Visualization drives a ‘cerebral’ arts statesman

To look at a Herbert Simon sculpture is to see metal transformed by the mind’s eye and the artist’s hands into a thought, an emotion, maybe even a chuckle.

See the marks left by the artist’s tools? The cuts in the metal, the places he hammered, shaped and welded a once-rigid form? Run your fingers along a harsh edge or a smooth curve. Really, it’s OK to touch it — it’s public art. Your art.

Add the play of sun or shadow, and the sculpture becomes something else entirely. Just what is entirely up to you.

Over the years, Simon’s art has graced galleries and museums, private homes and outdoor spaces. Commissioned sculptures are on permanent display at Wilkes University, the airport and Coal Street Park.

Now 80, Simon has worked without pause since the 1940s — painting, sculpting and making collages, line drawings and prints. Everything from wrestling and espresso machines to the Manhattan skyline and even his own head has found its way into Simon’s art.

He’s gone from realism to abstract and back again, from stretching canvas to welding bronze, from larger-than-life to intimate as a caress.

And he’s still at it, busing nearly every day from Shavertown to the printmaking studio at Wilkes, where he served as distinguished professor for 23 years before retiring in 1992.

“A good part of the art-making process is just that — the daily grind. Getting up and working. It’s not just waiting around for divine inspiration,” says Sharon Bowar, associate art professor at Wilkes.

“Herb is a very prolific artist and practices regular, daily discipline. I really respect that.”

Five years ago, Simon returned to the classroom as a student in Bowar’s printmaking class.

Today, he is Wilkes’ ad hoc artist-in-residence. Bowar says students 60 years Simon’s junior learn the rigors of an artistic life the best way possible: by observing an artist at work.

“It’s just been fabulous having him there, and I hope he continues. We would all miss him if he left.”

A labor of love

“The play of formal relationship, a working with geometric modules, and the more impersonal character of my earlier abstract work has been followed by sculptures and drawings in which memory, nostalgia, the absurd, the bizarre, the humorous and the self-referential have been given scope.”

Picture Simon as caricature: one black and one white eyebrow as bushy as Einstein’s, glasses that make his blue eyes wide enough to startle and hands as expressive as tiny dancers.

His East Center Street home is spotless and cool, with large picture windows that frame the greenery outside. Sculptures large and small command every available surface.

In the dining room, paintings and prints jostle for space alongside the abstract “45 Degree Revolve,” with its tilted aluminum tubes. “A lot of people, if they see a piece of art and it doesn’t represent something, they’re mystified by it,” he says. “What interests a lot of sculptors is formal relationships – figures, lines, mass, movement. I try to suggest an idea.”

At first glance, Simon’s studio – with its tools, welding machine, vises, aluminum rods and metal sheets – resembles a mechanic’s workshop. “I’ve done a lot of work out here,” he says of the sweat and imagination that combine in art that is curious and humorous, abstract and realistic. A theme might be found in a displayed quote from William Butler Yeats: “In dreams begins responsibility.”

Under Simon’s hands, an ordinary mailbox becomes a sculpture. A dirty ashtray, coffee cup, book, and clock pointed to 2:25 a.m. – fashioned of welded metal, down to delicate tissues in a box – become “Insomniac’s Night Table.” Each title provides a telling peek inside a creative mind: “Batman and Robin in the City,” “Warped Midtown,” “Atlas Shrunk,” “Scissors for Cutting Edge Art.”

To stone sculptor Robert Bergstrasser, Simon is a “cerebral artist” whose work was often ahead of its time.

“Many people just walk by and say ‘Huh. That’s nice.’ You have to sit and contemplate Herb’s art for a while,” says Bergstrasser, who’s known Simon since 1977.

When Simon places one aluminum tube next to another, shearing off a rounded edge at a harsh angle, “All of a sudden you have this complication. He creates a beautiful curve. That’s very thought-provoking,” says Bergstrasser, of Wilkes-Barre.

“Just like Monet used to look at shadows, we have to look at his work and ask why. So what if I ask the wrong questions? I still ask them.”

Artwork displayed in public spaces fosters culture, which Bergstrasser says makes Simon’s contribution to the Wyoming Valley a precious one.

“Herb studied with Robert Motherwell,” Bergstrasser says of the abstract expressionist, a member of the New York School along with the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. “That’s like, wow, oh my gosh. This is the guy who was there.”

Early years

“Another theme in this landscape mode was that of Manhattan. No doubt this stemmed from my love/hate relationship with the nearby but oh-so-distant metropolis where I formerly lived and frequently visit.”

