William Tarr, 1925-2011, grew up in
the Bronx and enlisted in the Navy at 17 during World War II. He
received training in meteorology and was assigned to a secret U.S. weather
station in Siberia to help the Allies plan their invasion of Japan. Tarr's fascination with sculpture began with a pile of
rotted wood from an old wharf shortly after he completed his military service
in 1946. He created 17 pieces of artwork from the lumber. Early on he had done much to convert a
former warehouse in SoHo into a sculpture studio and some-time living quarters.
There were some amazing architectural feats that the sculptor/magician had
performed, like the ramp that allowed him to park his motorcycle just inside
the front doorway – a doorway so wide that it opened like the end of a gigantic
ferry boat to allow enormous steel sculptures to be moved freely with pulley and
lever systems onto waiting flatbed trucks. The
first sculpture he ever exhibited was at New York City's Whitney Museum of
American Art in 1962. One of Tarr's works was among six pieces purchased by the
Ford Foundation, which donated Tarr's work to the Art Institute of Chicago, now
part of their permanent collection. The self-taught sculptor, who worked mainly
in welded metals but also with wood, concrete, fiberglass and cast bronze, was
named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1974. His massive memorial to Dr. King stands
across from the Lincoln Center in NYC. The U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., displays his 5,900-pound bronze casting
"Gates of Hell," also known as the "Gates of the Six
Million." Tarr's fascination with magic since
the age of 10 also led him to create several magic tricks and to write how-to
books on magic.
Mr. Spring recalls this print being a
gift from the artist in gratitude for all the innovation required by the
foundry in doing the direct cast for the monumental "Gates of Hell"
that was created for the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, DC. He recalls his other most famous piece as the welded steel
geometric memorial to Martin Luther King at the Jr. High School named after Dr.
King, located across from the Lincoln Center in NYC. He had a place in the Hamptons, and was friends with Pollock
and de Koonig.