Black colored cast bronze bas-rlief of mother and baby. Called "War Mother" The mother is seated and she holds the baby in her left hand with hand around baby's head. The baby's body rests against her leg. The mother's right hand covers her mouth and nose with only her right eye showing. "A more emotional work from 1947 was a plaster relief that Tsutakawa has some- times called 'Mother and Child' or 'Madonna and Child"....The massively robust figure types and their compression within a constraining format were very much in the old mode of so much prewar public sculpture--what he called 'World's Fair sculpture'. The subject, though, is postwar, for the very great compression all vears on the protection of the infant, and the woman's head and one visible eye are strained upward almost violently....the relief is about terror and helplessness. Specifically, he has said, it was about the atomic bomb, and he had originally called it 'War Mother'. (In the 1980s he had a small edition of bronzes cast from the 1947 plaster).... from GEORGE TSUTAKAWA by Martha Kingsbury, University of Washington Press

1993.003