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_George Sugarman (a sculpture) _
By: s borg
A Polychrome Profusion; sculptor George Sugarman, Fine Arts Building, New
York, New York BYLINE: RUBINSTEIN, RAPHAEL Best known today for his public
art, George Sugarman began his career with formally eccentric painted-wood
sculptures. In a revelatory New York exhibition, early pieces were shown
alongside the 86-year-old artist's more recent aluminum work. In the course of
1998, there were a number of important sculpture exhibitions in New York
galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art's Tony Smith
retrospective, Dia's presentation of Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, and a
group of David Smith's late painted-steel works at Gagosian Gallery. For me,
however, the most impressive and thought-provoking sculpture show of the year
was a concise survey of George Sugarman's work presented by Hunter College at
the galleries in its Fine Arts Building on Manhattan's West 41st Street.
Bringing together 16 sculptures made between 1958 and 1995, the exhibition
allowed viewers to trace Sugarman's career from his carved-wood works of the
late 1950s to his polychrome, laminated-wood pieces of the 1960s to the
painted-aluminum work that has occupied him since the early 1970s. While the
show did not cover Sugarman's extensive activity in the public-art realm--over
the last 30 years he has created large-scale public sculptures throughout the
U.S. as well as in Europe and Asia--it was an effective presentation of his
"indoor" work. (Sugarman has drawn a useful distinction between what he calls
the "indoor eye," a museum- and gallery-oriented esthetic vision which
perceives the work of art in isolation from its surroundings, and the "outdoor
eye," which allows us to view public art as part of a wider environment.)
Thanks to the presence of major, rarely seen works such as Two in One (1966)
and Ten (1968), the show was a welcome reminder of Sugarman's unique and
indispensable contribution to postwar sculpture. One of the earliest works on
view was Six Forms in Pine (1959), a carved-wood sculpture which brought
Sugarman his first major recognition when it won a prize at the 1961 Carnegie
International. Among the last of his unpainted works, it's a nearly
12-foot-long, smoothly flowing concatenation of horizontal abstract forms that
rests on two pedestals set several feet apart. Rippling patterns of chisel
marks are visible across every surface as are the strata of the laminated
wood. The forms, which range from gently swelling, landscape-like shapes to
more sharply defined volumes that evoke architecture or hand tools, are
clearly differentiated within the continuous overall structure. While the
carving technique and biomorphism relate Six Forms in Pine to established
sculptural styles of the 1950s, the sculpture also possesses properties which
presage Sugarman's innovative work of the next decade. The double pedestal
format, in which the sculpture seems to be leaping off its bases, anticipates
his subsequent elimination of the pedestal, and the emphatic horizontality of
the sculpture is a move toward the extended structures of the artist's 1960s
work. Sugarman's next phase was represented by three works: Blue and Red
(1961), Second Red and Blue (1962) and Three Forms on a Pole (1962). As the
titles of the first two sculptures suggest, color is an important component of
these works; the sculptures also show Sugarman's rapid elimination of
obviously hand-carved surfaces. Measuring 3 1/2 feet high and 5 feet long,
Blue and Red is an open, carved-wood piece combining geometric uprights with
more organic cantilevered forms, all of which are painted in primary colors.
Second Blue and Red, a modestly sized pedestal work, relies on similar colors
but it takes a very different compositional approach. Balanced atop a chunky
red form that suggests a bending torso is a horizontal blue element made from
flat, irregularly shaped pieces of wood that have been pressed together to
create a kind of sideways sculptural sandwich. With few, if any, precedents in
the history of sculpture, this playfully inventive blue element (in and of
itself, as well as in relation to the red form) announces Sugarman's gift for
finding new kinds of sculptural syntax. When the Hunter exhibition picks up
the tale again, it's 1966, the year Sugarman made one of the most striking
works of his career, Two in One. At first glance, this sculpture, which was
given a gallery unto itself, looks like it should really be called Nineteen in
One, since it consists not of two but of 19 different painted-wood forms laid
out in a narrow, 24-foot-long V formation. At the apex of the V is a
dark-purple, floor-hugging geometric shape that looks like a freestanding
sculpture toppled by some careless passerby. The two rows of forms branching
out from this flattened keystone are as abundant and various as the contents
of a child's box of toys. The palette can shift, in the space of four
elements, from yellow green to cobalt violet to black to cerulean blue, but
just when it appears that Sugarman's system is to give every part a different
color, you notice a sequence of three adjacent shapes painted bright yellow.
