JOEL & RENEE MEISNER Joel and Renee Meisner married in 1960 and began exhibiting at Artexpo shortly thereafter, or so it seems after all these years. The Meisners showed at the first Artexpo with Isidore Margulies, a figurative artist that did very sensuous work that wasn’t being done at the time, especially in bronze. “We had a great response at that first Artexpo,” recalls Joel, “and we continued on for the next 20 years or more. We had lots of success and lots of fun.” Joel holds a Masters of Fine Art in Sculpture from Columbia University, where he studied with Professor Maldorelli, a stone carver. After a stint in the Air Force, Meisner realized that his true calling was in facilitating the creation of other people’s artistic ideas. While working for Jacques Lipchitz in his Hastings-on-the-Hudson, New York, studio, he encountered for the first time “the work of a real genius.” Joel eventually went on to make bronze castings for him. The “process” was a monolithic ceramic mold which enabled an artist to actually cast a piece in one day as opposed to the weeks it normally took. Joel invented this from scratch and by chance. “I was teaching adults about sculpture in Green Acres shopping Center—a group of people got together and wanted to take art classes—they called up my professor and he asked me teach there. I met a woman whose husband was a fund raiser for Einstein Medical Center. Lester Avnet was a major contributor and an art collector who had amongst his holdings a foundry casting golf club heads in stainless steel. That little serendipitous meeting with a sculpture student started that whole foundry thing for me. “I went to Avnet-Shaw, they showed me around, and I said, ‘I think I can use this process for making sculpture.’ I ran home, made a wax sculpture, made a casting the next day, and that was the beginning of my version of the lost-wax method of casting. “It was very exciting, and it led me to a year of R & D to perfect the process for casting other artists’ work. Casting in this way resulted in better quality, much shorter turn-around time and less expense than the traditional methods that had been in use for 100 years. The lost-wax method requires the manufacture of a wax casting, which then gets surrounded by ceramic material; the wax is melted out, (hence the lost-wax method) and molten metal is poured into the cavity at 2,000 degrees. After the metal has solidified and cooled, the ceramic mold is broken away. For every casting made, this whole process must be repeated. For instance, if there were 300 Erté sculptures, there had to be 300 individual waxes. During this time, Renee was raising the family. In 1973, the Meisners bought the foundry from Avnet, and Renee came to work with Joel full-time. She had an innate ability to work with people and manage the everyday operation at a rapidly expanding sculpture facility. Among her primary duties were the advertising and promotion of the foundry’s featured sculptor Isidore Margulies, whose near-life-size nudes were captivating collectors. “We were selling them just about as fast as he could produce them. They were small editions, very prominent at the early Artexpos.” In addition, Renee manned the booths at Artexpo, where she and Joel met the people putting together the Erté sculpture collection, and that’s where it was born, right on the floor of Artexpo, not quite but more or less.” Over the years the Meisners cast thousands of Erté sculptures along with editions for nearly every major publisher at Artexpo and beyond, including major municipal and museum pieces. Today, Mitchell owns the Meisner Gallery and Meisner Acrylic Casting, pioneering casting methods in acrylic, much as his parents did in bronze. Joel and Renee retired in 1993 and moved to Florida. Renee succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 2003. Joel in his retirement and during the period when he was caregiving for Renee, developed a keen interest in gardening. This became a passion, which led to an award-winning garden with Orchids and Bromeliads and other exotic plants from all over the world. In place of giving tours at the Foundry, Joel’s garden is a primary stop on the horticultural tour of Mounts Botanical Gardens, where over 500 visitors came on a weekend. In 2003 Joel and his son, Craig, climbed a volcano in Chile to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Association. Upon his return from this expedition, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, was successfully operated and is totally cured after surgery and chemo. He has happily survived and is at the top of his tennis game, “playing better now than I have ever played in my life and if any of my old friends are reading this, please contact me at joelmeisner@comcast.net.”
Page 20 • Artexpo Hall of Fame 2008 • Art Business News