Dimitri Hadzi: Sculptures grace museums, Boston streets

As a birthday tribute to the sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney wrote:

But sculptor's time keeps other laws

It marks the time and makes it pause

As megaliths in misty air

Or your strong forms in Harvard Square

A few years before his friend penned the poem, Mr. Hadzi said, "A big frustration is that I know my time is limited now, and there's a hell of a lot of things I still want to do. I hope I can get around to them."

Although he lived to 85, it was not long enough to finish all he had begun.

Days after his death, artworks in stages of completion - enough to demand years, if not decades of attention - marked Mr. Hadzi's sudden absence in each room of his East Cambridge studio.

"He didn't want to go," said his wife, Cynthia. "He had a lot to do."

A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Mr. Hadzi died of kidney failure on Easter. His sculptures have found homes in the Museum of Fine Arts and, in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

His public art is displayed outside Lincoln Center in New York and at sites in Portland, Ore., Toledo, Ohio, and Rome.

"He leaves behind a major body of work," said Harry Cooper, curator of modern art at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge.

"The art was the most important thing to him," said Michael Mazur, an artist and longtime friend. "All the rest of it was just icing on the cake, basically, and the cake was in the studio."

Outside the studio, some of his major works are on display in Boston and Cambridge.

In the Copley Place Mall, tourists and wedding parties pose in front of Mr.

Hadzi's 60-foot tall "Fountain," created in 1984.

"To this day, I walk into Copley Place, and I just can't believe I made that," he said several years ago. "It's just so relaxing. I'm very fond of it."

At the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston, his 1969 bronze sculpture "Thermopylae" seemed to anticipate figures that appeared in the "Star Wars" films. "Elmo MIT," a stocky, 1963 bronze, is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and "Omphalos," his 1985 sculpture of mixed granites, stands near the Red Line entrance in Harvard Square.

Steps away from the cars and trucks rolling along Massachusetts Avenue, the polished blocks of "Omphalos" rise more than 20 feet next to Out of Town News. Abstract appendages slice the air above people tromping on the bricks below. At rush hour Friday, some paused to glance upward, though most passed by or sat on the base to sip an iced coffee and lean back against the sculpture's Stonehenge-style pillars.

The Greek name suggests navel of the world - an allusion to Harvard Square's intellectual gravitas.

Mr. Hadzi spoke Greek at home in Brooklyn, N.Y., until he began attending school as a child. His father was a furrier from Kastoria, Greece, and his mother was from a family of grain merchants in Adrianopolis, Turkey. The stock market crash of 1929 ruined his father's business.

With finances precarious, Mr. Hadzi grew up in a household with no heat, studying by kerosene lanterns, huddling under the covers with his brothers for warmth. An uncle gave him his first box of paints and took him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A guidance counselor suggested he take the entrance exam for Brooklyn Technical High School. He got in.

Training as a chemist, he worked in a research lab and went to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army Air Force and served on an island off Australia. He asked to be discharged in California so he and a friend could hitchhike their way back East, stopping at museums along the way.

In New York, he was accepted at Cooper Union and discarded his chemistry career to study art. Four decades later, he acknowledged that while creativity can be a struggle, "Whenever I felt discouraged and felt like complaining, I said to myself, 'You picked this.' I gave up chemistry and studied art. ... I chose the difficult life. The artist's life."

Graduating with honors from Cooper Union, Mr. Hadzi was awarded a Fulbright fellowship and lived in Greece, then studied art in Rome on the GI Bill. He stayed in Italy for 25 years, winning awards for his work and befriending artists, composers, and writers.

"His studio became a kind of hub in Rome for Americans and others coming through," Mazur said.

"I thought it was paradise," Mr. Hadzi told the Globe in 1989.

"He must have walked the streets of Rome until he wore holes in the streets," his wife said. "He knew every corner and every good trattoria."

When he was 55, in the mid-1970s, Harvard invited him to come teach. He remained for 14 years and retired as professor emeritus.

In the introduction to Mr. Hadzi's 1996 monograph, Heaney characterized his friend as, "The Greek who will come alive with a recollection of the ancient myths or at the sound of music in a tavern, whose intensity of focus can apply itself with equal conviction to a museum exhibit or to the listings on a menu."

He worked always, staying in his studio hours past midnight.

Traveling often to exhibits and museums, he sat in the passenger seat, sketching. In the enclosed yard outside his studio, he made sculptural sketches with smaller pieces of stone. He worked with granite, bronze, wax, and ceramic.

He painted and made prints.

All forms of his work are in the studio, where on the walls hang smaller models for the Copley Place "Fountain" and the stately "Ecumenical Doors," a 1977 work now part of St. Paul's Within the Walls in Rome.

Mr. Hadzi was European in manners and dress. Away from dusty studio garb "he always wore a tie," Mazur said. "In a way, he was an alchemist. He had to make a decision between chemistry and art. He chose both. As a sculptor, he was extremely sensual. The sensuality comes out of his particular love of materials, of bronze and stone and minerals. It was the feel, the look, the visual qualities of the materials. Everything became precious."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Hadzi leaves two children from a previous marriage, Cristina of New York City and Stephen of Holyoke; and a sister, Rebecca Mastropasqua of Brooklyn, N.Y.

A funeral will be held Tuesday at 11 a.m. in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Boston.

c.2006 The Boston Globe