The shapes and sizes of the elements are, if anything, even more varied than
their colors. Sugarman juxtaposes solid and squat forms with others that are
cantilevered or attenuated; he creates internal volumes by both organic and
geometric enclosures; singlemass forms give way to latticelike structures; a
knee-high form is succeeded by a towering 11-foot presence. Some of the
individual parts are themselves multifarious, such as a low-lying, raw-sienna
piece near the junction of the two rows which combines a highly abstracted
kneeling figure, a cantilevered beam and an upright plane (it looks like a
snowplow blade) that seems to be pushing the rest of the sculpture before it.
This veritable encyclopedia of sculptural possibilities appears concerned with
defying all formal continuity, but as you move around Two in One, which is
laid out to offer a virtually inexhaustible number of viewpoints, the
relationships between the various components begin to seem not so purely
random. An angular, constructivist form and a biomorphic shape turn out to
share similar internal volumes; the sides of a low, sawtooth form rhyme
visually with an hourglass shape that rises next to it; lateral slots recur in
several components; the asymmetrical nature of the two branches is balanced by
the consistent bilateral symmetry of each individual piece. At the same time
that he invites the viewer to enjoy this inventive, almost carnivalesque
parade of shapes, Sugarman also offers multiple occasions for us to partake of
his unusual artistic logic, to uncover how one form covertly translates into
the next. The year after Two in One, in an Art in America symposium on the
1960s, Sugarman described his heterogeneous chains as the result of a
connective process in which "the first form fathers the second, the second the
third, etc."(1) This generative quality was picked up on by the late Amy
Goldin, one of Sugarman's most perceptive critics. In 1969, Goldin advised
Sugarman's audience not to be "misled by the gaiety of his color or the
heartiness of his form." Instead of being charmed by such aspects, it was
necessary to "ask where the piece of sculpture begins and ends. Insist on
knowing why this is green while that is yellow. Why the segments are set this
distance apart, neither abutted nor spaced more widely."(2) Confronted with
complex works such as Two in One or Inscape (1964), another important
multipart, multicolored floor piece, viewers may find Goldin's advice daunting
to follow, but it remains some of the best advice for appreciating the formal
intricacies of Sugarman's work. Another helpful hint may lie in the title of
an early Sugarman sculpture--One for Ornette Coleman (1961). Like that free
jazz innovator, whose music inspired a number of abstract artists in the early
1960s, Sugarman challenges us to comprehend the underlying structure of
apparently disjunctive works. The presence at Hunter of Two in One, offering
the opportunity to compare it to the preceding Six Forms in Pine, was a
reminder of the immense amount of esthetic ground Sugarman covered in the
first half of the 1960s. This was a moment when sculpture was breaking with
many traditions, old and new; one of the first to go was sculpture's literal
foundation. There's some debate as to who was the first artist to dispense
with the pedestal, but certainly works such as Sugarman's Four Walls, Five
Forms (1961-62), a painted-wood work in which five individually complex
elements appear to have collided on the floor, were instrumental. As one
critic later observed: "Beginning in the early '60s, sculpture came down off
its pedestal. Some give credit to Anthony Cato for this move; a rougher, more
dramatic, and perhaps more influential leap was accomplished almost
simultaneously by an as yet-underacknowledged American, George Sugarman."(3)
Interestingly, the curator of the Hunter College show, Stephen Davis, suggests
that while Sugarman's elimination of the pedestal and his use of bright colors
were a striking departure from the practice of the day, "even more
revolutionary was the radical decentering of the viewer" in works such as Two
in One.(4) Revolutionary they may have been, but Sugarman's innovations also
looked back to the history of sculpture, in particular to the Baroque era.
This is especially evident in works such as Bardana (1962-63) and Ritual Place
(1964-65), a pair of polychrome, laminated-wood pieces in which part of the
sculpture sits on a pedestal while other elements make drooping thrusts down
to the floor. During his years in Europe (1951-55), Sugarman had been
impressed by Baroque architecture and art, in particular Bernini's Cathedra
Petri and the Ecstasy of St. Theresa, where the sculptural forms burst out of
their architectural niches.(5) After his return to New York, he began to
incorporate a Baroque sense of formal abundance into the abstract language of
modern art. In 1993, Sugarman recalled his artistic concerns of the late 1950s
and early 1960s and how they led him to make sculptures that left the pedestal
and incorporated wildly dissimilar shapes: Space fascinated me. Why did most
sculptures use a vertical, figure-like space even with abstract forms? I
looked around. Objects and living things crawled and spread out on the ground.
