As a practitioner of Tai Chi, Hertzel describes the flow of movement originating “deep within the core through the mantle of the earth spiraling up through your soul and soles” into the body, much like bronze itself. Metal is a material that can be transformed from state to state, from solid to liquid and back to solid. In Reversal a figure stands (almost) in contrapposto but the energy of the piece is tracked rather than depicted by the bronze. The torsion and the tension make the figure seem ready to spring but the openness of the composition makes it unclear in which direction it will move. Reversal speaks to that feeling between fight and flight, paralysis and panic, where one doesn’t know which way to turn much less what is really going on around us. The figure of Reversal, like many of us in this shifting America with its stirring up of hatred, feels powerless as he digs deep into his soul for strength and direction.
https://www.jonathanhertzel.com/images/reversal-2
Adam Splitting refers at once to Adam, the first man, splitting like a cell rather than being split through a missing rib, and to violence throughout the Middle East, particularly suicide bombers. According to Hertzel,
Adam Splitting was made during the time of my mother’s death and the loss of the multi-generational family home while simultaneously there was an invasion of Iraq. My garden exploded to the backdrop of the war.
Adam Splitting: Unique bronze. 2008, 31”x61”x29”
https://www.jonathanhertzel.com/images/adam-splitting-2
Like the paradox of the stillness in motion, war-torn Iraq was a cradle of civilization, whose vast cultural reserves have been destroyed along with its citizens. The family dynamic split in similar ways; the loss of parent and home forced a reckoning. Adam Splitting has more positive space (metal) than many of the artist’s current pieces but retains a fierce centrifugal motion and power. The figure spins away from a center, losing force and parts as it moves. Adam Splitting embodies pain, displacement, and body parts, out of control and in the process of being lost forever.
We’re in motion all the time. Some part of us is constantly moving. It’s rare when our minds are quiet or our bodies still, we are always in movement one way or another: our hearts are pounding, we’re breathing, the earth is rotating, and yet, there is stillness within all this motion, and that contradiction is the underlying structure of my work.
Twin Serpents 2018, 113”x72”x36” Unique bronze
https://www.jonathanhertzel.com/images/nehushtan
In the Old Testament story of Nehushtan, Yahweh has become annoyed with the Jews complaining about conditions in the desert after their exodus from Egypt and sent down ‘fiery serpents’ that bit and killed many. Repenting, they asked Moses to intercede. Yahweh ordered Moses to make a bronze serpent mounted on a pole and then decreed that all who looked upon it would be healed. In the sculpture, Nehushtan, the serpent image is held aloft while groups of snakes remain in the background. Snake cults had existed in what we now call the Middle East since the Bronze Age — and this story sounds very much like an attempt to meld older beliefs with a monotheistic religion but for the sculptor, the tale of Nehushtan takes on a different tinge altogether. The story bears out Hertzel’s themes of human confusion and chaos in the face of what seems incomprehensible. Yahweh was rescuing the Jews but then turns on them — only to save them once again in the end. Snakes and idols, spoken of repeatedly in the Bible as evil, are here the symbol, indeed the method, of salvation. Again, the story resonates with our contemporary anxiety and consternation as accepted ethical standards and expectations of ourselves and the world in which we live are being overturned and demonized.
Levi Spiegelberg
Bishop Jean Baptist Lamy
In his latest work, all produced in his Santa Fe studio, Hertzel engages his very personal history with New Mexico. His ancestor, the pioneer merchant, Levi Spiegelberg had come from Germany in 1848 at the behest of his older brother, Solomon Spiegelberg. Solomon was a formidable character who arrived in the United States as a teenager in 1842 and promptly became sutler to Colonel Alexander Doniphan’s expedition to Chihuahua. This would be the first of many such contracts with a variety of armies and expeditions. He was the first Jewish merchant to travel the Santa Fe Trail. Solomon, with Levi at first, followed by his other brothers, made an extraordinary amount of money trading, banking, and mining, first in New Mexico territory and then throughout the Southwest. The Spiegelberg brothers also changed Santa Fe, structurally, by helping to build a money-based economy in place of the age-old barter system and visibly, by building the first Philadelphia-style storefront amid the sea of adobe on the Plaza.
The House of the Spiegelberg Brothers, built by Levi Spiegelberg in 1858. The steel front beams were and are from Pittsburg, PA. The building still stands but the façade was “adobified” in the 1960’s.
