Herbert Ferber

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Ferber, Herbert (1906–1991). American sculptor (and in his later career, painter), born in New York. He attended evening classes at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, New York, 1927–30, while studying dentistry at Columbia University, and subsequently continued both professions (in this respect his career is remarkably similar to that of Lipton). His sculpture passed through many phases. He first carved massive nudes in the manner of Maillol. Then, after being influenced by Romanesque sculpture and German Expressionism on a visit to Europe in the late 1920s, his work displayed increasingly violent distortion and by 1940 he had practically reached abstraction. In 1945 he abandoned representation altogether and developed an openwork abstract style using welded rods and strips of lead, copper, or brass. By the end of the decade he was prominent among the group of sculptors, including Lassaw, Lipton, and Roszak, whose metal sculpture paralleled the work of the Abstract Expressionist painters. His constructions were cage-like but suggestive of organic forms and he was one of the first to obtain an expressively textured surface by the manipulation of molten metal. In the 1950s he received several commissions for sculptures on or in religious buildings, and it was partly through these that he began to eliminate the base, experimenting, for example, with forms suspended from the ceiling. These in turn led to room-sized environmental sculptures, the first of which he created for the Whitney Museum, New York, in 1961. In the 1970s Ferber began to devote much of his time to painting.

Herbert Ferber 1906–91, American sculptor, b. New York City, grad. Columbia (D.D.S., 1930). His original name was Herbert Ferber Silvers. Turning from early massive figures in wood and stone, he developed large, spatially inventive abstractions in brazed metal called environmental sculpture. Among his works are Green Sculpture II (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), Sunwheel (Whitney Mus., New York City), and Covenant II and Flood II (Temple Anshe Chesed, Cleveland).

Bibliography: See catalog by W. Andersen (1962).