Nathaniel Kaz
Exodus, 1940-1949
Cast bronze
Gift of Saul Rosen
Nathaniel Kaz studied with William Zorach, whose sculptures can be found in the Ulrich collection. If you compare the works, you can identify similarities in the way the two artists handle the human figure and treat their mutual medium of bronze. However, their subject matter is quite different. Both of the Zorach sculptures in the WSU collection are female nudes, stripped of narrative context. Kaz, on the other hand, presents us with an action-packed scene that may even be about contemporary world events.
An exodus is a mass departure; we usually assume that such an event happens under unpleasant circumstances. How does Kaz suggest that the two figures in the sculpture are fleeing from a traumatic event? The work may more specifically address the Book of Exodus, the second book in both the Jewish Torah and the Christian Bible. It tells the story of how the Israelites, God’s chosen people, followed the prophet Moses out of a life of slavery in Egypt, and received land in Canaan (or “the promised land”) due to their faithfulness. Look at the old man’s legs. Could the sinuous circles surrounding his ankles be the waters of the Red Sea, which Moses parted so that he could escape Egypt? Could they be shackles remaining from his enslavement?
Kaz may be using this religious story as an allegory for current events, as well. The sculpture dates to the 1940s, a decade dominated by World War II. In 1945, at the end of the war, German Jews were freed from the slavery and genocide of the Holocaust, just as Moses freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Kaz may even be using the reference to the Book of Exodus to make a political comment on the controversial topic of the founding of the nation of Israel in 1948, a topic that continues to be contentious today. He may be suggesting that Israel is now “the promised land” that God offered the Jews in the canonical story.