“I am interested in what I call the tyranny of art. Where the art takes over from the artist, and the artist, toward the end, isn’t as free as he though he was.”
– Dimitri Hadzi
Biography
Dimitri Hadzi (1921-2006) is among the most distinguished sculptors of the 20th century. His work is characterized by its unique ability to merge themes and traditions from ancient Hellenic culture–language and attitudes, mythology and theater–with 20th century tenets of Modernism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. While Hadzi's work presents itself in formalist terms, it always remains rooted in meaning drawn from his Greek heritage.
A creator of works in bronze, stone, and ceramic, Hadzi employed traditional materials and embraced the richness of history as both a literary and aesthetic source during a career that spanned over five decades.
Born on March 21, 1921 to Greek immigrant parents in Greenwich Village, Hadzi is the second of five children. His family moves to Brooklyn shortly after his birth. As a youth, he attends Greek school each afternoon, where he receives his first significant exposure to Greek language and culture. Expressing a natural inclination for drawing, he enters and wins the Wanamaker Drawing Medal as a student. In 1936, Hadzi passes the entrance examination to Brooklyn Technical High School and majors in chemistry. After graduating in 1940, he continues his studies towards a degree at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute.
“In many ways, Dimitri’s sculpture, like his life, straddled dual cultures, still believing in the vitality and worth of post-Cubist art, insisting that this European legacy did not have to be forestalled by the War, as it had been in America, that there was still something to say in modernist sculptural languages that had their origins in Paris. And prove it he did, even long after he moved to Cambridge in 1975 to take up his teaching position at Harvard, the devotion to his work never abating.”
– Debra Bricker Balken, Independent Curator and Writer
In 1942, Hadzi volunteers to join the U.S. Army Air Force, and is stationed on a remote island off the coast of Australia as a radio mechanic. After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1946 he hitchhikes from California to the East Coast stopping along the way to visit the Art Institute of Chicago, The Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art among others. Returning to New York City, he enrolls in evening art classes at the 92nd Street Y with Aaron Berkman (1900-1991), a Social Realist involved in the WPA. Hadzi subsequently passes the entrance examination to Cooper Union. Abandoning a career in chemistry, Hadzi begins a four-year program in fine arts; his teachers include Robert Gwathmey (drawing), Morris Kantor and Nicholas Marsicano (painting), John Hovannes and Milton Hebald (sculpture). Hadzi describes Hebald as strongly influenced by Lipchitz and considers this influence one of the formative elements in his own work.
During these four years in New York, he is exposed to the work of the Surrealists and the Cubists. But moreover, in December 1946 he sees the retrospective of Henry Moore at the Museum of Modern Art and is influenced by the organic forms, knife-sharp edges, compact twisted shapes and stretching points.
In 1948, he visits Isamu Noguchi at his MacDougal Alley Studio and is strongly affected by the older artist’s work. They would meet again in Rome and their acquaintance would grow into a lasting friendship. In addition to his studies at Cooper Union, Hadzi takes day classes at the Brooklyn Museum Art School (BMAS), where Hebald is on the faculty. He studies painting with Manfred Schwartz and is exposed to the work of other faculty members, among whom are John Ferren, Rufino Tamayo, and Max Beckmann. With a scholarship, Hadzi studies painting with Ralston Crawford at the BMAS.
After graduating with honors from Cooper Union, Hadzi is awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for study in Greece, where he begins investigating stone carving at the Polytechion in Athens. This stay in Greece exposes him for the first time to Archaic and Classical sculpture–instinctually he embraces his heritage studying the archaeological sites at Mycenae, Tiryns, and Asine. With a second Fulbright Fellowship from the American School of Classical Studies, Hadzi travels to Egypt and Turkey, where he visits Hagia Sophia and the Hittite Museum.
In 1951, Hadzi moves to Rome studying on the G.I. Bill. He would extend his stay for twenty-five years. Visiting galleries in Rome, he becomes better acquainted with the work of leading contemporary artists such as Mirko, Marino Marini, Afro, and Pericle Fazzini, in whose studio he meets the poet Ungharetti. He spends time in local cafés and galleries, and at Rosatti's on the Piazza del Popolo he meets Federico Fellini, Pier Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Levi, and others. There he becomes acquainted with several people in Italian creative circles, as well as American residents who are artists, photographers, writers, and journalists. Tim Vreeland, the architect, introduces Hadzi to Baroque art and Roman monuments. He acquires his first Rome studio on via Vittoria Colonna.
“Dimitri Hadzi’s sculptures have the deeply satisfactory self-sufficiency of all finished work. They do the paradoxical things, which the best sculptural forms do. … I value Dimitri’s oeuvre because of its nice combination of confidence and impersonality, muscle and nimbleness, historical echo and original forthrightness, its excellence on the largest and smallest scales. I value it because I know from looking at it and from observing its maker that it springs from a proverbial need which acts as a kind of sweet torment until it finds its release and equivalent in the silent adequacy of the sculptures themselves.”
– Seamus Heaney, poet, Nobel Prize laureate, (Dimitri Hadzi, Hudson Hill Press, NY, 1996):
Enrolling in the Museo Artistico e Industriale in 1952, Hadzi studies alongside many prominent contemporary Italian sculptors including Pericle Fazzini, Emilio Greco, Lorenzo Guerrini, Leonardo Leoncillo, and Renato Guttuso. He studies ceramics, metalwork, including repoussée technique, jewelry making, and bronze casting.
