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Neil Estern, Sculptor
 "I like sculpting nudes . . . , and I have done
many, both male and female," the sculptor Neil Estern told Dena
Merriam for Sculpture Review (Spring 1994). "But nudes tend
to be anonymous, and I am naturally drawn to people who have had an
impact on our lives and changed the course of history to some
degree. I think of it as three-dimensional biography. I want to make
my subjects vivid and alive so that the viewer can immediately
relate to their special qualities. For me, doing a public figure
represents an exciting challenge, although it can be very daunting
also." Estern has fashioned statues and busts of such towering
figures in American history as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, President John F. Kennedy, and New
York City mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Others of his subjects,
individuals who have also made major contributions to or had
indelible influences on society, include U.S. senator and
representative Claude Pepper of Florida; President Jimmy Carter; J.
Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI; U.S. senator Robert A.
Taft of Ohio; Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the architects
of Central Park, in New York City; and, in the United Kingdom,
Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Estern's bronze relief of the
songwriter Irving Berlin is in the collection of the National
Portrait Gallery, a division of the Smithsonian Institution, in
Washington, D.C., and his bust of the actor Danny Kaye is in the
collection of the Brooklyn Museum, in the New York City borough of
Brooklyn.
According to a writer for the National Park
Service, in a description for nps.gov of the Franklin Delano
Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., "The portrait and figurative
sculptures of Neil Estern attempt to go beyond a mere recording of
physical characteristics. His work captures the energy or the
repose, the tidiness or the rumple, the wrinkles, the tilts, the
gestures and body language—those details that animate a specific
personality with a presence as unique as a fingerprint." "[Estern's]
goal is that the viewer sense the personality of the subject, not
simply recognize the historical personage," Benjamin Forgey wrote
for the Washington Post (April 27, 1997). Trained in the fine arts,
Estern worked for two decades in the toy industry before devoting
himself full-time to portrait sculpture. In the 1950s he created the
clay model for Patti Playpal, the first successful life-size doll to
be marketed in the U.S.; it is the subject of the book The Art of
Patti Playpal (2004), by Jennifer A. H. Kohn and her co-authors,
who characterized it as "the most spectacular doll of the twentieth
century." Estern has participated in group and solo shows at
locations including the National Academy of Design, in New York
City, and the Brooklyn Museum. At present, he told Current
Biography, his projects include a statue of Lady Bird Johnson, the
wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
An only child, Neil Carl Estern was born on April
18, 1926 in New York City to Marc and Molly (Sylbert) Estern. His
father was a negotiator for a toy-industry trade group. Estern grew
up in Brooklyn. Starting early in life, he enjoyed making things out
of clay from the children's sets that his father would buy for him.
At the age of 12, Estern started attending a Saturday-morning class
in drawing and painting at the Pratt Institute, a leading American
art school, which has a branch in Brooklyn. Sometimes, he has
recalled, he would stop working on the day's project and, instead,
mold his extremely pliable kneaded erasers into various shapes.
After he completed grammar school, Estern attended the School of
Industrial Arts (later renamed the High School of Art and Design),
in Manhattan, where at that time each student took four art classes
daily. Estern found helpful and fun the classes in which live models
posed and students sketched them. Instruction in sculpting, though,
was minimal. Estern told Current Biography that the school's
objective was to prepare students for commercial jobs, as
illustrators or designers of window displays, for example. He
learned that two of his teachers were sculptors; like many others
who aspired to make a career in the fine arts, their main incomes
came from their work as educators. At his high-school graduation
ceremony, in about 1943, New York City's mayor, Fiorello H. La
Guardia, handed out the diplomas.
Having decided that he was far more interested in
fine art than commercial art, Estern enrolled at the Tyler School of
Fine Arts, a division of Temple University that is located near
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He also took classes at the Barnes
Foundation, in nearby Merion, which is both a museum and an
educational facility. In 1947 Estern earned both a B.F.A. (bachelor
of fine arts) degree and a B.S. degree in education from the Tyler
School—the latter for practical reasons, in case he was unable to
support himself as an artist. Within days of his college graduation,
he married a fellow student, the former Anne Graham.
