Renowned Washington sculptor Harold Balazs (pronounced "blaze") created a lasting legacy in visual arts and architecture during a career spanning more than six decades. His greatest contributions came in public sculpture, the integration of his work with architectural projects, his innovative use of disparate materials, and his ability to create art that still resonates in the community. A graduate of Washington State College in Pullman and a longtime resident of Mead, near Spokane, Balazs defied categorization. He experimented with bronze, stainless steel, enamel, wood, and concrete, and his mastery of these materials allowed him to create works that remain technically impressive and emotionally vibrant 70 years after he began.
Family Man
Born in Westlake, Ohio, Harold Balazs (1928-2017) had a hardscrabble life that required him to go to work early on. He fished, hunted, farmed, and handcrafted tools to make ends meet. He picked so many strawberries that he traced his back troubles late in life to that stooping drudgery. His father was a second-generation Hungarian American who manipulated sheet metal and worked in air conditioning. As his father’s understudy in that rough trade, Harold learned a lot. He carried those skills forward into his own large-scale sculptures and installation work. Some of his many sculptures of bronze, steel, copper, and aluminum are deceptively light because they are hollow – some so light they can float. He told a story about his father’s unforgiving tutelage. Doing duct work in the family business, the son misplaced a hammer. The father would not let that hammer go. He crept beneath every bit of ductwork, thumping on it till he heard a bounce. Then he demanded that his son disassemble all that ducting and retrieve the precious tool.
Balazs had his first taste of production labor early in life. He went to work for an inventor of a fishing lure. His production task for a week was to solder tiny wings on hundreds of lures. In the end, the inventor refused to pay 14-year-old Balazs the $75 he had promised. That experience helps explain his lifelong aversion to the production work that often occupies artists whose imaginations are limited and energies quickly expended. His mother, happily for history, had enrolled her pre-teen in weekend art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Balazs ultimately chose higher education as his best path. At Wright Junior College in Chicago, he tentatively chose to major in aeronautical engineering – a natural evolution from the sheet-metal fabrication craft in which he was already versed. His father had begun his own work in the aircraft industry in Cleveland, before moving into air-conditioning. If he had followed his father into that industry, further production work likely would have been his lifelong fate. His blue-collar backup abruptly ended when his parents showed up at his Chicago doorstep. Car loaded, they told him they were moving to Spokane and invited him to follow along.
Good Timing
The timing was right. He moved to Spokane and then transferred to Washington State College (now University) in Pullman, 75 miles away, where he changed his major to art. "Kicked out of the ROTC because of his independent spirit, Balazs was also nearly expelled from the fine arts program. He owes his survival to teacher George Laisner. A Czechoslovakian immigrant who painted, sculpted, etched, made jewelry, and worked with glass, Laisner taught Balazs about Bauhaus design and encouraged him to follow his multimedia impulses. In return, Balazs taught Laisner to do precise metalwork" ("Finding the Artist ..."). Laisner was as much a Renaissance man as Balazs. Their interests and mastery of various media and materials complemented one another.
While completing his art degree at WSC, Balazs married Rosemary Schneider. The two would remain partners for the rest of his life, and she outlived him by five years. Shortly after he finished his degree, they became parents of son Kurt, who "kept me out of Korea," Balazs said (Sellars, 9). During the Korean War, that is, the Selective Service allowed parental obligations to delay conscription eligibility for enrolled men. The growing family moved to Spokane. Rosemary worked in a bank while Harold made enameled jewelry. They opened shops that sold his "trinketry," as he called it (Sellars, 9). In that period, he originated or perfected the acetylene-torch-fired enameling that would occupy him for much of his career.
After twin daughters Andrea and Erika born in 1956, the family moved in 1961 to Mead, just north of Spokane, where he chose to work for the remaining 60 years of his career. He refused to call his shop in Mead a studio because, he said wryly, studios must have nude models and northern light. Expo ’74, the Spokane world’s fair, elevated him from penury and from the risk of crippling cynicism about the art world. For the bulk of his career, he proved reluctant to identify himself exclusively as an artist. It was as if he were superstitious about the pretension that attached to the word. He preferred to be known as a craftsman. After being injured while installing a sculpture for Expo ’74 and crushing three vertebrae, then being forced to convalesce in bed, he began painting watercolors, "mostly plants in the garden," he said. "When able to travel, [he] did plein air landscapes in the region, which lasted until the late eighties and started a very successful affiliation with Gallery West in Portland" (Nelson, 149).
