Though his greatest work was destroyed, Jan Zach greatly influenced Northwest sculpture

YOU'VE PROBABLY never heard of Jan Zach. He never became a national art celebrity, and unless you paid attention to local and regional art 20 years ago, it's unlikely you know the name of Eugene's most profoundly influential sculptor. Two exhibits that opened this month - the larger at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, and the smaller at the Karin Clarke Gallery in Eugene - offer the first comprehensive look at Zach's work and career since the artist's death in 1986.

Zach is one of those figures so original and odd that, if a television movie were made about him, people might dismiss the plot as unbelievable. Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Zach (his full name, by the way, is pronounced "yon zock') was already a budding art star by the time he came as a student to New York in 1938 to work on the Czech pavilion at the New York World's Fair. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939 and Zach couldn't return home, the young artist headed for Brazil, where he lived the romantic life of an artist in exile in and around Rio de Janeiro, surrounded by other artistic emigres. Alexander Calder opened one of Zach's exhibitions for him in Rio. Gore Vidal signed the guest book at another show. In Brazil, Zach met a Canadian woman, courted her in their only common language, Portuguese, married her, and moved to Victoria, B.C. There, he was introduced to the sensuous Northwest landscape that would inform his greatest work. Finally, in 1958, he came to the University of Oregon, spending three decades teaching and making art here.

Working feverishly at the university and at a large home studio outside Elmira, Zach grafted mid-century European modernism onto the subtly organic textures of Northwest regional art. It was an odd marriage, combining the polished glint of industrial steel with the random soft forms of coastal driftwood. But this cross-pollinated art grew with hybrid fervor, producing an amazing body of work. Zach created 17 pieces for Eugene City Hall alone. He made sculptures for the UO and the Lane County Courthouse, for the state Capitol and for a savings and loan in Roseburg.

His greatest work was destroyed. In a terribly clueless move, a graceful, 50-foot, rotating steel sculpture titled "Can-Can" was scrapped during remodeling by the Eugene department store that had commissioned it 20 years before. "Zach's work is very individualistic and very original," said Roger Hull, an art historian at Willamette University and curator of the Hallie Ford show. "It has these roots in earlier modernism and even baroque sculpture. In his hands, it becomes distinctly his own work."

"What really struck him when he got to Canada was these huge beach logs," Hull said. "Which reminded him of the baroque sculpture he remembered from Prague. Big voluptuous forms. Dramatic expressive gestures. He got looking at those logs and saw the movement in them, the implied flow of energy that runs through them." The Hallie Ford exhibit offers a detailed look at Zach's career, from his earliest drawings and paintings to the monumental sculptures that he created at the end of his life. Zach's early works included oil paintings and pastels of great richness and expression; one of the most interesting is a youthful self portrait in oil, showing an intense young face below the kind of soft workman's cap in vogue in the 1930s. The Salem exhibit even has a handful of book covers - pure commercial art - that he created during his stay in Rio.

The sculpture is primarily in two mediums: sheets of stainless steel, which Zach worked into large, reflective, flowerlike shapes; and laminated wood, which he later used to make large, abstract creations reminiscent of the driftwood that inspired them. Many of the stainless steel pieces are titled "Flower of Freedom," honoring the Prague Spring rebellion of 1968, an artistic and political outpouring quickly crushed by the Communists. The giant wood pieces include the totally abstract, such as the 1973 "Ondine," a 14-foot-long, horizontal chunk of laminated pine, carefully carved into a graceful shape, painted and then abraded to look aged. But others represent more recognizable figures, such as his giant "Marching Women," a series of 10-foot-tall heroic female figures, also done in laminated wood. The doomed "Can-Can," now seen only in photographs, was commissioned by the Meier & Frank department store for its Eugene store at Valley River Center, where it hung in a rotunda. Hull calls it the artist's "biggest and most triumphant and most feted piece ... his greatest single accomplishment." Fifty feet tall and rotating on a vertical axis, "Can-Can" was indeed the culmination of Zach's interest in stainless steel, with its combination of strength and beauty and the brilliant interplay of light and reflection.

Hull is disappointed but philosophic about the piece's destruction in a store remodeling. "A commercial setting is by nature a changing and dynamic and unpredictable one," he said. "And you buy into that if you're going to have your art in the middle of a store. It's not like putting it into a museum. Still, in the history of Oregon art, it's too bad that it's gone."

The much smaller exhibit at the Karin Clarke Gallery offers a narrower collection of Zach's work for Eugene viewers. A handful of smaller stainless steel works are joined by a few in wood. In addition, the gallery is showing some delightful early pastels and several paper models of larger sculptures. The gallery show was selected from a wide range of work still stored in Zach's studio in Elmira. His widow, Judith Zach, had already donated the pieces in the museum show to the Hallie Ford. Unlike the museum show, the gallery pieces are for sale. Tommy Griffin, a former student of Zach's who has acted as artistic executor for the artist's estate, said he deliberately set prices low for the gallery show so the work could be owned by Eugene art lovers.

"I really want to see that work go to people in Eugene," Griffin said. "I really hope that people who respect Jan will be able to acquire one of those pieces. I don't want to return the work to the studio if I can help it. It needs to be out there." Besides his work as a sculptor, Zach was also a passionate teacher. New York sculptor Olinka Broadfoot, another Czech immigrant to the United States, used to live outside Eugene while she was beginning to sort out her artistic career. Now an artist in residence on Long Island, Broadfoot recalled her first meeting with Zach, then a complete stranger to her, as an act of desperation on her part, and kindness on his. "I was working in a vacuum," she said. "I had four kids, bringing them up in Fall Creek, not very much money. When my father died, I went into a tailspin. I called Jan up out of the blue. He didn't know me. I wasn't a student or anything. I said, `You're from Czechoslovakia. I am, too.' '

Zach and his wife went out and had dinner with Broadfoot at her home, beginning a friendship that would inspire and direct her both personally and professionally. Broadfoot also had dinner with Zach and his wife the night before he died in 1986. She asked him that night for advice. "We were having this big dinner," she said. "He was sitting at the head of the table. He said you need three things to be an artist. One, the ability to see the thing that's just out of sight, around the corner. Two, persistence and hard work. And three, luck."

The next day, Zach and his wife and his elderly sister went to Crater Lake Lodge. During the night, a prankster pulled the fire alarm at the lodge. Zach helped his sister to the parking lot, where he had a heart attack and died. He was 72. "He raised the bar of consciousness here in the arts, in general, and sculpture in particular," Griffin said. "Jan always said the artist was the messenger of his time. He was clearly the messenger of his time, in the most beautiful way, expressing the Northwest quality of landscape."

Feb. 23, 2003