Estern soon discovered that he had little chance
of earning a living as a fine artist, not least because his
specialty—realist, or classical, art—was no longer in vogue among
the buyers and sellers of art; rather, the demand was for abstract,
or nonrepresentational, art. "The art establishment is all concerned
with novelty, with something different, something shocking," Estern
noted years later to David Karp, a reporter for the St. Petersburg
(Florida) Times (April 16, 2002). With the help of his
father, he got a job as a wax modeler with the Ideal Toy Co.,
molding heads, limbs, and torsos for dolls. In the late 1950s Abe
Katz, who was then the president of the company, assigned him the
task of creating a life-size doll. Within two weeks Estern had
sculpted a clay model of a 35-inch doll. Named Patti Playpal, the
doll was introduced in March 1959 at the American International Toy
Fair. With some of her outfits designed by Estern's wife, Patti
Playpal became an instant success. It was the "first big doll to
really catch on," according to a Time (December 14, 1959)
reporter; indeed, her popularity was so great that, in November of
that year, a giant Patti Playpal balloon debuted at the annual
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, in New York City. Estern later
sculpted other life-size dolls for Ideal: Patti's siblings or
friends, Peter Playpal, Saucy Walker, Bye Bye Baby, Penny Playpal,
Suzy Playpal, Bonnie and Johnny, Shirley Temple, and Patti Pattite.
He also completed freelance projects for other toy manufacturers,
among them Hasbro, Kenner Products, and Goldberger Dolls. According
to Kohn and her co-authors, he refused to work with Mattel, because
he believed that that company's Barbie doll (which had been
introduced in 1959 at the same toy fair) failed to teach wholesome
values to young girls.
A big break for Estern came in the early 1960s,
when New York City officials recruited the American Institute of
Architects to sponsor a competition for a monument to honor the
recently assassinated president John F. Kennedy. The winning design
for the monument, which was to be erected at a newly constructed
fountain at Grand Army Plaza, in Brooklyn, called for a bust of the
slain president, and Estern was commissioned to sculpt it. Set upon
a pedestal covered in Vermont marble, the bust was unveiled in May
1965. (In 2002 it was removed because of damage attributed to
weather, and Estern was asked to make changes to the design. As of
mid-2008 it had not been reinstalled.) The materials that Estern
uses for his models are clay or plaster. His completed sculptures
are then cast in bronze at any of several foundries.
In 1964 the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey commissioned Estern to design for La Guardia Airport a statue
of Fiorello H. La Guardia, who served as mayor of New York City from
1934 to 1945 and was known as an unusually honest, passionate
reformer. Lack of funds forced the authority to abandon the project.
Estern kept the plaster model, and in 1986 a picture of it came to
the attention of Al McGrath, a founder of the group Friends of La
Guardia Place, which is dedicated to the beautification of an area
south of Washington Square Park in Manhattan. McGrath submitted the
design to the Manhattan community board whose approval was required
for such public works. Estern's statue portrays the former mayor in
vigorous mid-stride, talking animatedly, his hands about to clap—the
way he often looked and moved, as the hundreds of photographs and
newsreels that Estern used for research showed. The sculptor also
relied on his own memories of the fiery, feisty LaGuardia in
creating the sculpture. "He was always railing against something,
some injustice or corruption," Estern told Marvine Howe for the
New York Times (September 25, 1994). The "dynamic posture" of
the statue, as McGrath put it, according to Howe, displeased some
New York City residents, who, at several public hearings, contended
that it made La Guardia look foolish. Among them was John Bennett,
who offered as an alternative his own, sedate model, which depicted
the mayor "in an almost Napoleonic pose," Douglas C. McGill wrote
for the New York Times (October 9, 1987). In 1988, after
almost a year of debate, the community board, with the backing of
New York City's Art Commission and a number of people who had known
La Guardia personally, endorsed Estern's design. Almost six years
passed before enough money was raised to pay for the bronze cast of
Estern's model. Erected in La Guardia Place, the statue was
dedicated on October 19, 1994. Two years later Estern won an award
from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation for his
work.