Simon was born in 1927, the son of an optometrist and a homemaker from Nashville, a small, segregated Bible Belt city that banned movies and liquor on Sundays. Instead of joining the family business, Simon joined the Navy.

While stationed in Boston, he immersed himself in the city’s museums and galleries. “I began to draw and realized it was something that really challenged me,” he says. A single line in a Henry Miller book about Boston Harbor moved Simon to entirely reconsider landscapes: “It was wreckage strewn by a demented monster.”

In the mid-1940s, he moved to New York – a vibrant city of dreams with an enticing downtown art scene dominated by artists drunk on the possibilities of brash new art forms. He brushed against the greats: Franz Kline at the Cedar Tavern and Alfred Stieglitz at a midtown gallery. “It was summer, and he wore an overcoat. He was draped across a sofa,” Simon recalls of the photographer. “It was all part of my becoming an artist.”

Simon painted in earnest, at Brooklyn Museum Art School and in the studio with Hans Hofmann. “Everyone you can think of in New York studied with him,” Simon says. “It was the real art world.”

He first encountered Motherwell at Colorado College and later studied with the master at New York’s Hunter College. “He was very sophisticated,” Simon says. “I was painting in a representational manner, and he got me to move toward abstract.”

Motherwell also convinced Simon to tackle his first teaching gig at the North Carolina State College School of Design and Architecture. Returning to post-war Manhattan, Simon found himself in the new center of the arts universe.

“America was powerful and optimistic, and abstract expressionists were able to give it a kind of prestige it had never enjoyed before,” Simon says. “Before, Americans were always looking over their shoulder to Paris.”

By now a sculptor, the young artist scored shows in 1964 and 1966 at the Phoenix Gallery with works in plaster, carvings and wood. “Maybe I sold one thing. But for me it was a beginning,” he says.

With his master’s, he taught art in New York public schools for nine years, a job that allowed him to make art and pay bills. With the ’60s in full flower, Wilkes-Barre soon became the epicenter of Simon’s universe.

Wyoming Valley inspiration

“Since coming to this region in 1969 I had been struck by the stark, gritty quality of the area, but it was only after 1987 that it occurred to me this landscape might provide the raw material for art.”

Moving to a small city of 58,000, where beer and coal were king, meant big changes. One thing remained steadfast: Simon’s commitment to art.

The arts community embraced Simon with one-man and group shows, all-important paid commissions and exhibits in Allentown, Reading and Harrisburg museums and at universities such as Lehigh and Lafayette.

He discovered beauty in the bizarre. Ashley’s Huber Breaker, abandoned coal-company houses and culm banks? Art for the taking. “It’s scarred and can be depressing, but it’s also of interest to me,” he says. “In New York, they’ve seen so much they can be very blas�. Here, people attend shows and they buy art. It’s very positive.”

After 1987, Simon’s largely abstract work, with its aluminum and steel geometric modules, segued into more representational art based on objects and landscapes. In the ’90s, he concentrated on smaller bronzes, doing the chasing, welding and patination by hand. He now concentrates on printmaking, finishing nearly 200 etchings, mainly on copper or zinc plates, and some on consignment in Manhattan.

“I started out as a painter, but I haven’t stretched canvas in 40 years,” he says. “But I still like to do what’s called works on paper. In life you often go back to work you’ve done in the past. It’s not over. You can always return to it. In a sense, it’s recycling.”

He’s happiest when his art is in public view. “It’s what every sculptor wants. I like getting it out into the world.”

As elder statesman, Simon moves freely in the local art world, attending exhibits and openings with fellow artists. Manhattan retains its pull, but his reputation is rooted in his adopted home state. To Marywood University art professor Robert Griffith, Simon is “an extraordinary visual communicator.”

“He’s dedicated to not only his own work but to advancing the arts in general,” Griffith, 58, a metal sculptor, says. “He’s been very, very successful at demonstrating a fulfilling lifestyle centered around his art. He’s been a tremendous mentor to students.”

Sculpting his legacy

“Just as in 1987 I could not have anticipated the path my work would take, so now in 1993 I cannot predict future developments.”

When he’s not making art, Simon – a “promiscuous reader” – devours literature, history and essays. He shoots off letters to the editor and watches The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, the History Channel and Antiques Roadshow.

His humor stays sly. The best way for someone to show appreciation for his art? “Buy something.” His mind keeps ticking. What line did he add to the bottom of a print featuring characters he drew eons ago in a Manhattan gin joint? “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with a song still in them.”

In November, he’s having yet another show, this time at Kingston’s Something Special.

“I’ve realized something in my life,” he says. “I haven’t had the kind of success I would have liked, but I still feel like I want to continue. You never know. What I’d like to survive me is my work. That’s my legacy.”