Primary Structures and Environmental Sculpture
Like painting, sculpture since
1945
has been notable for its epic proportions. Indeed, scale
assumed fundamental significance for a sculptural movement that extended
the scope— the very
concept—of sculpture in an
entirely new direction. "Primary Structure," the most suitable name
suggested for this type, conveys its two salient characteristics:
extreme simplicity of shapes and a kinship with architecture. Another
term, "Environmental Sculpture" (not to be confused with the
mixed-medium "environments" of Pop), refers to the fact that many
Primary Structures are designed to envelop the beholder, who is invited
to enter or walk through them. It is this space-articulating function
that distinguishes Primary Structures from all previous sculpture and
relates them to architecture. They are the modern successors, in
structural steel and concrete, to such prehistoric monuments as
Stonehenge.
Mathias Goeritz.
The first to explore these possibilities was Mathias Goeritz
(born
1915), a German
working in Mexico City. As early as 1952-53,
he established an experimental museum, The Echo,
for the display of massive geometric compositions, some of them so large
as to occupy an entire patio (fig. 1144).
His ideas have since been taken up on both sides of the
Atlantic.
1144. Mathias Goeritz. Steel
Structure. 1952-53.
Height 4.5 m. The Fcho (Experimental Museum), Mexico City
Ronald Bladen
Often, these sculptors limit themselves to the role of
designer and leave the execution to others, to emphasize the
impersonality and duplicability of their invention. If no patron is
found to foot the bill for carrying out these costly structures, they
remain on paper, like unbuilt architecture. Sometimes such works reach
the mock-up stage. The X (fig. 1145),
by the Canadian
Ronald Bladen
(1918-1988), was originally built with painted wood substituting for metal for an exhibition inside the
two-story hall of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. Its
commanding presence, dwarfing the Neoclassic colonnade of the hall,
seems doubly awesome in such a setting.
1145.
Ronald Bladen. The X
(in the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.).
1967.
Painted wood, later constructed in steel, 6.9
x 7.3 x
3.8 m.
Courtesy Fischbach Gallery, New York
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Ronald
Bladen
(b Vancouver, 13 July 1918; d New York, 3 Feb 1988).
Canadian sculptor and painter. He studied at the Vancouver School of Art and at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. While living in San Francisco in the 1950s, he produced paintings related to the Abstract Expressionism of Clyfford Still, using mythic and pictographic forms (e.g. Untitled, c. 1956–9; New York, Met.). In the early 1960s he turned to sculpture, abandoning the subjectivity of his previous work in favour of large, simple structures, such as Three Elements (painted aluminium, 1965; New York, MOMA), that demanded to be appreciated in formal terms alone, without explanation, interpretation or evaluation. Nevertheless, the anthropomorphic qualities seen by some critics in his massive solid forms separated his sculpture from the more geometric forms of Minimalism practised by sculptors such as Tony Smith, Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt. In the mid-1980s Bladen again created visual drama by reflecting light from aluminium sheets attached to skeletal wood constructions.
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David Smith.
Not all Primary Structures are Environmental Sculptures, of
course. Most are free-standing works independent of the sites that
contain them. Bladen's The X, for example, was later constructed
of painted steel as an outdoor sculpture. They nevertheless share the
same monumental scale and economy of form. The artist who played the
most influential role in defining their character was David Smith
(1906—1965). His earlier work had
been strongly influenced by the wrought-iron constructions of Julio
Gonzalez (fig. 1139), but
during the last years of his life he evolved a singularly impressive
form of Primary Structure in his Cubi series. Figure
1146
shows three of these against the open sky
and rolling hills of the artist's farm at Bolton Landing, New York. (All
are now in major museums.) Only two basic components arc employed: cubes
(or multiples of them) and cylinders. Yet Smith has created a seemingly
endless variety of configurations. The units that make up the structures
are poised one upon the other as if they were held in place by magnetic
force, so that each represents a fresh triumph over gravity. Unlike many
members of the Primary Structure movement, Smith executed these pieces
himself, welding them of sheets of stainless steel whose shiny surfaces
he finished and controlled with exquisite care. As a result, his work
displays an "old-fashioned" subtlety of touch that reminds us of the
polished bronzes of Brancusi.
