Larger-than-life terracotta heads form an operatic visual finale in Eric Firestone Gallery’s exhibition Reuben Kadish: Earth Mothers. An amalgam of human beings and some strange subspecies, these crenellated heads, which look as if they were built from jagged scree, radiate a silent nobility. Frozen in semi-repose or grim rumination, or perhaps caught in death throes, they loom like beatific elders from a civilization wiped out by divine ordination, or by some cosmic whim. 

In fact, confronting the unimaginably real, and responding to premonitions of cataclysm and its aftermath, inform sculptor Reuben Kadish’s art as well as his biography. Born in Chicago in 1913 and raised in Los Angeles, he attended high school with Jackson Pollock, a lifelong friend, and furthered his studies at Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) in 1930 before apprenticing under Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Amid the political despair of the mid-1930s, he traveled to Morelia in Mexico and, collaborating with Philip Guston, created a 1,000-foot mural, “The Struggle Against War and Fascism” (1934–35) — a nightmarish epic that rang alarms about global far-right political terror and its concomitant militaristic barbarisms. 

But the mural project was only the first act in Kadish’s artistic interventions based on humanity’s universal inhumanity. During World War II, while in the US Army Artist Unit, he was commissioned to photograph civilian carnage in Burma and India, savageries that he further memorialized in pen-and-ink sketches. These acts of witness presumably gave rise to the artist’s poignant, sublimated ethics of paying close, empathic attention to corporeal anguish. 

The abundance of artwork in Earth Mothers, along with the works’ varied scale and psychological tenor, make sculpture seem like Kadish’s destiny from day one. But he only committed to it in full after a studio fire in the late 1940s destroyed most of his paintings. The surviving canvases — many done in what came to be known as an Abstract Expressionist mode — are featured here and underscore how, in turning from purely abstract painting to imaginative and figurative sculpture, he found a far more suitable métier for cultivating and refining an existential outlook. 

Partly instigated by the archeological fieldwork of his wife, Barbara Weeks, who introduced him to ancient sculptures from far-flung times and epochs, especially from the Kingdom of Benin and the Aztec Empire, Kadish tirelessly produced one sculptural series after another until his death in 1992.