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Augusta Stylianou Gallery 
Mitchell Fields (September 28, 1901-October 6, 1966) was a Romanian-born American sculptor. He is known for his life-size statues, as well as for his portrait busts. Fields’s works belong to the schools of Realism and Social Realism.
Early life Mitchell Fields (né Mendel Feldman) was born on September 28, 1901 in a small village near Iaşi, Romania; he was the third of five sons of Marku Feldman and Tova Felderman. In 1907 the family immigrated to the United States and made its home in East Harlem (Manhattan), then an immigrant neighborhood. The parents supported the family by selling vegetables in markets in Manhattan and the Bronx.
Sculpture , Sheba Hospital School of Nursing Education as an artist Fields graduated from Stuyvesant High School, then as now a school whose pupils specialized in the sciences and engineering; early on he showed an interest in drawing and sculpture which was encouraged by his teachers. After a year at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken NJ he decided to pursue a career as a sculptor and enrolled at the National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts in New York and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. The Beaux-Arts Institute aimed to train architects, sculptors and mural painters in accordance with the agenda of the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Its student body consisted mainly of immigrants or first-generation Americans, many of whom came from a working-class background. Fields studied at Beaux-Arts from 1917 until 1927. Career in the USA On completing his studies Fields began to work as a sculptor; he created in clay and plaster, in marble, and when commissioned to do so, cast his works in bronze. Fields continued living in New York, where he belonged to an informal circle of predominantly Jewish artists whose work was for the most part representational: Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Ben Shahn, De Hirsch Margulies, James Lechay, Myron Lechay, Joseph Kantor, Saul Berman, Tully Filmus, were among the painters; while after World War II his “circle” included the sculptors Clara Bratt, Chaim Gross and Jacques Lipschitz. During the early 1930s Fields was active in the John Reed Club, whose aim was to support leftist and Marxist artists and writers. On occasion Fields produced works with a political message: in 1935 he sculpted a monument to the civilians killed in the February 1934 Vienna Uprising, also known as the Austrian Civil War. The location of this statue is not known. There were, in any case, not many commissions to be had during the Great Depression. As did many artists at the time, Fields worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Work Projects Administration. During the mid-1930s Fields divided his time between New York and Europe. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded him a fellowship in 1932 which enabled him to live and work in Paris for two years; subsequently, in 1935 a second Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to reside and work in Moscow. During this period statues of his were placed in the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest in Moscow, in the Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow and in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. In 1938 Fields, his wife Beatrice (née Meyers) and their infant son Michael David returned to New York City. Fields continued creating sculpture until the entrance of the United States into World War II. Too old to be drafted into the army, he decided to “do his bit” for the war effort by working in a factory which engaged in war production; he operated a lathe on the production line until after the final Allied victory. In the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s Fields lived in New York and maintained a studio at 3 Gt. Jones St., NY. He was represented by the statue Bather in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's 3rd Sculpture International exhibit in 1949. He created a larger-than-life-size portrait bust of Albert Einstein which was placed in the Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island. From time to time Fields taught courses in sculpture at the Art Students League of New York schools in Manhattan and Woodstock, NY, at the National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts in New York, as well as at the University of Iowa (Iowa City). Career in Israel From the late 1950s until his death in 1966 Fields spent long periods of time in Israel, where he had a studio at 16 Da Modena St., Tel Aviv. During his stays in Israel he created portraits of personages for public spaces. These personages included Yehiel De-Nur (Ka-tzetnik), author; Yosef Sprinzak, first Speaker of the Knesset; Prof. Chaim Sheba, head of the Medical Corps of the Israel Defense Forces and later director of the Tel Hashomer Hospital and Medical Center, which now bears his name; Member of Knesset Avraham Hertzfeld, as well as works now in private collections. During this period he created a portrait bust of the great Yiddish author Shalom Aleichem; he also attempted a portrait bust of Anne Frank as she might have looked during the last months of her life in hiding with her family in Amsterdam, based upon available photographs from when she was younger. Fields sent photographs of the bust to Frank’s father, Otto, who felt that the portrait did not represent his daughter as he remembered her during their last months together. His statue “Young Woman Holding Wounded Bird” is in the School of Nursing of the Sheba Hospital at Tel Hashomer. Fields was assisted by Robert Bannet, City Architect of Tel Aviv and head of the team of architects which planned Ramat Aviv. He had many friends among Israeli painters and sculptors; Agnes Adler and David Adler, sculptors who immigrated from Israel to the United States in 1961, are numbered among the latter. Fields made the acquaintance of Batya Lishanski, who was awarded the Dizengoff Prize for her sculpture, and of Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dada school of art. His friendships with Israeli painters and sculptors, as well as his observations of the vibrant artistic scene in late 1950s-early ‘60s Israel are described in the chapter which he composed for Assignment in Israel (1960). Fields's work was to influence that of his eldest grandson, Reuven Sadeh Fields, a sculptor who works mainly in metal. Although he was only five years old when his grandfather died, Sadeh, who lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, grew up surrounded by Fields's sculpture. His own creations reflect the statuesque, essentially realistic character of his grandfather's work, as well as the latter's uncompromising excellence of craftsmanship. Mitchell Fields died after a short illness on October 6, 1966. He is buried in Kibbutz Hazorea, Israel; his statue Naomi, which twice enabled him to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, is exhibited at the entrance to the kibbutz’s Wilfred Israel Museum. Themes and style Fields’s sculptural language was representational. Having been educated in the tradition of Realism, which subscribed to an ideology of objective reality and rejected what its practitioners saw as the exaggerated emotionalism of nineteenth-century Romanticism, he created life-size (and on occasion over-life-size) statues of the human body, both female and male. Fields depicted women as strong, capable figures, who were simultaneously feminine in a traditional sense. His portrait busts and bas reliefs were articulated in a non-abstract idiom. As was the case with many American artists from immigrant families who came of age during the Great Depression, some of his works may be seen as part of the Social Realist movement, one of whose aims was to depict the working class as heroic. Yet he did not accept the tenets of Socialist realism (for whose practitioners the purpose of art was to forward the international agenda of socialism or communism). Indeed, despite his left-wing political views, the large majority of his works do not bear a political message. Even after World War II, when many American artists moved in the direction of Abstract Expressionism, Fields continued to create within the realist canon. During the early 1950s he began to work in ceramics, producing small tables and household items such as cups and vases. A short-lived attempt to sell the latter via a small business (Sculpture Products) did not succeed commercially. His ceramic art work, with its richly toned glazes and whimsical shapes, was his only attempt at adopting a semi-abstract idiom. Exhibited works * Birobidjan Museum, Russia In Sheba Hospital School of Nursing Portrait busts–partial list * Sonja Tykhayeva (athlete)
* Angel
* 1929 - Helen Foster Barnett prize, National Academy of Design
* Clark, Eliot. History of the National Academy of Design, 1825-1953. 1954 ==--==--==
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