Morris Brose

Brose arrived in Detroit from his native Poland in 1931. Trained as a watchmaker, he worked various jobs and eventually established a successful furniture business. During the next 15 years he designed furniture, attended drawing classes, and began to make small sculptures in wood and terracotta. Encouraged by his friend and fellow artist Sarkis Sarkisian, he attended night classes at the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. In 1949, he sold his business and embarked on a new career as a sculptor. Following a short period of study at Wayne State University, he enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art where he studied with William VcVey. In 1954 he made an extended trip to Europe, where he met Ossip Zadkine and Jacques Lipchitz. When he returned to Detroit in 1955, he joined the faculty at Cranbrook as an instructor. He spent the next several summers in Italy researching the Italian bronze foundry tradition. In 1960 he setup a studio in Rome, the same year he was awarded his first one person show by the Peridot Gallery in New York City. In 1962 Bose joined the faculty at the Art School of the DSAC and directed the building of the school's foundry on Watson Street. He established the sculpture department at Oakland University in Rochester in 1965, remaining on the faculty there until 1971. He is represented by many commissions in the Detroit area, including a fountain for the J.L. Hudson Company at the Eastland Shopping Center, "Voyage V" for the Renaissance Center in Detroit, and the monumental "Tzedek" for the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue in Southfield. Brose is best known for his cast and welded bronzes. His work was generally abstract or surreal, ranging from pieces based on landscape and figure sources to totally nonobjective groupings on cubic planes and volumes. He also worked in wood and with assembled forms.