In the 1970s Estern and four others—the sculptors
Tom Hardy, George Segal, and Robert Graham and the landscape
architect Lawrence Halprin—were commissioned to design different
parts of the proposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in
Washington, D.C. Halprin designed four outdoor "rooms," placed in a
7.5-acre space, that offer a chronological look at Roosevelt's 12
years as president. Estern portrayed the 32d president, whose
previous jobs included assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy, as he
appeared at a wartime conference held in Yalta, in what was then the
Soviet Union, in February 1945, two months before his death. The
statue, which is nine feet tall, shows Roosevelt seated, with a
thoughtful expression and with his large U.S. Navy cape draped over
much of his body, its hem resting on the ground; in addition to his
head and part of his neck, only his hands and one leg are visible.
Sitting near him is his famous dog, Fala. Many handicapped people
and advocates criticized the design, arguing that Roosevelt's
inability to walk unaided—polio had caused the paralysis of his legs
before he became president—was one of his defining characteristics
and should not be hidden. But Estern disagreed, telling Sam Libby
for the New York Times (February 11, 1996), "Roosevelt would
never have allowed a sculpture of him in a wheelchair." Yielding to
the demands of some organizations for the disabled, he added wheels
to the chair on which the president sits. (Robert Graham's sculpture
of the president in a wheelchair was added to the memorial in 2000.)
Estern also designed a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt for the memorial.
The First Lady is seen standing serenely, wearing a simple cloth
coat, with her hands clasped at her waist. Behind her is a
reproduction of the symbol of the United Nations, a reference to her
service as the first chairperson of the United Nations Human Rights
Commission. After years of delays stemming from lack of funds,
construction of the Roosevelt memorial began in 1994. The children's
book Shaping a President: Sculpting for the Roosevelt Memorial
(1997), by Kelli Peduzzi, describes the process through which
Estern came up with and executed his design.
Claude Pepper, who served as a U.S. senator from
1936 to 1951 and in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1963
until his death, in 1989, was instrumental in pushing Congress to
appropriate money for the Roosevelt memorial. He was also an
outspoken liberal, a tireless fighter for the disadvantaged among
his constituents, and a champion of a fair deal for the elderly.
Estern's statue of Pepper, erected on the Florida State University
campus in Tallahassee, was unveiled in late 2003. It shows the
bespectacled politician dressed in a three-piece suit and standing
with his left hand outstretched and his right hand clenched at the
level of his shoulder. In a press release posted on the Web site of
the Claude Pepper Foundation, Estern was quoted as saying, "In my
sculpture of Claude Pepper I want those who knew him personally as
well as those who knew him only by reputation to immediately
recognize the man for who he was and what he stood for."
Estern served as president of the National Society
of Sculptors (NSS) from 1994 to 1996 and again from 2007 to 2008;
currently he sits on the society's past-presidents advisory board.
In 2008 the NSS bestowed its Medal of Honor on Estern. He has also
won the NSS's Lindsey Morris Prize (1984) and Mildred Vincent Prize
(in 1988 and 1992). His other honors include the 1990 Dessie Greer
Prize, the 1997 Daniel Chester French Medal, and the 1999 Isaac N.
Maynard Award, the last-named from the National Academy of Design.
Estern and his wife, Anne Graham Estern, have three grown children:
Peter, a lawyer; Evan, a cinematographer; and Victoria, a onetime
owner of a company that specialized in lighting equipment for
filmmakers. The Esterns lived in Brooklyn until 2006, when they
moved to West Cornwall, Connecticut. Anne Graham Estern has
published three books for children.
Suggested Reading: New York Times B p1+
Oct. 9, 1987; Sculpture Review p21+ Spring 1994; Kohn,
Jennifer A. H., and others. The Art of Patti Playpal, 2004;
Who's Who in America
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