I have just finished reading the book, "Art Is My Life," by William Zorach. It was a wonderful read. I found some copies with prices beginning at $14.95 at www.alibris.com

For your interest, I have copied two sections below. The first is from the inside cover, and the second is from the book itself.
Enjoy, Steve

Note from Bob Ipcar: Grandpa "Bill" occasionally regaled his grandchildren with this tale of Yosemite that Steve quotes below - about how that crazy "kid", Ansel Adams, almost killed him while descending a mountainside.

ART IS MY LIFE
by WILLIAM ZORACH
The Uninhibited Autobiography of a Famous Artist

"I would say to every young artist of great talent: live art, sleep art, think art, talk art, write art, in other words, marry art. Treasure talent in yourself and allow nothing to degrade it. Recognize your own talent; do not confuse it with the talent of another; allow every man his own without envy. Do not defeat yourself."This is the credo of a man who rose from the depths of poverty to become one of America's leading sculptors. An émigré, at the age of six, from the little village of Euberick in Lithuania, he went with his family to Cleveland. William was forced to leave school at the age of thirteen to become an apprentice in a lithographing studio. Eventually, he saved enough money to go to New York and ultimately to Paris to study.In a warm and surprisingly candid autobiography, Mr. Zorach describes his youth and his slow but steady rise to fame. His early days were filled with financial peril and grave crises, and they were met with both humor and courage. Highly personal anecdotes are an integral part of his life story. He never minces words, whether he is speaking of his private life or of the world of the artist. His witty and illuminating comments on artists and their personalities will open new vistas for the curious art lover.William Zorach started his career at a point when Americans couldn't have cared less about "Art" as a form. Americans at that time had some respect for European artists but very little for Americans. Recognized now as a foremost realist, Zorach was called "wildly modern" by his contemporaries. His "modernism" stemmed from his intense admiration for the cubists and the Fauvists who were creating a revolution in Europe in modern painting. The "new" painting so entranced Mr. Zorach that he became, as he says, "drunk with the possibilities of color and form."In 1917 Mr. Zorach started experimenting with sculpture. His early carvings were in wood and as time passed he became almost totally absorbed in sculpture. In fact, by 1922 his immersion in what to him was "the complete art form" was total. He carved directly in wood and in stone, and the quality of his work comes close to being legendary. Perhaps his most famous work is "Mother and Child," which won the Logan Medal of the Chicago Art Institute and was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among his other works are "The Spirit of the Dance," which he did for the Radio City Music Hall in 1932, and the heroic-sized "Benjamin Franklin" for the Post Office Department building in Washington, D.C.In an autobiography that makes a valuable contribution to the world of art and gives the reader a fascinating insight into the character of a memorable, warmhearted man and artist, William Zorach has recreated one of America's golden eras, when the country was finding its way toward becoming a nation that could point with pride to its own painters and sculptors.As a final note that illustrates the depth of William Zorach's spirit, he told a friend shortly before he died on November 16, 1966, "I've had a very happy life. Some artists make it when they are young, some when they are in middle age, but I've been rising every year."

From the book:"I almost lost my life in the valley. Ansel Adams, our finest photographic artist, was a young man of nineteen and in charge of the valley library. He was quite a mountain climber and a member of the Sierra Club. He asked me to go with him to climb Grizzly Peak, a cone-shaped mass of rock rising about three thousand feet above the valley floor. It took all day to climb to the top, winding around and back and forth on the trail and fighting our way up when the trail ended. He took a rope and I took my sketching materials. We had to climb by throwing the rope over rocks and pulling ourselves up. I had never climbed any sort of mountain before. From the peak of the cone we looked down a sheer three thousand feet to the valley floor below. The place where we stood was so small and the sheer drop of granite around us so perpendicular that we felt like two specks on the head of a pin. Around us was the panorama of the whole Sierra Nevada range. I made some sketches and Ansel Adams took some pictures. He put a record for the Sierra Club in a capsule wedged in the top and removed the file that was there. Only one man had ever climbed this peak before and it was his file we removed. It was getting late. It was already dusk in the valley, only the peaks were in the sun. Ansel said we'd be all night getting down the way we came, "I don't like to try it in the dark but if we go straight down we can do it in an hour." I knew nothing about mountain climbing so I trusted Ansel implicitly. It was a sheer cliff as if you were climbing down an egg and at times it was undercut. We swung over space on the rope and caught the mountain on the rebound. Everything went; watercolors, paints, brushes flew into space. My sketches and portfolio I had left at top-I hadn't even tried to take them. Everything began to slide away from us; we picked up momentum, I especially.

We snatched at every twig and bit of brush and fought for every crevice. I clawed and worked my way back to where Ansel was. He had discarded the rope and was working his way down by crevices. He knew how to maneuver in and out of every crevice. We wormed our way down to the shale slides and then along them as best we could. We were both scared to death but we got down to the valley floor in nothing flat. There wasn't a stitch of clothes on either of us. Our shoes were gone; we were smeared black and red with blood; we were torn and bruised and exhausted. I dropped in the camp and lay flat on my back and couldn't move for a week. It was a terrible and terrifying experience. It was a miracle either of us survived."

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