This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following information is from John Mellar:
"I was a student and personal friend of, and also assisted Edouard Chassaing for several years in the early 1960s....he was a master of the craft of sculpture including the making of complicated plaster piece molds as well as the use of ferrocement reinforced concrete as a final sculptural material for many of his works, particularly his animal sculptures at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo....
He had quite a sense of humor as well, of which I have numerous personal anecdotes...in particular, the large statue (from his later life-after retiring from teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago) of the Virgin was in fact the centerpiece statue for a fountain he designed titled Salome in the Court of Hero. The Virgin mentioned was actually a rather sensual dancing figure of Salome, with four large caricature self-portrait heads as corners of the fountain...The identification of Salome as the Virgin Mary originated when a reporter from the Chicago Tribune once came to interview him. and inquired about the large statue in his studio, to which he impishly replied "it is a statue of the Virgin Mary", and so it has gone into history. Somewhere, I still have the newspaper clipping from this interview (which had a photo of the piece).
Another anecdote: Chassaing told me that he prototyped the original version of his best known sculpture Hope and Help with the surgeon wearing a somewhat sinister mask, and the figure being helped as an attractive female with one breast exposed. Since this was a commissioned sculpture for public placement on North Michigan Avenue, his original concept had to be substantially modified to become the final sculpture.
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