William King

 

Photo by Wes Morgan (at Foust Park) of Solstice by William King. The following is obit from the NYTimes.

William King, Sculptor, Dies at 90; His Pointed Wit Was a Tool

By Bruce Weber March 26, 2015

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 was born in Jacksonville, Fla., on Feb. 25, 1925. His father, Walter, was a surveyor and an engineer who moved his family around Florida to accommodate his work. As a boy, William made model airplanes and helped his father and older brother build furniture and boats. Expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, he began to study engineering at the University of Florida, but it was his mother, the former Florence Dickey, a teacher, who recognized his independent streak and encouraged his departure.

“I was 19, 20, my mother gave me a hundred bucks, says, ‘Get out of this state and don’t come back until you’re 65; there is nothing here for you,’ ” Mr. King recalled in a video interview for the Smithsonian museum.

He came to New York, where he attended the Cooper Union and began selling his early sculptures even before he graduated. He later studied with the sculptor Milton Hebald (who died this year) and traveled to Italy on a Fulbright grant.

Mr. King’s work often reflected the times, taking on fashions and occasional politics. In the 1960s and 1970s, his work featuring African-American figures (including the activist Angela Davis, with hands cuffed behind her back) evoked his interest in civil rights.

Mr. King’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Connie Fox, whom he married in a Buddhist ceremony in 2003 presided over by the novelist and Zen roshi Peter Matthiessen; a son, Eli King; a daughter, Amy King; a stepdaughter, Megan Chaskey; a stepson, Brian Boyd; and seven grandchildren. The New York Times critic Holland Cotter once described Mr. King’s sculpture as “comical-tragical-maniacal,” and “like Giacomettis conceived by John Cheever.”

“Misery loves comedy” was one way Mr. King himself described his attitude. He continued to work until just a few months before his death.

Mr. Chaskey, his stepdaughter’s husband, recalled, “He said, ‘If I can’t go out in the studio, what’s the point?’ ”

A version of this article appears in print on March 27, 2015, Section B, Page 8 of the New York Times