August 24, 2006 Issue                                       

©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Local legend dies; carved out career for 69 years
by LEN LEAR

Richard Lieberman is seen admiring a work by one of his students, Vitta Horowitz, of Bala Cynwyd, at an Allens Lane Art Center exhibit.

Richard Lieberman, a crusty, cantankerous, profane, brutally honest but basically lovable sculptor who inspired and challenged students at Allens Lane Art Center in West Mt. Airy, Temple University’s Tyler Art School in Ambler and other area schools and institutions for almost seven decades, died Thursday, August 17, at the age of 91.

Richard, who told me an interview at Allens Lane in 2000 that “I have lost six inches off my height in the past few years, but my feet have compensated by getting larger,” would have been an ideal subject for the old Reader’s Digest feature on “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met.”

Richard was almost as short as a billiard table; he had arthritis so bad he could barely walk; when he sat down, a Herculean effort was required to get him back up again; his omnipresent pipe was as integral a part of him as his arms and legs; he could barely hear, and he would never have been a diplomat.

“That’s a piece of crap,” he blasted off about a piece of sculpture in an exhibit of his students’ work at Allens Lane Art Center. “I leave it up there on the wall, though, because it makes the other works around it look so much better.”

Two things that never aged about Richard, though, were his aesthetic perceptiveness and his ability to inspire students. “He’s different from any other teacher I’ve ever had,” insisted Sharon Lee Stein of Jenkintown, who studied with Lieberman for more than 25 years. “He never does the work for you. You must work it out yourself. He may say nothing to you for three weeks; then suddenly he’ll say, ‘Change that line; move it over here.’ And then you realize his suggestion changes the entire work for the better. And it’s amazing because he’s always right. He just has a great eye. Look at this alabaster piece I’m working on. He made one simple comment that improved it dramatically. That’s why I keep coming back to his classes.

“My daughter, Leslie Moon (her real name), also took classes with Richard, and today she’s a successful artist in Seattle because of him. I just can’t say enough about him. We even have a stroke victim in our class, and this is great therapy for her. At one recent show, he said, ‘Get that one piece out of the show. It belittles your other work.’ I didn’t like to hear that, of course, but after I cooled down and thought about it, I realized he was absolutely right, as usual.”

Another student, Gloria Hoffman of Jenkintown studied with Lieberman even longer — more than 35 years. “His comments are so brilliant that you can always learn more from him and always improve your work,” she observed.

When Richard Lieberman was six years old (in 1921), his parents, Max and Sarah, brought him and his seven siblings from Kiev in Ukraine to the United States. “Did you ever see Fiddler on the Roof?” he asks. ‘If you did, you know exactly why we left Ukraine. The Cossacks came to persecute the Jews, just like in the movie.”

The Liebermans arrived at Maryland’s fabled eastern shore. “There was a lot of limestone there,” recalled Richard, “and I used to carve it. It was a lot of fun, but I never thought of myself as a real artist. My father was the real artist. He loved to work with his hands and designed beautiful patterns in wood, but what he did with his hands they now do with computers.”

When Richard was eight, his family moved to Philadelphia to be near relatives. Despite his obvious artistic abilities, Richard won a football scholarship to Columbia University, where he played under the legendary coach Lou Little.

“I was as strong as a tiger,” insisted Lieberman, “but those were the days when we didn’t even wear helmets. I broke both kneecaps and collarbones and had lots of shoulder dislocations and concussions, but if it weren’t for football, I could have never gone to college. I was probably the poorest student who ever went to Columbia.”

Ironically, Lieberman said the person most responsible for his ultimate career as a sculptor was his football coach, who persuaded him to become a fine arts major. “We had long conversations about art, not football.” After working as an artist in New York for a few years, Richard returned to Philadelphia because “whatever money I made was all going to rent in New York.”

Eventually Richard’s work, which was about half-abstract and half-representational, began attracting attention. He was asked by the world-famous I.M. Pei to do a piece called “Unity,” which is still in a courtyard at 3rd and Locust Streets in downtown Philadelphia. To cite just a few others, he was commissioned by the city of New York to do a sculpture of Benjamin Franklin, by Moravian College in Bethlehem to do one of their founder and by the Emmaus Library near Allentown to do a thought-provoking piece called “Earth.”

Richard’s favorite materials were nickel, aluminum and bronze. He created thousands of pieces in his years as a sculptor, and he had as many as 80 students at one time. In addition to Tyler and Allens Lane, Richard taught classes at the Art Museum of Philadelphia, the Abington Art Center, Fleisher Art Memorial and Settlement Music School.

In addition to sculpture, Lieberman also had a love affair with golf; he was an eight-handicap golfer until he was forced to give it up in 1998 because of arthritis. He lived with a woman for 35 years but “unfortunately, never had any children of my own.” (His companion, Barbara, died about one-and-a-half years ago.)

“I always had problems with money,” he added, “because my thoughts were always on the next piece of sculpture. I’ve never been any good with money, but I would like people to remember that I always gave my heart and soul to my students. They made it all worthwhile.”