Despite its impression of balance and weightlessness, Sorel Etrog’s War Remembrance, 1961–1962, carries the burden of traumatic war memories that loomed large in the artist’s experience. One of the most influential 20th century Canadian artists, Etrog was born in 1933 to a Jewish family in Romania, where he and his family suffered from state-organized violence and anti-Semitism during World War II. Later settling in Toronto in 1963, where his international career began to take off, Etrog would continually channel his experience as a survivor of Nazi and Soviet aggression into his art. Through mediums of sculpture and painting, he grappled with the fortitude and vulnerabilities of the human body.
War Remembrance’s direct reference to violence places it among Etrog’s most recognizable and important bronze sculptures, with variants found in important institutions such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Franklin D. Murphy Sculptural Garden at the University of California, Los Angeles. The rounded spirals in the sculpture bend and twist into each other in a manner that resembles the organic shapes of a human body and the tension within it. Underneath, a triangular dart pierces through the biomorphic form, perhaps suggesting a soldier’s bayonet. This intrusion shifts the artwork from lyrical abstraction to jarring symbolism, serving as a reminder of the lingering presence of World War II in the artist’s psyche.
“... my search is for a language of forms possessing two fundamental elements: one of organic calligraphy which will evoke warmth of earthiness; the other a geometric calligraphy which will compel us by its strength.”
—Sorel Etrog
First created in 1960–1961 and later recast, War Remembrance belongs to the first body of Etrog’s sculptural works made of bronze, a medium that would become a hallmark of his practice. Beginning with the process of plaster molding followed by lost-wax bronze casting, Etrog imbued his subjects with detail and texture. The result, as seen in the present work, blends the monumentality of the industrial world and the intimacy of human experience. The interpenetrating composition of War Remembrance also sheds light on Etrog’s profound meditation on connections, continuity, and intricacies of the human condition— a germinal idea that would later inspire his celebrated painting series, Links.
