16 Facts About Reuben Kadish

Reuben Kadish was an American artist, specializing as a sculptor, draughtsman, muralist, painter, and printmaker.

The family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1920 and it was there that Kadish developed strong roots and lifelong friendships.

Reuben Kadish's father, Samuel Kadish was a painting contractor by trade but harbored strong political interests having been, while a young man in pre-revolutionary Russia, a member of the Marxist-oriented General Jewish Labour Bund in Kovno.

The elder Reuben Kadish was quite artistic in his own right as a trained decorative painter, expert in various decorative painting techniques such as Faux Bois and marbling.

Reuben Kadish passed his artistic proclivities to his eldest son, Reuben, who from an early age drew everything in sight.

Reuben Kadish inherited his father's political activism and, as a teenager, became a political radical, leading a protest against the US Marine presence in Nicaragua, which resulted in his suspension from high school.

Guston and Reuben Kadish soon grew tired of Otis and set up a studio nearby where they continued their self-taught apprenticeship to Renaissance painting and the growing movement of the Mexican muralists.

Reuben Kadish had volunteered his services to the charismatic Siqueiros and chauffeured the famed artist around Los Angeles and assisted him in local outdoor mural projects such as the Plaza Art Center in 1932.

Reuben Kadish worked for twenty-five cents per impression in a part-time job for Stanley Hayter's storied Atelier 17 in Greenwich Village, printing editions for the likes of Joan Miro, Andre Masson and other European Surrealists.

Keen on living in New York City, Reuben Kadish wanted to join old friends like Jackson Pollock who were migrating to the eastern end of Long Island for cheap housing.

Once that dramatic transformation was made, Reuben Kadish moved his family back to New York City, renting out his land to tenant farmers and starting a new career.

Reuben Kadish taught design at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, the Brooklyn Museum of Art School and finally in 1960, began his long association with the Cooper Union in Manhattan as a professor of art history and sculpture.

Apart from his teaching and art-making in the late 1950s and 1960s, Reuben Kadish moonlighted as part-owner of the White Horse Tavern, the legendary Greenwich Village bar where the British poet Dylan Thomas died from alcohol poisoning in 1953.

In 1977, Reuben Kadish led a group of students in completing the restoration of the historic Foundation Building at Cooper Union, casting missing and broken pieces of the cast-iron lamps and capitals in the shop's foundry, saving the school approximately $40,000.

Reuben Kadish created an impressive oeuvre of deeply scored terra cotta and bronze sculpture that was viscerally reflective of his Abstract Expressionist roots and hammered out a respectable exhibition career.

Those lucky ones heard Reuben Kadish's thundering lectures on Egyptian funerary sculpture, Greek mythology, and cinema-like slide shows of exotic art and architecture from around the world.