Castine sculptor Clark B. Fitz-Gerald, 87, dies at his home

CASTINE – Clark Battle Fitz-Gerald, a sculptor who moved to Castine in 1956 to find artistic inspiration in the quiet and simplicity of small town life, died Monday morning at home. He was 87 and had been in declining health for some months, but was drawing and planning new works up until his death.

A St. Louis native, Fitz-Gerald achieved renown as a sculptor of large public pieces of art installed in prominent locations in cities, churches, and universities in the United States and abroad. Maine Maritime Academy, George Stevens Academy, Colby College, the University of Maine all have large-scale works by Fitz-Gerald on their campuses.

One of his most notable Maine pieces, and typical of Fitz-Gerald’s themes, “Continuity of Community,” is an enormous aluminum mobius strip in Bangor’s West Market Square.

Born in 1917 in St. Louis, Fitz-Gerald attended John Burroughs school and graduated from Philadelphia College of Art in 1940.

He served as a first lieutenant in the 9th Armored Division, from 1940 to 1945, through the Battle of the Bulge and the Allied advance on Berlin. He was among the corps of engineers responsible for removing German explosives from the Bridge at Remagen, and installing the subsequent famous sign: “Cross the Rhine with dry feet. Courtesy of the 9th Armored Division.”

Fitz-Gerald was seriously wounded by sniper fire near Leipzig, two weeks before V-E Day. He recovered fully from his injuries. His wartime correspondence amounted to hundreds of witty and romantic cartoons – graphics that allowed him to speak “over” the army censors.

After the war, Fitz-Gerald married his sweetheart, Leah Oliver, the stepdaughter of the Episcopal bishop of St. Louis, and went to work in commercial art. He soon left that, in exasperation with ad agencies, and began teaching. Over the next decade, he taught at Phillips Academy, Andover; Washington University, St. Louis; and Beloit College in Wisconsin.

In 1956 Fitz-Gerald left teaching and moved to Castine to devote himself full-time to sculpture. He bought an old house on a rocky bluff above the Penobscot River, adjacent to the town lighthouse, and went to work in a studio he built on the property. For the rest of his life, he had no institutional support or regular paycheck, but managed to support his family making art.

He lived robustly, cutting his own firewood and using his welding skills to barter for materials, services, or even lobsters. He would gladly weld rips in the town snowplow blade, or a friend’s tractor bucket. And he was fond of scouring the woods and rocky shore for mushrooms and mussels. Fitz-Gerald could rattle off the Latin names for numerous plant and animal species.

In more than 1,000 commissioned works, Fitz-Gerald looked deep into the natural world, drawing inspiration from minute structures of seeds and spores, sinewy kelp fronds, or even whale vertebrae for his large works in wood or bronze.

He called himself “a craftsman; a symbol maker … trying constantly to re-evaluate old ideas.” His daily journal – 30 volumes by the end of his life – was a trove of drawings and observations for sculptural ideas. “Nature is my greatest source of ideas,” he said.

Fitz-Gerald worked in bronze, stone, wood and metal. He took weighty abstractions and turned them into appealing, even sensuous, objects. His statue for Coventry Cathedral, rebuilt in the bombed-out shell of its medieval stone buttresses, depicts Amos assuming the mantel of the prophet Elisha and measuring the city with a plumb line.

“I see the Old Testament as the history of mankind,” said Fitz-Gerald, whose commissioned work is installed in churches of all denominations. “It has every psychological problem man has faced.”

Another sculpture, now in the Portland Museum, depicts two warlike peoples, spear-to-spear, extending tentative hands to bridge their animosity, an idea Fitz-Gerald borrowed from Martin Buber, the Jewish existentialist killed by the Nazis.

His major installations were large works in public spaces: City Art Museum of St. Louis (Golden Jubilee screen), Uris Hall at Columbia University (“The Market Place”), Independence Hall in Philadelphia (“Milkweed Pod”), and Coventry Cathedral in England (“The Judgement of the City”), to name a few. A fiberglass abstract of his, “The Beginning and End,” is in Carnegie Hall.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Fitz-Gerald did work for Aero Saarinen and Associates for the Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Ind., and for Rohm & Haas in Philadelphia. He saw his giant milkweed pod, in Independence Mall, Philadelphia, as representative of “the dissemination of democratic ideas.”

As old Castine trees fell, the town crew supplied Fitz-Gerald for years with elm and maple trunks of sufficient mass for his carved work – both abstract shapes and female nudes. “I look for the biggest piece of wood I can find to make a piece of sculpture,” he once said. “It’s like having a bigger vocabulary – it gives me more potential.” Crew members enjoyed returning to the studio to watch that potential take shape.

Fitz-Gerald charmed friends with his wry political cartoons, depicting Republican and Democratic rivalries as a fracas between red and black ants. When Castine voters go to the polls on Nov. 2, they will cast ballots in a wooden ballot box carved by Fitz-Gerald, a staunch Democrat, who had hoped to cast his own vote this year and did not fill out an absentee ballot.

Fitz-Gerald was awarded numerous prizes and honors, including honorary degrees from the University of Maine (doctor of Fine Arts) and Maine Maritime Academy, for which he made an honorary mace first used at the 2000 commencement.

At the time of his death, Fitz-Gerald was at work on a ceremonial mace for Adams Elementary School in Castine to be used for eighth-grade graduations. He once served as school board chairman, and liked to point out the weathervane atop the school as his work. It included old toilet parts.

“The worst thing in the world,” Fitz-Gerald once told a reporter, “is a wasted life.”

Fitz-Gerald is survived by his second wife, Elizabeth “Liddy” Fitz-Gerald, and his children by his first wife, Leah, Timothy and Stephen Fitz-Gerald. In lieu of flowers, the artist left instructions for family and friends to vote for John Kerry.