You had to bend down to see them properly. Your body had a different
relationship to them. Some things climbed up, hugging other things for
support. Others hung above your head. Objects were broken up, yet remained
continuous. Some forms very different from each other were adjacent yet made a
coherent image. Space was used in every conceivable way. It was active, it was
as if it adapted itself to the needs of the world, that its role was not
merely passive.(6) Intermittently in the late 1960s and more intensely from
1970 on, Sugarman's investigation of active space took the form of outdoor,
public sculptures. While, as already noted, the Hunter exhibition skipped this
aspect of Sugarman's career, the show did include Yellow to White to Blue to
Black (1967), the sculpture that became the model for the first of Sugarman's
public commissions, for the Xerox Corporation in El Segundo, Calif. In
contrast to Two in One, this work's four streamlined forms, which describe a
variety of internal volumes, are spaced out widely from one another. The
roughly 3 1/2-foot-high pieces are also characterized by Sugarman's emerging
interest in larger, curving planes. This tendency toward sleeker shapes finds
its fullest expression in Ten (1968-69), a compelling, and in some ways
uncharacteristic, work which was one of the last sculptures Sugarman made in
wood. (Its presence at Hunter was especially welcome since the Museum of
Modern Art, which purchased Ten in 1976, rarely displays it.) Standing over 7
feet high and 5 feet wide, stretching to almost 12 1/2 feet in length, Ten
initially presents itself as a single, self-enclosed, smoothly contoured white
form, looming up in the space like a svelte igloo. Quickly, however, its
reliance on separate components becomes evident. As the title subtly tells us,
the sculpture is composed of 10 distinct, differently configured forms which
have been set within inches of one another. The narrow spaces between these
tall verticals allow you to peer into the physically inaccessible interior.
These gaps are carefully situated to bring light into parts of the interior,
while other areas are left in darkness. The play of light and shadow is
further complicated by the fact that the vertical elements are not simple
walls but forms which loop up and down like towels hanging on a rack.
Truncated, footlike extensions along the bottom of these looping elements help
stabilize the piece as well as establish a formal connection to the floor on
which the sculpture sits. In addition to its understated technical brilliance,
Ten also exudes powerful symbolism. Holliday T. Day, the curator of Sugarman's
traveling retrospective of 1981-82, has drawn attention to the work's female
and male polarities: the three narrow forms at one end suggest a phallic
lingam form, while the oval at the other end is emphatically egglike.(7) Brad
Davis, an artist who worked as Sugarman's assistant during the making of Ten,
has described the work as being "somewhere between an Egyptian sarcophagus and
a tantric cosmic egg."(8) The work also presents a paradoxical situation of a
shelterlike structure which is impossible to enter. It's a tribute to the
undogmatic nature of Sugarman's imagination that Ten should forgo so many of
the qualities that characterized his work of the previous decade (bright
colors, incongruous elements). And it's equally noteworthy that after
completing Ten he didn't go on turning out variations on the theme. After a
quick stop in 1970 for Green and White Spiral, a tour-de-force demonstration
of how to arrive at formal complexity by multiplying and repositioning a
single element, the Hunter show skipped ahead to 1987. In the intervening
years, Sugarman embraced the medium of painted aluminum, both for large-scale
outdoor works and smaller sculptures. (It would have been interesting to see
some of the maquettes Sugarman fashions, using a pliable paper and leather
compound, for the aluminum works.) In the 1970s, as well as creating public
sculptures around the country, Sugarman expanded his practice to include wall
reliefs and acrylic paintings. Responding to the properties of his new
materials, while still retaining his enthusiasm for color and irregular
shapes, he opted for different kinds of forms, building sculptures out of
fiat, foliage-like elements. After the austerities of the Minimalist 1960s,
his work found a more congenial art-world environment in the mid-'70s. In his
recent survey Art of the Postmodern Era, Irving Sandler discusses Sugarman's
1970s work in the chapter on "Pattern and Decoration Painting," noting how the
"profuse forms and exuberant color" of his early 1970s work "stunned" the
younger P &D artists.(9) (Sandler also makes the intriguing suggestion that
Sugarman's painted-metal works may have influenced the metal reliefs Frank
Stella began making in the mid-1970s, when the erstwhile Minimalist embraced
wildly colored, curvilinear forms.) The seven sculptures from the late '80s
and '90s that rounded out the Hunter College exhibition demonstrated that
Sugarman, who turns 87 this year, has continued to evolve artistically. The
Hanging Men (1987), is a freestanding, black-and-white structure that evokes
mechanical objects such as gears, rudders and airplane parts. The sculpture
seems to reject the sensual spirituality of Ten and is equally devoid of the
