WWII Veterans Lend Their Images to Posterity

The faces of the Greatest Generation fill the art gallery at Mount St. Mary’s College, 100 life-sized busts, each the likeness of a man or woman who fought to make the world safe for democracy.

The busts reveal the way they look today, more than half a century after they defeated the Nazis and their Axis allies. Now they are grandparents and great-grandparents, but beneath their clay likenesses are their photos from World War II; reminders of how young they once were and how much they did for their country.

None of the men looks old enough to go to war. And the women seem to wear their short-skirted uniforms with special pride, clearly ready to make the same sacrifice as their brothers and sweethearts.

You look at the wartime snapshots and you can almost hear “I’ll Be Seeing You” and the other songs they danced to, knowing it could be for the last time.

Titled “Face to Face,” the exhibit on display at the Brentwood campus is the work of three Westside sculptors who wanted to pay homage to a generation whose enemy now is time.

Many of the veterans are still hale and active, said sculptors Claire Hanzakos, Kaija Keel and Jilda Schwartz. But six of the 100 have died since they sat for their portraits.

Among them was Allan Adler, the “silversmith to the stars,” who taught the craft to Katharine Hepburn and whose clients included Errol Flynn.

During much of the war, Adler had a government contract to make silver tubing for radar equipment.

The project began several years ago, when Keel was commissioned to do a bust of Warren King, who taught photography to thousands of Angelenos.

A military photographer during the war, King was in a French village on V-E Day and recalled having dozens of German soldiers surrender to him, even though he was armed with just a camera.

Keel and Schwartz had long worked with Hanzakos in the sculpture studio in her West Los Angeles home.

And it struck the women that they could create a unique tribute to King and other veterans by capturing their likenesses then and now.

One of their first subjects was Hanzakos’ husband, Harry Steinberg -- Schwartz did his bust.

A physician and an avid sculptor himself, Steinberg was a major in the Army Medical Corps during World War II, working in mobile hospital units that moved forward with the troops throughout the European theater.

The day after the Normandy invasion, he was frantically treating the wounded in a makeshift hospital on a hill overlooking Omaha Beach, a position wrested from the Germans at the cost of thousands of lives.

The veterans usually determined who would sculpt their busts by reaching into a bag and pulling out one of the three artists’ names.

Initially, each subject sat for three hours in Hanzakos’ studio while the artist did a rough portrait in clay. Then, Keel took multiple photographs of each man and woman, which were used to complete the busts.

“It was wonderful having a piece of history right there in the studio, talking to you,” said Hanzakos.

Among her portraits is Paul Soldner’s. Now a noted ceramic artist, sometimes called “the father of American raku,” Soldner grew up in a Mennonite community that was opposed to war. But he chose to fight and was one of the first Americans to liberate a concentration camp.

Some of the veterans have familiar names. Director Steven Spielberg’s father, Arnold, and uncle, Irvin “Bud” Spielberg, are among the hundred. Director Delbert Mann, master furniture maker Samuel Maloof, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Frank Pierson and liberal activist Stanley Sheinbaum also took part.

Portraits of women and minority veterans are some of the most moving. Now a physicist, Maggie Gee, a Chinese American, was one of several women pilots. Susan Ahn Cuddy, a Korean American, taught troops how to handle machine guns. George Fujimoro, a Japanese American, was in Army Intelligence. Frank Jackson, an African American, was a famed Tuskegee airman. Alejandro Arradaza, a Filipino American, survived the Bataan Death March, while Encarnacion Gonzales, a Latino, fought in the Aleutian Islands.

Independent curator Jo Lauria decided to help promote the project because she was impressed by its noncommercial nature.

For much the same reason, anthropologist Jill Weisbord volunteered to do oral histories of the veterans. The stories of about half have been recorded.

At first, many veterans were reluctant to talk, saying that they had only been doing their jobs. But many then talked for hours, the artists said.

Robert Tompkins described his work creating fields of fake aircraft and tanks and using sound effects to disguise Allied troops’ true positions.

Tompkins, whose unit included designer Bill Blass, talked about the problems associated with having a field full of inflatable tanks. You had to keep an eye on the weather or you might discover all your phony tanks had begun to sag.

But not all the reminiscences were of happy times. Japanese American soldiers left family behind in internment camps. Latino troops were sometimes given substandard clothing and equipment.

And, in the Deep South, the Tuskegee Airmen couldn’t go into whites-only establishments where even German prisoners of war were served.

“One of our veterans said it was like therapy,” Keel recalled of their conversations.

The artists have formed the nonprofit Art Options Foundation and hope that the Westside exhibit will launch a national tour that includes excerpts from the oral histories and a documentary film.

Steinberg, 93, would like to see the exhibit become part of a permanent tribute: “There’s no World War II memorial that has the living warriors tell their stories as well as having their portraits.”

Steinberg was somewhat taken aback when he first saw his bust.

“Most of us have an inner feeling of how we look,” he said. And that inner self tends to be younger than our years. To see if his portrait was a good likeness, Steinberg asked children visiting the exhibit if they could tell which bust was his. They all could.

“It was a shock,” he confessed.

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The exhibit, which is open to the public, continues through Jan. 12 at Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery at Mount St. Mary’s College, 12001 Chalon Road, Brentwood. At 11 a.m. on Jan. 10, a representative of the Gabrieleno Indian tribe will bless the exhibit in memory of tribesman Joseph J. Morales, whose bust is in the show. Tours may also be arranged through the Art Options Foundation at (310) 472-3448.