In 1953, he begins to exhibit his work at the prestigious Galleria Schneider in Rome. He is given a studio at the American Academy in Rome where he resides with his first wife, the art historian Martha Leeb. Through the coming two decades, Hadzi is exposed to a regular stream of talented artists, writers, scholars and other intellectuals from the United States and Europe whose frequent visits to Rome considerably enrich his stay in the city.
In 1955, Hadzi receives the Tiffany Award for sculpture. He receives his first public commission for “Helios” in the Sun Life Building in Baltimore, MD. This marks the first of his many subsequent site-specific large-scale public commissioned works. In 1956, he is included in the Museum of Modern Art “New Talent IX” exhibition, and again in 1959, he is included in the important MoMA exhibition “Recent Sculpture, U.S.A.” During this time, he is the youngest sculptor to be invited to make a proposal for the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, in the company of Isamu Noguchi, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet.
During the 1960s, Hadzi begins exhibiting extensively in the United States and Europe. His first solo exhibition in New York opens at the Stephen Radich Gallery in December 1961. And earlier the same year, his first solo in Germany at Galerie Van De Loo, Munich. In 1962, together with Louise Nevelson, he represents American sculpture in the U.S. Pavilion at the XXXI Biennale in Venice. Many exhibitions would follow as well as several major museum acquisitions.
Major commissions during this period include the design for the bronze doors for St. Paul’s “Within-the-Walls” in Rome in 1966; “Thermopylae” for the Government Center Plaza, Boston, and “K458 The Hunt” for Lincoln Center, New York. These commissions continue into the 1970s including his 1974 monumental basalt piece “Willamette River Oracle” in Eugene, Oregon, which marked an important change in materials and sculptural bravura from bronze to stone. Large-scale public sculptures, in both bronze and stone, continue to be very important in his oeuvre until the 1990s.
Dimitri Hadzi in Rome with “Thermopylae” in progress, c.1967. Courtesy Estate of Dimitri Hadzi
“No matter what material Dimitri worked in – and he worked in almost every one, for he was equally a carver, a modeller, and a joiner – he always arrived at a very particular surface that was his alone. The word that springs to mind is ‘articulate.’ His bronzes, however laboriously he finished and patinated them (using all of the knowledge he gained before he gave up chemistry for art), still bear the traces of knife and trowel, the memory of scraped wax and spattered plaster applied by a sure, never fussy hand. They are also articulate in the sense that they speak, or make light and air speak. Dimitri’s works will continue to breathe and speak for a very long time.”
– Harry Cooper, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
After a nearly-twenty-five-year sojourn in Rome, in 1975, Hadzi returns to the US and begins teaching at Harvard University where he remains until his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1989. During his fourteen-year tenure at Harvard, he participates in a frenzy of academic activities; lectures, concerts, film, and student productions. His main studio is on the top floor of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the only building designed by Le Corbusier in the United States. Hadzi is highly motivated and creative in this space, sensing the ever-present spirit of the great architect.
In 1983, Hadzi is elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. His passionate interest in foreign cultures takes him to India, Egypt, Japan and Central America, continually supplemented by visits to Greece, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. In 1986, he is marries the artist and curator Cynthia von Thuena.
In 1989, Hadzi retires from teaching at Harvard University in order to explore painting and printmaking and to devote full attention to his sculpture in stone, bronze, wood, and later, ceramics. He begins to introduce applied color to his work in stone, wood and ceramics while his sculpture strongly informs his painting and graphics.
In 1996, Hudson Hills Press publishes a definitive study on Hadzi.
Ever inquisitive, in the early 2000s, Hadzi makes an ambitious foray into the ceramic arts. He brings a monolithic approach to one of the more intimate, ancient and malleable materials. These works are publicly exhibited for the first time in 2002 at the Kouros Gallery, New York.
Until his death in 2006, Hadzi continued to work from his Cambridge studio with the enthusiasm, curiosity and perseverance that marked five decades of a rich artistic life.
Monographic institutional presentations have included The Hellenic Cultural Foundation, New York (1998); The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (1991); Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge (1984); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard (1975); Galleria dell’Obelisco, Rome (1974); Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, (1969); MIT, Cambridge (1963).
Significant posthumous solo exhibitions include Rosenthal Fine Arts, Chicago, IL (May 2023); Danese/Corey, New York (2013); Danese, New York (2010, 2008); Victoria Munroe Gallery, Boston (2009, 2008); Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown (2007).
Hadzi received many prestigious awards and honors including Fulbright Fellowship (1950); The Comfort Tiffany Award for Sculpture (1955); The Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1957); American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1962); National Academy of Arts and Letters Grant (1962); Citation Award for High Achievement in the Visual Arts, Cooper Union (1976); Honorary Master of Arts, Harvard University (1977); Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Grant (1984); Museum Award, Hakone Open Air Museum (1987) Fifth Annual Henry Moore Grand Prize, Hakone Open Air Museum (1987); The Augustus Saint-Gaudens Medal, Cooper Union (1989).
Teaching appointment and residences include Artist-in-Residence, Dartmouth College, RI (1969); Artist-In-Residence, American Academy, Rome (1973-74); Artist-In-Residence, Fullerton College, CA (1974); Tenure Faculty, Harvard University (1975-1989); Sculptor-in-Residence, White Mountain Center for the Arts, NH (1977).
For a full list of public commissions, click here.