Covert Rebel
Balazs's large commissions began in the early 1960s. He took a big chance on one of those first commissions in 1962. Subcontracted by Tacoma architect Bob Price (1915-1981) to design a piece for an athletic building at the University of Washington, Balazs was asked by the UW to provide a "shop drawing" of his work-in-progress. The request meant fabrication instructions or a template, but Balazs rebelliously "went to his shop and drew everything in it: the grinders, solvent cans, screw boxes, rags, hammers, and garbage cans." His shop drawing "was met with stony silence," but his completed work was accepted. That shop drawing "became legend" and has been widely shared and reproduced (Nelson, 14, 56-57).
Always amiable in interviews and workshops, Balazs hid an irreverent streak. Seattle architect Tom Kundig (1954) found some of Balazs’s discourse "unprintable" (Nelson, 14), confirming journalist Sam Maddux’s assessment that Balazs was "ribald and rollicking" (Sellars, 13). In the early 1970s, Balazs and fellow sculptor Rudy Autio, at Priest Lake in North Idaho, fueled by home brew, carved a totem pole. Spontaneously they went to work on a huge cedar timber on the shore. They titled the pole Great God Damn, a title that harbors a clever pun. The last two words, instead of being used as a curse or interjection, became the profane idol’s proper name. Too big to move anyplace, it was left there to return to earth.
Balazs never enjoyed a patron like some artists historically have. He refused teaching and production artwork, fearing a rigid schedule or severance from Mead Art Works – his shop next to his home and acreage on Peone Creek. Among his friends he dubbed his shop "Mead Evil Art Works," a name that entails another pun – medieval. Consequently, by his own admission, he chose to take any job that came through his door. He rarely made a lot of money, even after he was nationally known. His daughter Erika, an attorney, observed in 1988 that "there would have been more money in art if Dad had been half as interested in selling art as he was in producing art itself" (Sellars, 43). Installing his Dancing People in 1983, a 50-foot enamel on steel installation at Columbia Basin College, Balazs recalled an incident in Alaska. There, "a bunch of ladies" got upset by his prototype of those same masked dancing people. The ladies "thought it was about Halloween and accused me of being an agent of the devil. I told one of them, 'Lady, if I were an agent of the devil, you would have fleas in your armpits and in other places too'" (Nelson, 40).
Religious zealots got beneath his skin on other occasions. Instead of calling them out publicly, he often used his art to deliver his sly digs. Rain-Making before Intelligent Design (2009), a keenly balanced sculpture in brushed aluminum, features a cloud that showers rain shafts, a lightning bolt, and an ax (Nelson, 95). Its other objects are open to interpretation. The title is the key. Before Christians came along to interpret thunderstorms as products of intelligent design, Thor and Zeus were believed to brandish martial armaments that made storms. Comment on religion also embeds St. Sheepshank’s Bones (mixed media 2005). It echoes poet Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) and his Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales. A church official, the Pardoner hawked fraudulent papal indulgences to pardon sins. Balazs centers his imaginative piece of art upon a reliquary – a glass tube containing supposed relics of a saint – but he makes no claim that the bones are human. They come from a dead sheep (Nelson, 102). Chaucer’s Pardoner likewise trotted out a phony reliquary to extract money from his gullible parishioners.
In an interview Balazs conducted for the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Museum, he recalled his mother dragging him to church. "I just thought, 'This is all bullshit" ("Oral History Interview ..."). When he and Rosemary went to church in Spokane, they went to the Unitarian Church, which still displays the doors he designed. "But right now, I think religion is the bane of the world" ("Oral History Interview ...").
