The Heat of Fusion is the first film made by Spaccarelli, who prior to making the documentary was known to Polich as a painter, sculptor and maker of furniture, among other pursuits. “My wife and I own a number of pieces of his work,” says Polich, “and he’s just an amazingly talented guy. When I was awarded the Dorsky prize, Stephen came to me and said, ‘I’d really like to make a movie about the foundry.’ And I think he just hit it out of the park; when my wife saw it for the first time, she said, ‘This is very emotional.’ I said, ‘Of course it is; you have people talking about things they really believe in that are important to them, and that involvement comes across.’”
One measure of just how devoted the craftsmen and women have been to Polich and the foundries is the fact that more than half of the workforce has been with him for more than 20 years. “We’re very close to each other, and people love the work. It probably takes at least five years to really get skilled, and after that, they develop that wonderful kind of interest in solving problems. Doing very good work makes people happy and proud.”
The longest-standing employee is Jimmy Jolly, who has been with Polich for 38 years. In The Heat of Fusion, he tells the story of how, when he was initially hired, nobody asked him about whether he’d made sculpture before. “Can you fix a car engine? Can you build a house?” were more the concerns asked of him. Asked to comment on Jolly’s remarks, Polich says, “I was looking for craftspeople and trying to identify who had the stuff. Jimmy certainly had the stuff, and is still one of our top guys.”
Today the Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry employs approximately 80 people, who work on as many as 100 active projects at any one time. People have their specialties, but each does a lot of different jobs, says Polich. Work is assigned according to ability, and a lot of training is involved.
A foundation in craftsmanship
Richard F. (Dick) Polich was born in Chicago in 1932. “I grew up in a community of people from Croatia, many of whom were craftsmen,” he says. “The community was close-knit and helped each other with their projects: new storm windows, a new addition…and when those things were done, there would be parties and everybody would come and look, and they’d be critical if they didn’t like it. One of my earliest memories is of me taking nails out of used board that my father was using to build an addition to our house.”
Polich excelled in academics and athletics, earning a football scholarship to Yale, where he earned a BA in Economics in 1954. But he also studied modern art there, and architectural history; and after a stint as a pilot in the US Navy from 1956 to 1959, he attended Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1960. For the next four years he worked and studied in the foundry of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Master’s degree in Metallurgy and gaining exposure to advanced art-casting practices that led to a lifelong fascination with the scientific properties of metal.
Polich worked in the aerospace industry until the late 1960s, when he shifted gears to move to the Hudson Valley and open a small art foundry in a garage near Cold Spring with his friend Sandy Saunders. That decision came about after Saunders (whose family owned an industrial foundry) told Polich how often artists were calling looking for a place to cast their sculptures. At the time, all of the art-casting was done in Europe, which left the New York artists completely out of the production process.
It wasn’t long before the art world discovered the new fine art foundry located just an hour from Manhattan, where they could do work as traditional or as avant-garde as they liked. But while he has remained lifelong friends with Saunders, Polich went out on his own in 1970 to open his own foundry in a 3,000-square-foot rented facility outside Peekskill. He called it Tallix (based on the word “metallics”).
Coming to fruition
By the time he moved the foundry business to a 10,000-square-foot facility in Peekskill, where he had the capacity to do larger-scale works, Polich’s reputation was well-cemented in the art world as that of someone open to new ideas and techniques. “Artists as a group are very experimental, and everyone always has an eye open, I think, for a new foundry or foundry director with ideas that are interesting,” he says. Among the earliest conceptual efforts at the foundries were works inspired by Hawaiian lava flows by abstract Impressionist painter Cleve Gray and works by Nancy Graves cast from organic materials (from fish to fruit) using the burnout method.
The give-and-take of working out the casting of a piece with an artist generally has to do with structural concerns, says Polich. “No one can put a statue into a public place that doesn’t have an engineering certificate that it’s safe and is not going to fall over or cause harm or injury,” he says. “Sometimes the artist would like to do something where we have to talk about the alloy with them, and the structural requirements for the work.”
Tallix moved to Beacon in 1986, where Noguchi (who preferred to carve in stone and wood) trusted Polich to produce bronze castings of his works, and Koons brought his infamous plastic inflatables and tchotchkes of the 1980s to be cast in metal.
Polich left Tallix in 1995. The following year, he opened a new art foundry in a former warehouse the size of a football field in Rock Tavern, near Stewart Airport, calling the new business Polich Art Works (PAW). When Tallix later went out of business, Polich bought back the company and the name, merging the two businesses into the current Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry in 2006.
The focus these days is on new technology using digital and 3D design and experimenting with new alloys of copper and ductile iron. “There are two pillars that are an important part of our success here,” says Polich. “One is craft and the other is technology. The technology keeps changing; it requires more and more preparation. But that’s why the artists come here: They want their work made with the latest technology using the latest alloys. And we have lots of ideas on how to use modern technology. We are collaborators.”
“Dick Polich: Transforming Metal into Art”, Wednesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. through December 14, $5, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY-New Paltz, 1 Hawk Drive, New Paltz; (845) 257-3844, www.newpaltz.edu/museum.
