San Francisco sculptor Bruce Hassen wants to melt down firearms and Nazi helmets, transforming symbols of destruction into art.
He’s planning to create two bell sculptures to honor Assisi priests who helped save 200 Italian Jews during World War II.
“They’re worth recognizing,” Hassen said recently at his Berkeley studio. “They did this extremely courageous act alone without the support of the Catholic Church.”
At the time, saving Jews was not a church priority.
“This story [of the Assisi priests] is particularly interesting because of the history of Jewish-Catholic relations and how lately, it’s improved,” he said. “It seems timely to do this, as we near the end of the century.”
Working with smelted weapons has been a powerful medium for Hassen, 44, who has molded the material since 1994.
Acknowledging that bells — symbols of freedom and victory — were historically made from melted cannons following wars, he also cites a contemporary reason for reshaping gun metal.
“Firearms are terrorizing this society and it’s causing a lot of social problems. There’s an urban war going on. It’s an epidemic,” he said. “I felt compelled to do something.”
Initially, he contacted the San Francisco and Oakland police departments to request confiscated arms. “They were happy to give them to me,” Hassen said. “They dismantle them and give them to me in pieces. They’re the perfect size to melt them down in a crucible.”
At the end of May, his latest work, “The Birds,” was unveiled at the annual awards ceremony of the Amici Dell’Italia Foundation at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
The sculpture was inspired by the story of Nicholas Green, the 7-year-old Bodega Bay resident who was shot in Italy by highway robbers in 1994. It consists of seven primitive-looking bells (to commemorate the seven Italian transplant recipients who received the child’s organs), each crowned by a bird and suspended from thin cables at varying heights.
The serene-looking piece is being donated to the government of Calabria, the region where Nicholas was shot.
For the new sculpture, Hassen will remold arms metal into two 30-inch bells, one he would like to send to Assisi and the other he hopes will remain in San Francisco, ideally at the Jewish Museum, he said. The budget for the project is $80,000, which has yet to be raised.
“There’s a lot of avenues I can go to get funding, including Jewish to Catholic organizations,” he said. “To get funded, it has to hit people at a gut level.”
Each bell will have niches on the surface. The bell’s exteriors will represent a wall of protection, while behind the niches, human figures will be semi-visible.
Hassen said the Nazi helmets will not be completely melted down in the sculpture. Fragments will protrude from the bells in order to suggest images of the war. “It would not interfere with the design,” he said. “But it’s a way to remember.”
The sculptor knows a collector who frequents military shows, where Nazi memorabilia is often available.
“I don’t want to have to pay a lot to get it,” Hassen said. “But I will pay if I have to because the important thing is getting them out of circulation. Why should people have these things around?”
After receiving a degree in art from U.C. Santa Cruz in 1977, Hassen spent nearly three years attending art academies in Italy. Every chance he gets, he returns to Italy and hangs out in the museums.
Years ago, when he sold a marble sculpture for $2,000, he used the money to return to Italy. “That piece was my first significant sale. At the time, I could live off that for six months in Italy.”
Hassen, who grew up in a Jewish home in Southern California, has a strong personal connection to Italy. His paternal grandmother was Italian and both paternal grandparents lived in Rhodes when it was under Italian rule. His mother’s ancestors came from Russia.
Besides his preoccupation with Italian culture, other influences in Hassen’s work include architectural forms, more recently of the Peruvian variety. Among modern sculptors, Hassen admires Henry Moore, Uruguay’s Torres Garcia and several other South American artists. He also enjoys the work of several Jewish artists, such as Lithuanian-born sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, as well as ancient works.
“I love antiquity,” he said. “I like the early 20th century period when Jewish arts started becoming significant. Before, there were just craftsmen. Then, all of a sudden, there was this really diverse group.”
Animals are featured prominently in a number of Hassen’s pieces, such as “Ark,” a dense bronze contemporary version of Noah’s ark that the San Francisco Arts Commission installed at a Tenderloin park during the mid-’80s.
“The animals I used in the sculpture are endangered and vanishing,” Hassen said.
Historical context is a crucial link in Hassen’s work. Before he embarks on the Assisi project, he intends to research the Italian town’s wartime period.
“I like things with a reference,” he said. “In contemporary art, that seems to be an unimportant issue.”