Balazs’s bluntness in visual art became the subject of mild censorship that presaged the Idaho book bans of the twenty-first century. His First of May series, 14 inches by 14 inches, enamel on steel panels, was done "in the real early 1970s, and when I showed them at the University of Idaho, they put flaps of brown paper over them and hung them way up high so the kids couldn’t lift the paper" (Nelson, 82). The papers covered naughty anatomical bits. Saturated by bright reds to signify passion, the panels depict Japanese couples engaged in sex. Breasts, nipples, lips, tongues, and flexed thighs caused those University of Idaho officials to squirm. To the credit of the University of Washington Press and the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane that published the sumptuous book Harold Balazs and Friends in 2010, those panels are shown in full. Between Two Crotches, a complex sculpture in wood that hails also from the 1970s, is more suggestive in its title than it is explicit. The piece foresees or riffs on the period pop song "Torn Between Two Lovers." These pieces are held in private collections.
Celebrated Works
For fans and viewers outside of art-collecting circles, Transcend the Bullshit is Balazs's most celebrated work. Originating in the early 1960s, that "almost unreadable, circular, curlicue letter design" displaying the title is his signature (Nelson, 77). It began as a 23.5-inch by 17-5-inch screen print on paper, but it outstripped its own counterculture origins to exemplify a frequent theme – critique of bureaucracy, ignorance, and religion. The denotation of bullshit has been eclipsed by its connotative or figurative meaning of deception or nonsense. His piece also alludes to the posturing and pretentiousness that vexed him about commercial art. He did not suffer fools gladly. "His signature phrase," Transcend the Bullshit "made its way into any number of his pieces, at times hidden in the art for future generations to discover" (Kundig in Nelson, 13). He wore it on a belt buckle when he spoke in public. The design appears on a wide variety of media, including coffee cups sold at the Boo Radley’s novelty store in Spokane.
Former Spokane arts director Karen Mobley tells a story that embodies the irreverent side of Balazs. In 2005, he had finished the massive Rotary Riverfront Fountain done with Bob Perron in Spokane. He had playfully dubbed his creation "the big sprinkler," and he alerted the Rotarians he planned to run through it. He did not alert them he planned to run through naked. Horsing around, streaking as others had done roguishly for decades, he shocked several members of the Rotary Club that had assembled to commemorate the civic occasion.
Generally, Balazs concealed his rebelliousness in his art. A public figure who made his living from public commissions, a man so often in the news, he had an obligation to his family to conduct himself with some degree of decorum. He could ill afford to be branded as a rogue. His objections to the status quo peek from his many interviews, though, and from the covert titles and designs of his earliest work. Whether he was challenging authorities, poking fun at religion, or calling out those who would bowdlerize or censor him, Balazs could be defiant in understated ways. He could oppose and confront those institutions he perceived as sanctimonious or phony.
An Absence of Pretense
His appearance in interviews and videos was humble, open, easy. To adopt a figure of speech, his personality was as common as an old shoe. In his "struggling early days," he tied flies for fishermen in exchange for groceries. He even "won a fly[-tying] contest once. The prize was a worm bucket" (Sellars, 9). Such absence of pretension transferred to his irreverent regard for his profession. "Notions of 'art as experience' and 'self-expression' tend to attract some rather lazy sorts and reduce the whole matter of creativity to a kind of therapy," he said (Sellars, 47).
"It is the public that too often does not get proper consideration from the artist," Balazs said. "If a man has a fireplace to be decorated, he calls in an artist who sells him on the idea that there is only one solution. I say if the client can afford only $25, then he has the right to an inexpensive solution. It is the artist’s business to solve the problem at a price the man can afford, within reason" (Sellars, 68). Such respect for clients and audiences is altogether rare. "Other people call me an artist and I guess that’s nice, but I consider myself a sculptor or a craftsman or a plebe or whatever" (Nelson, 38). The word plebe derives from plebeian: one who is commonplace or lowbrow.
Presaging statements made by writer Annie Dillard in the wake of the Pulitzer Prize she won just before moving to Washington, Balazs snorted, "That big art scene in New York is a den of thieves and I don’t want any part of that" (Lindley). He wanted to be left alone to do the work that gratified him, rather than being answerable to the indignities of the marketplace. "He found the gallery scene of cultivating collectors and schmoozing with dealers distasteful. 'I found the more money, the more scoundrels show up,' he says" ("Finding the Artist ...").