1146. David Smith. Cubi
Series. Stainless steel.
(left) Cubi XVIII. 1964.
Height 9'8" (2.9 m). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston;
(center) Cubi XVII. 1963.
Height 9'2" (2.7 m). Dallas Museum of Fine Arts;
(right) Cubi XIX. 1964.
9'5" (2.9 m). The Tate Gallery, London
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David Smith
David Smith, in full David Roland Smith (born March 9, 1906,
Decatur, Indiana, U.S.—died May 23, 1965, Albany, New York),
American sculptor whose pioneering welded metal sculpture
and massive painted geometric forms made him the most
original American sculptor in the decades after World War
II. His work greatly influenced the brightly coloured
“primary structures” of Minimal art during the 1960s.
Smith was never trained as a sculptor, but
he learned to work with metal in 1925, when he was briefly
employed as a riveter at the Studebaker automobile plant in
South Bend, Indiana. Dropping out of college after his first
year, he moved to New York City and, while working variously
as a taxi driver, salesman, and carpenter, studied painting
under John Sloan and the Czech abstract painter Jan Matulka.
Smith’s sculpture grew out of his early
abstract paintings of urban scenes, which were reminiscent
of the work of his friend Stuart Davis. Experimenting with
texture, he began to attach bits of wood, metal strips, and
found objects to his paintings, until the canvases were
reduced to virtual bases supporting sculptural
superstructures. Long after he stopped painting, his
sculpture continued to betray its pictorial origins: his
overriding concern with the interplay of two-dimensional
planes and the articulation of their surfaces led Smith to
abrade or to paint his sculpture while often ignoring the
traditional sculptural problems of developing forms in
three-dimensional space.
Smith’s interest in freestanding sculpture
dates from the early 1930s, when he first saw illustrations
of the welded metal sculpture of Pablo Picasso and another
Spanish sculptor, Julio González. Following their example,
Smith became the first American artist to make welded metal
sculpture. He found a creative freedom in this technique
that, combined with the liberating influence of the
Surrealist doctrine that art springs from the spontaneous
expression of the unconscious mind, allowed him soon to
produce a large body of abstract biomorphic forms remarkable
for their erratic inventiveness, their stylistic diversity,
and their high aesthetic quality.
In 1940 Smith moved to Bolton Landing, New
York, where he made sculpture during World War II when not
assembling locomotives and tanks in a defense plant. For a
time after the war, he continued to work in a bewildering
profusion of styles, but toward the end of the decade he
disciplined his exuberant imagination by making pieces in
stylistically unified series. Such series of sculptures were
often continued over a period of years concurrently with
other series of radically different styles. With the Albany
series (begun in 1959) and the Zig series the following
year, Smith’s work became more geometric and monumental. In
Zigs, his most successful Cubist works, he used paint to
emphasize the relationships of planes, but in his Cubi
(begun in 1963), his last great series, Smith relied instead
on the light of the sculptures’ outdoor surroundings to
bring their burnished stainless-steel surfaces to life.
These pieces abandon two-dimensional planes for cylinders
and rectilinear solids that achieve a sense of massive
volume. Smith joined these cubiform elements at odd and
seemingly haphazard angles, in dynamically unstable
arrangements that communicate an effect of weightlessness
and freedom.
Encyclopædia Britannica
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David Smith. Ancient Household. 1945
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
David Smith. The Forest
1950
David Smith. Star Cage
1950
David Smith. Australia. 1951
Bolton Landing, New York
David Smith. Portait of a Young Girl
1954
David Smith. 25 planes
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