This is a heady narrative indeed. Solomon leaves a Prussia amassing land and power in a bid for a united Germany despite aristocratic resistance. By the time Levi arrived in 1848, the Revolutions of 1848 had spread to Germany with the promise of a more egalitarian future but, after the government quickly acquiesced to liberal demands, the conservatives regrouped and clamped down on reform. Throughout all the upheaval in Europe during the nineteenth century, the avenues open to Jews remained sharply restricted. While a thriving Jewish middle class developed in Germany, occupations and land ownership were still curtailed. When the brothers arrived in western North America during its transition from Mexico to the United States, they were able to do things that were not yet possible in Central Europe such as own land and mines. They had become Anglos in the eyes of their co-inhabitants.
The brothers were always on the road, buying or selling. On one such trip in 1852, Levi had gone to Independence, Missouri to lead a wagon train of merchandise back to New Mexico when he fell deathly ill on the Santa Fe Trail. Thinking that he might have cholera, the teamsters left him to die in a small sod hut by the side of the road. Fortuitously, he was found and nursed by the future Archbishop, Jean-Baptiste Lamy. Lamy was returning to Santa Fe with a group of nuns from the Sisters of Loretto of Kentucky whose order had answered Lamy’s pleas for help in educating his new flock. By the time the party found Spiegelberg, they had already endured a cholera outbreak themselves, losing the Mother Superior to death and with one nun too ill to go on. Recognizing that Levi did not have cholera, he was loaded into Lamy’s wagon. Levi did not die on that trip but was healed by the clergy and went on to forge the link between, Hertzel, his family and Santa Fe.
The two-part Signs of Life is the sculptor’s response to this story. Falling Man shows Levi is falling from the carriage and falling into the earth. In the Bishop's Eye, Jean-Baptiste Lamy sees the fallen Spiegelberg. The figure of Levi is pulled back from his possible grave in the tiny sod hut by Lamy’s expedition. Levi, Jewish merchant saved by the future Archbishop of Santa Fe. Human beings save other human beings and compassion triumphs. Like the other pieces in this exhibition, there is a conscious contemporary reference. Falling Man cannot be mentioned in 2018 without the searing image of the same name from 9/11 of another man who wasn’t saved despite the massive, selfless acts of so many first responders. It is also fate — or chance. It is perhaps only kindness that can save us from cruelty and bloodshed. In the same way that chance can shift a response in a dancer, chance can change the story of a family. Hertzel was drawn back to Santa Fe through stories and family pictures. But perhaps it was just the meeting of Levi and Lamy on the side of the rough Santa Fe Trail; a concrete moment but, like the artist’s sculptures “rooted in motion, transition and passage.”
FALLING MAN
https://www.jonathanhertzel.com/images/signs-of-life-1
Bishop's Eye
Aline Brandauer
Santa Fe, 2018
Copyright @Aline Brandauer 2018
- Hertzel interview with Joseph Skibell 2017
- Merce Cunningham. Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/136349.Merce_Cunningham
- Hertzel interview with Joseph Skibell 2017
- Hertzel, interview with the author, 2018
The Tetragrammaton that Arch Bishop Lamy had carved on the keystone above the door on the St Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe, NM., bears a resemblance to the one on a candle stick found in Lamy's home town cathedral in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
In St Louis at the Basilica of St Louis, King of France, a Tetragrammaton was carved above the church entrance in 1834. Lamy must have seen this Tetragrammaton on his numerous journeys through St Louis.
At this crossroad in history Lamy, the Loretto Sisters and Spiegelberg travel on to Santa Fe where they build the Spiritual, Educational and Economic foundations of their new World.
Cathedral Basilica of St Francis of Assisi built by Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy between 1869 and 1886. It was built over an older adobe church, La Parroquia built 1714 -1717 upon the site of an older church constructed in1626 and destroyed in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt.
Loretto Chapel. Commissioned by the Sisters of Loretto for their girls school the Loretto Academy in 1873.
House of the Spiegelberg Brothers, built by the brothers 1859-1863 on the land Levi purchased from Bishop Lamy in 1856. The land previously was the grounds of La Castrense, the Spanish military church Our Lady Of Light, built 1754.
The History of Our Future
Seven generations connect.