He was unpretentious enough to title a self-portrait Shrine to Homo Fabre with Pieces of String Too Short to Be Saved (2003). The Latin translates "man the maker." In that mixed-media jumble, a pile of metal refuse drapes below a headshot of himself at the top (Nelson, 106). If Balazs in private was "ribald," as Sam Maddux said, then his ribaldry was a trait that curators and journalists were reluctant to document. His public face was one of joy. For instance, his massive Primer at the Newport Way Library in Bellevue – a 4-foot by 26-foot enamel on steel series – counterbalances the doom that imbues the New England Primer (1687-90). Both primers are intended to teach the ABCs. While Balazs integrated colorful azaleas to depict the letter A, his seventeenth-century precursor deployed the verse "In Adam’s fall/We sinned all." By contrast, Balazs’s "work is characterized generally by a gay sense of color and lively humor" (Nelson, 72). Much of his work was done on commission, almost never as art for art’s sake, thereby diminishing the temptation to exercise undue vanity or self-importance.
Did Balazs bite the hand that fed him when he criticized the institution of modern art? A bit of trinketry, a bracelet from his lean early days, sold for $8,000. Jay and Julie Babineau, represented by the Art Spirit Gallery in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, sold their collection of Balazs sculptures and drawings in 2023 to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane for a half-million dollars. The museum then mounted yet another Balazs show in 2024. Such big figures benefit collectors, galleries, and museums more than artists and their heirs. The abiding impression of Balazs is that he made his art for unselfish reasons rather than to preen his reputation. He had a generous spirit. Unselfishly, he mentored many other artists, including his own grandson.
An Eclectic Practice
As an artist, Balazs was exceedingly productive over his 70-year career, but also admirably diverse in the range of his accomplishments and interests. He referred to himself as "catholic in my tastes" (Sellars, 79), which is something of an understatement. He was catholic like a magpie, collecting objects and weaving them into his imaginative productions. Some might call his process chaotic, messy, even promiscuous. His daughter Erika praised his eclectic practice, no matter the scatter it could generate: "He produces an amazing quantity of work in an incredible variety of media" (Sellars, 43). Balazs said, "I got to the point where I could think one week in wrought iron, the next week in concrete, the next week in stained glass" (Sellars, 9). Stained glass, of course, is the medium of choice of churches. Because custom jobs formed at least 80 percent of his practice as an artist, by his own admission he chose never to turn down an order.
Just as some Renaissance artists were kept afloat due to backing for church art, so was Balazs for a solid portion of his career. So rebellious in so many ways, he is a paradox in that he became the most important liturgical artist in his locale. To have worked chiefly on commissions was good fortune when it came to the church work that began for him in the 1970s. At the age of 33, he was invited by architect Don Murray (1920-2004) to do a large job at the St. Charles Catholic Church in Spokane. For its baptistry, he crafted 12 separate panels, each one "65 individual plates of torch-fired enamel," making for a total of 780 enamel plates in all six doors, each one fastened, often by Rosemary, with tiny brass nails every two inches (Nelson, 30). If the baptism panel does not stun the viewer with its magnitude and splendor, his three-sided torch-cut iron baptistery gates might. They measure 96 inches by 61 inches in the front and 91 inches by 25 inches on each side. Their silhouetting imagery depicts angels on each side and St. John baptizing Christ on the front.
Some of his best and most noteworthy work is also the most interactive. Centennial is his 1978 sculpture of 30 feet long. It floats in the Spokane River. Made for the City of Spokane’s centennial in 1981, it weighs two tons. Anchored at the bottom of a channel of the Spokane River, its stainless steel was chosen to reflect the water. Rotary Fountain in Riverfront Park, built in 2005 with Bob Perron, is 24 feet high and 40 feet in diameter. It showers water from above for people to play in. That’s where Balazs streaked when the fountain was tested. The "anti-obscenity league reacted angrily against" his panel of a pregnant woman on a totem pole that he made for McIlvaigh Junior High School in Tacoma: "In the dead of night members of the league sneaked into the school, stole the panels and then published a letter taking credit for the theft," he told one interviewer, "claiming they were trying to protect the young students from the evil force that was corrupting their minds" (Sellars 70).
