Waylande Gregory

Horse

1936

Beautiful abstract sculpture depicting a guitar player. Bronze on wood base measuring 15 x 9 x 4 inches. Actual cast piece without base measuring 17 x 7 x 3 inches. Signed indistinct...

William King (1925-2015). Reclining figure, ca. 1965. Cast and welded bronze, 7 x 9.5 x 5 inches. Unsigned. William King, a sculptor in a variety of materials whose human figures traced social attitudes through the last half of the 20th century, often poking sly and poignant fun at human follies and foibles, died on March 4 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 90. His death was confirmed by Scott Chaskey, who is married to Mr. King's stepdaughter, Megan Chaskey. Mr. King worked in clay, wood, bronze, vinyl, burlap and aluminum. He worked both big and small, from busts and toylike figures to large public art pieces depicting familiar human poses -- a seated, cross-legged man reading; a Western couple (he in a cowboy hat, she in a long dress) holding hands; a tall man reaching down to tug along a recalcitrant little boy; a crowd of robotic-looking men walking in lock step. But for all its variation, what unified his work was a wry observer's arched eyebrow, the pointed humor and witty rue of a fatalist. His figurative sculptures, often with long, spidery legs and an outlandishly skewed ratio of torso to appendages, use gestures and posture to suggest attitude and illustrate his own amusement with the unwieldiness of human physical equipment. His subjects included tennis players and gymnasts, dancers and musicians, and he managed to show appreciation of their physical gifts and comic delight at their contortions and costumery. His suit-wearing businessmen often appeared haughty or pompous; his other men could seem timid or perplexed or awkward. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, he tended to depict women more reverentially, though in his portrayals of couples the fragility and tender comedy inherent in couplehood settled equally on both partners. Mr. King's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among other places, and he had dozens of solo gallery shows in New York and elsewhere. But the comic element of his work probably caused his reputation to suffer. Reviews of his exhibitions frequently began with the caveat that even though the work was funny, it was also serious, displaying superior technical skills, imaginative vision and the bolstering weight of a range of influences, from the ancient Etruscans to American folk art to 20th-century artists including Giacometti, Calder. and Elie Nadelman. The critic Hilton Kramer, one of Mr. King's most ardent advocates, wrote in a 1970 essay accompanying a New York gallery exhibit that he was, "among other things, an amusing artist, and nowadays this can, at times, be almost as much a liability as an asset." A "preoccupation with gesture is the focus of King's sculptural imagination," Mr. Kramer wrote. "Everything that one admires in his work - the virtuoso carving, the deft handling of a wide variety of materials, the shrewd observation and resourceful invention - all this is secondary to the concentration on gesture. The physical stance of the human animal as it negotiates the social arena, the unconscious gait that the body assumes in making its way in the social medium, the emotion traced by the course of a limb, a torso, a head, the features of a face, a coiffure or a costume - from a keen observation of these materials King has garnered a large stock of sculptural images notable for their wit, empathy, simplicity and psychological precision." William Dickey King...

Beautiful figural sculpture by American artist, Ernest Tino Trova (1927-2009). Walking Man with Disc (working study), 1966. Brass sheet with cut-out figure in profile, sheet measures...

Reaching, ca. 1980. Cast bronze. Signed in lower region on wrist. A rare example from the artist's later period influenced by figurative abstraction with expressionist tendencies. ...

Figure of a Chanting Warrior Ceramic with bitumen highlights 300-600 CE (Classic Period) Mexico, Veracruz, possibly Nopiloa Veracruz Culture Pre-Columbian, Mexico, Vera Cruz culture...

Beautiful late 15th-century Burgundian Netherlandish portrait of a woman. Carved walnut. Original polychrome has been removed with traces at base and lower portions of figure. Minor ...

A very rare bronze cast of two battling Rams, by Sirio Tofanari (1886-1969). An old cast with a dark brown shaded patina. On a heavy green marble steppe...

A fine quality, twentieth-century bronze model of a roaring lioness by Alberic Collin (Belgian 1886-1962). Prior to casting by the Valsuani foundry it w...

Stephen Glassborow was born in Hammersmith, England and studied sculpture at the Brighton College of Art, before becoming a permanent resident of Au...

Stephen Glassborow was born in Hammersmith, England and studied sculpture at the Brighton College of Art, before becoming a permanent resident of Au...

Stephen Glassborow was born in Hammersmith, England and studied sculpture at the Brighton College of Art, before becoming a permanent resident of Australia in 1983. He is now one of ...

Artist Statement “Bronze figurative sculpture has a long tradition. For me, the Art Deco period was the foundation for inspiration. Running parallel to that are ideas that spring fro...