gracefully proliferating, vegetal forms that mark many of Sugarman's public
works. The "hanging men" of the title--three black, bladelike forms impaled on
a white spar that projects from the sculpture's side--are less the sculpture's
subjects than they are its victims. Yellow Fringes (1990) shows Sugarman's
continuing involvement with eccentric, disparate forms. The core of this
sculpture, which is installed high on the wall and suggests a spiky, half-open
fan, is a bundle of three black-and-white girders--one sporting sawtooth
edges, another punctuated by bent flaps--which jut out several feet at about a
40 degree angle. Wedged between these girders and the wall are five flat
aluminum forms, alternately black and white, that resemble oversized Christmas
stockings. Bristling from the outside of the girders are three bright-yellow
aluminum forms (the "fringes") cut into rhythmic, fencelike patterns. With a
formal unpredictability as great as his "one thing after another" floor
sculptures of the mid 1960s, Sugarman here invites viewers to exercise their
vision by focusing attention in an unusual place (where the wall meets the
ceiling) and, there, to engage in retinal battle with a thrusting sculpture
that keeps its complexities partly hidden. Yellow and White (1995) is a
roughly 5 1/2-foot-high aluminum work composed of two elements: a gracefully
twisted white shape at once suggestive of a curving funnel on a ship, a
megaphone and the pistil of a flower, and, at its base, a boxy yellow form
with irregular folds and scalloped edges. Sugarman works against our
expectations by placing the more brightly hued, petal-like form on the floor
rather than at the top of the stemlike white form. He also creates a work
which, with its tapering edges, torqued planes and opened and closed volumes,
offers the mobile viewer an equally mobile set of formal relations. In his
introduction to the catalogue that accompanied the Hunter show, Museum of
Modern Art curator Robert Storr suggests that there is a resonance between
Sugarman's work and that of younger sculptors such as Polly Apfelbaum, Charles
Long and Peter Soriano. I agree with Storr in seeing an affinity between their
work and Sugarman's (particularly his painted-wood sculptures of 1963-67), and
would only add to his list three more American sculptors: Jeanne Silverthorne,
Jessica Stockholder and Daniel Wiener. One quality of Sugarman's work that
links it to the sculpture of artists 40 or more years his junior is that in
the early 1960s he rejected the notion of "troth to materials," happily
obscuring the "natural" properties of the wood he used with repeated coats of
acrylic paint. Another is his Baroque-influenced fondness for extended forms
that undertake unruly excursions from their bases.(10) Given these affinities
with younger artists, it's surprising that Sugarman's achievement isn't more
widely recognized and that it was left to Hunter College, rather than a major
American museum, to offer this survey. No doubt, Sugarman's long focus on
public art (rather than on gallery and museum work) has been a factor. Also at
play, I fear, is the profound indifference shown by large swaths of the art
world to the kind of formal inventiveness and complex visual thinking on which
Sugarman's art is based. I can only hope that the art students who made up a
significant portion of the audience for this exhibition found some of their
late-century assumptions about art-making challenged by the high order of
visual invention on hand. (1.) Quoted in Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler,
"Sensibility of the Sixties," Art in America, January-February, 1967, p. 51.
(2.) Amy Goldin, "George Sugarman," in George Sugarman: Plastiken, Collagen,
Zeichnungen, Kunsthalle Basel, 1969, unpaginated. (3.) John Perreault, "George
Sugarman, Joslyn Art Museum," Artforum, Summer 1982. (4.) Stephen Davis,
"Disparity in Sugarman," George Sugarman, New York, Hunter College, 1998, p.
8. Davis also points out the similarities between Sugarman's work and Frank
Gehry's architecture, especially his Guggenheim Bilbao. (5.) See Holliday T.
Day, Shape of Space: The Sculpture of George Sugarman, Omaha, Joslyn Art
Museum 1982, p. 16. (6.) Artist's statement in George Sugarman, Tokyo,
Contemporary Sculpture Center, 1993, unpaginated. (7.) Day, p. 42. (8.) Ibid.,
"Recollections," p. 88. (9.) Irving Sandier, Art of the Postmodern Era: From
the Late 608 to the Early 908, New York, HarperCollins, 1996, p. 144. (10.)
Compare Bardana and Ritual Place with Silverthorne's Untitled (Fragment), 1996
[A.i.A., June '97, p. 100] or Wiener's Ball, 1993 [A.i.A., Nov. '95, p. 105].
"George Sugarman" was seen at the Gallery in the Fine Arts Building, Hunter
College, New York [Feb. 18-Apr. 11, 1998]. The accompanying catalogue includes
texts by the curator Stephen Davis and by Robert Storr. Sugarman was also
included in a recent three-person show at Tatunz Gallery, New York [Feb.
2-Mar. 20]. His newest large-scale public sculpture will be inaugurated in
Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in July, as part of the Universiada Sculpture Park.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH IAC-CREATE-DATE: April 23, 1999 LOAD-DATE: April 24, 1999 ©
1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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