his love life seems to have been scattered with emotional landmines. Every decade or so another one exploded, catapulting him on a new romantic trajectory.
His first marriage fell apart following an "amour fou" with an English art student, better known now as the cookbook writer Shirley King, whom he married in 1955.
They were divorced 10 years later after he fell in love with Annie Kobin, and that marriage in its turn ended by 1977, when Mr. King moved full time to the East End to live in Springs with the painter Cile Downs.
Eye-Opener
His present relationship, with another painter, Connie Fox, has broken the pattern - they have been together for about 18 years.
"One of my wives said, 'You love those statues more than you love me.' And I thought, 'It's true.' But," added the sculptor, "if you fall in love, it always stays in some way - it doesn't just go away."
"Graham Greene once said, 'At the center of every artist, there's a chip of ice.' I had some big sculptures on 79th Street and I heard one of them had blown over. I got this terrible, sick feeling in my stomach," Mr. King remembered. "Not long after, Annie came to my studio and told me my mother had died. There really was not much of a feeling, not compared to what I'd felt about the sculpture."
"That was an eye-opener - monstrous, in a way."
Personal Bugaboos
In comparing the relative strengths of emotional feelings and castigating himself for falling short, Mr. King seems to forget that he really is not a good example of an icy-hearted anything.
From time to time, the letters pages of this newspaper are graced (or cursed, according to the reader's political leanings), by Mr. King's pointed cartoons and outraged letters.
Among the targets of his wrath have been local Republicans, greedy developers (in the person of characters called Bucks Biggy and Bucks Piggy), Shoreham, the Pentagon, racism, Central American policy, the gun lobby, and other personal bugaboos.
A longtime member of the East Hampton Town Democratic Committee, he pulls no punches when something gets him mad.
No Angels, No Devils
"I was always interested in politics," he said. "I've never liked the way people are bad to one another, and I've never understood why more people don't take it seriously and do something about it."
Recently, though, his political fire has died down, said Mr. King.
"It may be that I just need the energy to stay upright these days, but politics now seems so impersonal. You sense there are big wheels grinding away behind the scenes, but I don't know - I don't even want to know - how it all works."
"There isn't a place anymore for my sort of theatrical, confrontational street theater. Now Democrats are people in suits, and I realize they are no more angels than Republicans are devils."
Life And Politics
His ideas about life and politics are still there in his sculpture, however: in the essential humanity that lies just beneath the satire.
"I see my sculpture right in the line of tradition from prehistoric times, Roman, Renaissance, down through the ages. But a number of people see the message - see that sculptural decisions have been made, but also see the aura: 'Things are not okay, but that's all right.' "
Mr. King, wary of the inadequacy of words to describe art, put down his coffee mug with an unmistakable end-of-interview firmness.
"I'm pretty sure it's something like that."