"Futura," a carved figure nine feet tall, gazes into the distance, one hand raised to his brow, the other hand held behind his back, fingers crossed. Made by William (Bill) King at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1989, its gesture is perhaps even more relevant in the year 2022 -- observant, cautious, somewhat hopeful.
Opposite "Futura" at the Arts Center at Duck Creek's show of King's work in wood -- placed on a handsome, sturdy table built by the artist and painted yellow -- is another piece that dates from Bill's time at Skowhegan, though crafted 40 years earlier (1948-1952): "Uptown," or "Jim Broady as Josephine Baker." Upon graduating from Cooper Union in 1948, Bill won a citywide competition that sent him to the newly formed school for the arts in rural Maine. There he honed his way of working, and he maintained a lifelong connection with a place that offered space for young artists to grow. He said of the school, "Skowhegan is a Xanadu, or Shangri-la in a way, in my consciousness."
Faced with a body of work created over 70 years by a prolific artist who made his living by sculpting in a remarkable range of materials, Jess Frost, the curator, chose for this show to focus on King's works in wood. The art critic David Cohen has praised his "pitch-perfect control of materials," an ability that allowed him to convey whatever he desired. King was "a modernist with one foot in American folk art."
Over the course of his career, Bill made sculpture out of wood, plaster, clay, aluminum, steel, bronze, burlap, Naugahyde, and even Tyvek (used in house construction). I am reminded of a story he told, reflecting on his student days in New York City. While he was at work in a studio, Milton Herald, one of his Cooper Union instructors, appeared at the door: "What are you doing here?"
Bill's reply: "I'm making. I'm working."
"That's good," said Herald. "I'll bet you can get 50 bucks for that!" It was a profession (an art!) Bill applied himself to daily for seven decades.
From the 1950s, when he first began showing his work, Bill earned respect as a master carver. For the Duck Creek show, Ms. Frost selected figures made of pine, mahogany, cedar, and balsa -- "Dutch Boy," a painted figure with an impressive artist's brush in hand, stands over nine feet high, while "Self as First Lady," clothed in a delicate blue nylon dress (Bill was a first-class tailor), measures 29 inches high.
I happened to be at the opening to witness a woman circling "Bon Soir" (originally titled "The End" if you look closely), the tender embrace of a man and a woman. "Look at the embrace, the carefully carved hands," she said, "and the beautiful feet."
Viewers of Bill's work have always noted both playful and satiric qualities. He is an acute "social critic," but keen observers have also noted another quality, less visible in contemporary sculpture -- tenderness. It is a quality inherent both in the man and in his love of the materials -- the substance -- he carved or molded. "I see the material first," he said. "I see the material I want to work with, and then the idea comes. The muse will send you an image."
Hilton Kramer famously called Bill's "a sculpture of comic gesture," and that gesture is suffused throughout the barn and gallery space of Duck Creek. In an "Opinion" composed for his audience and included in an early catalog, Bill wrote, "If some of [these sculptures] make you feel good, that's where the art is, not in the sculptures themselves."
Another critic, Arthur Danto, noted that comedy is often underappreciated "in part because the distinction between the comic and the merely laughable has become blurred. It is, however, robust in King's brilliant and witty sculptures, which confirm a thesis of Hegel's, that comic action requires a solution almost more stringent than a tragic action does."
Look at his work once, and then return to look again, as is required of the finest art, and you may come nearer to the solution that Bill sculpted with such skill.
Note the comic element embedded in the titles Bill has chosen, often turned back upon himself: "Self as Bartok," "Faun," "Self as Pushover," "Ego (or Self as Freud)," "Old Wingfoot Comes for the Advertising Man."
Beyond the formal brilliance of this sculptor's work and his love of his materials, there is always what Kramer recognized as "wit, empathy, simplicity, and psychological precision."
Having lived with Bill's art for four decades now, I continue to admire the range of human emotions he could depict with such accuracy, and often with the most minimal gesture, as if idea, feeling, material, and a sculptor's dexterity all arrive in the moment in just this one sculpture.
More than once I heard Bill say of his figures, "They are all self-portraits." If this is so, what a fantastic, audacious (to use a word Bill favored) collection of personalities come together to populate his imagination.
Forty years ago, Kramer wrote, "At the present moment there is -- quite literally -- no one else like him." That moment is with us still, and will be as we look into the future, with "Esperanza," a painted figure carved in balsa, one hand hugging her back, fingers crossed.
Scott Chaskey of Sag Harbor, poet, farmer, educator, and author, knew William King as stepfather-in-law for 35 years.