Original Media
Balazs’s claims to rightful fame include techniques and materials he originated or adapted. He worked in such a wide variety of media that future biographers may be forgiven if they have difficulty tracking it all. Some of his work was lost, some stolen, other work callously trashed by its owners. The key was his adaptability and willingness to do whatever job should come his way. A client would ask him if he could do doors, he would disingenuously say yes, and the next week he would make a quick study on how to craft and hang doors. One of the foremost chores for artists and craftspeople is how to mount or attach their creations, especially heavy creations such as doors or gates designed to serve a utilitarian function. When Balazs traveled to Spain and Italy, he investigated how artists from earlier eras managed to hang their decorative doors.
Enameling is one material with which he made a lasting mark. His vitreous enamels began as powder. He would apply the powder to the metal and then fire it to melt it, much like glaze on clay. That novel process involved first applying oil to the metal base. He delicately dabbed oil in the shape of the design he desired, a flower or a letter or some scrollwork. Next, he sprinkled on the enameling powder, which the oiled metal held in place. Stray powder was brushed or blown away. Such designs were often too delicate to be finished in a kiln, the heat too difficult to regulate. Accordingly, he adapted by using an acetylene torch to fire the powder more precisely, allowing him a birds-eye view of the process as the powder melted to the required consistency and texture. Such a painstaking and tedious technique had to be replicated many times over a long panel. On other occasions he might use a stencil to stand in for the dabbed oil. The vitreous enamel finish turned out much like glass, but it protruded to generate the requisite dimension. "He built his own enamel firing ovens to accommodate [his] large panels" (Sellars, in Coppel).
His perfected torch-firing technology borrows from cloisonné, a process common in jewelry making that involves intricate designs using thin metal wires or strips. These wires are soldered or fused together to form compartments or cloisons. The compartments are then filled and fired in a kiln. The enamel melts and fills the compartments, creating a smooth, colorful surface.
He innovated another process, especially for sculptures. Following his apprenticeship in Ohio with his father, whose training was in airline manufacture and the air-conditioning industry, Balazs adapted sheet metal to his art sculptures. Those sculptures from sheet metal, whether in brass or copper, stainless steel or brushed aluminum, proved airtight, watertight, easier to install due to their light weight, and more likely to outlast the elements. Those hollow sculptures, carried over from his father’s industrial tutelage, kickstarted his career and continued throughout it. They prove also to be some of the most innovative pieces he ever did, before he became so occupied by commissioned work. There is the lovely Pregnant Form from 1958, Homage to Picasso from the early 1960s, and Reflections on the North Idaho College campus from 2007.
Most original among his various material is styro-casting. The process was so new when he began using it that its terminology had yet to settle. The copyrighted product called Styrofoam did not become widely available till the 1950s, when Balazs began his work in earnest. The Dow Chemical Company produced it for insulation and other uses. Balazs prided himself on his adaptation of that material to his techniques as a sculptor. He was "probably the first one to use the innovative possibilities of styrofoam for the making of negative molds for concrete relief casting," his friend and fellow sculptor Rudy Autio wrote. Balazs himself noted, "What they taught you in college was to make something in clay, then make a mold from the clay, and then pour the bronze in" (Nelson, 90). Elsewhere he elaborated, "This was the first time that styrofoam had ever been used to cast concrete. No one was certain if the weight of the concrete would crush the styrofoam forms at the bottom" (Sellars, 40). After mishaps where the material adhered to the concrete and had to be picked off bit by bit, he managed to fool-proof the process.
Since his death in 2017, his reputation has grown, which is one gauge of greatness in any of the arts. Indeed, a flourishing afterlife legacy is the dream of every artist who writes poetry, originates choreography, or leaves a body of photographic work. Spokane planner Jim Kolva noted that Balazs had the gift to "make abstractions that people can relate to" (Coppel, 16). Art curator Beth Sellars, one of the most erudite in the Northwest, called the vast production of Balazs "the most regionally visible artwork to be 'exported' from Spokane" (Sellars, 6). Odds are his visibility will expand beyond Spokane, after his death, now that critics can readily take his measure. A latter-day Renaissance man in the arts, perhaps he would have acquired a national reputation had he chosen to forgo his home neaer Spokane and relocated to a larger city.