A few years ago, I proudly introduced my grandson to his great-great-great great-grandfather Levi Spiegelberg, depicted on a monument in the Santa Fe rail yard (Levi is 2nd from the right seated with his hand tucked into his jacket) The monument shares a brief history of the Spiegelberg accomplishments in the early frontier town of Santa Fe.
As a child, I was captivated by my mother's stories of the young Levi Spiegelberg who, in 1848 at the age of 17, traveled from Prussia to join his brother Solomon in Santa Fe, NM. They started the extremely successful Spiegelberg Brothers mercantile company. The New Mexican territory offered the Spiegelbergs opportunities that were unavailable to Jews in their German homeland. Four other brothers joined the business in the following years.
In 1852, Levi had gone to Independence Missouri to lead 25 ox drawn wagons loaded with merchandise, back to New Mexico. Somewhere along the Santa Fe Trail, Levi fell deathly ill. Thinking he might have cholera, the teamsters left him to die in a small sod hut by the side of the trail.
Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the future archbishop of Santa Fe, was in a wagon train behind Levi’s. From his vantage point, Lamy could see the stalled wagons and a fallen man being carried into a hut. Lamy, who was returning to Santa Fe with a group of nuns from the Sisters of Loretto, stopped to assist. Recognizing that Levi did not have cholera, Lamy loaded Levi onto his wagon, where the clergy nursed Levi back to health.
They traveled on to New Mexico where they laid the spiritual, educational and economic foundations of modern Santa Fe. Lamy forged the religious and spiritual center of his new home with the construction of the St. Francis Cathedral. On the keystone above the cathedral entrance is carved a Tetragrammaton with the inscription of Yahweh in Hebrew. It is believed that Lamy was honoring his friendship with the Spiegelberg family as well as all the Jewish merchants and immigrants living in thier frontier town
The Loretto nuns went on to build the Loretto chapel, with the "Miraculous Staircase", for the girl’s academy they founded.
The Spiegelberg Brothers Company Store
Levi Spiegelberg and brothers went on to build thier financial and mercantile empire on the Santa Fe Plaza. The Spiegelbergs built one of the first iron front, brick, block, tiles and lots of glass amongst the traditional adobe structures made of mud and straw.
Coming even further full circle, Levi bought the land along San Francisco Street, on the Santa Fe Plaza from Archbishop Lamy, as the property had formerly been part of a Spanish military chapel La Castrense, Our Lady of Light. The "Spiegelberg Bros."building still stands today but unfortunately it was "adobified" in the 1960's and the facade was stuccoed over to make it look like an adobe. In the late 1860’s Levi and his wife Bette and their family, that eventually became twelve children, moved to Brooklyn, NY where Levi became the east coast supplier for "The House of Spiegelberg Bros."
Jean Baptist Lamy 
Levi Spiegelberg
Today, Santa Fe is a fusion of cultures and a celebration of the arts. It’s an extremely creative, vital and progressive community. Sadly, we are not immune to the recent stirrings of hatred in our devolving humanity, spurred on by our political leaders. I share my ancestor’s stories to humanize the Spiegelberg Brothers recently defaced monument. Its destruction is personally painful to see as these remarkable lives are degraded. The rising anti Semitism and racial hatred are signs of a sick society.
Perhaps the cure can be found in the moment of compassion that changed my family’s life, when the future archbishop of Santa Fe saved the life of a Jewish merchant along the Santa Fe Trail. That compassion has lasted generations and is partly why I’m here today. In fact, compassion might be the reason many of us are here.
History helps us understand the future; the options are clear. We will either devolve into hatred or evolve with compassion. Either path will affect us for generations. When humanity is under attack, we are all falling. As it is written in the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”
The monument vandalized
I moved to Santa Fe in 2015 and set to work building a sculpture to commemorate a moment of compassion. The future archbishop of Santa Fe saved the life of a Jewish merchant along the Santa Fe Trail. The two-part sculpture "Signs of Life" consists of "In His Eye" when Jean Baptist Lamy saw a "Falling Man", Levi Spiegelberg. The sculpture is now complete and is currently on display till May 2020 at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden as part of the exhibition "HUMAN NATURE". My eight sculptures are part of a series titled "Stories From My Ancestors" are exhibited along with the sculptures of the late Alan Houser and David Pearson.
"Signs of Life" with "Falling Man" and "In His Eye" currently at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, will be available for exhibition after May 2020.
Jonathan Hertzel
Great-great-grandson of Levi Spiegelberg