Remembering American sculptor Richard Serra for his art that adds perception
The prolific San Francisco-born artist died on March 26, 2024 at the age of 85
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
While American sculptor Richard Serra's work can be found in public spaces and museums around the world, he started his appreciation of art by drawing.
He was born in 1938 in San Francisco to a Spanish father and a Russian Jewish mother and was constantly drawing as a kid. He majored in English literature at the University of California in Santa Barbara, but while he was there, he became interested in the great Mexican muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
He loved how they were able to change his experience of both space and architecture through their work, so Serra went on to Yale Art School, where he majored in painting. Then he won travel grants to Paris and Florence.
By the time he moved to New York in the mid-1960s, he had put painting permanently behind him and focused on three-dimensional work. He began with rubber and lead, but soon switched to steel, a material he was already familiar with since — as the son of a shipyard pipe-fitter — he'd worked in steel mills to put himself through school.
Before long, Serra was making outdoor site-specific work: huge curved steel sculptures that oxidize over time, giving them a warm, brownish hue. His art has been almost universally celebrated and is now exhibited worldwide.
Serra died in March of this year at the age of 85. Eleanor Wachtel spoke with him in New York in 2011.
The shift to sculpture
"It happened because I made a trip to Madrid and I had never seen Velázquez before, and I saw Las Meninas and I was completely dumbfounded.
"And I was looking at the painting and Velázquez was looking at me. And what I thought was that not only had Velázquez punched this perspectival hole in the plane of the painting in order to make the scene of the Infanta and the dog and the people looking out, but he had also projected a space in front of the painting where the viewer was implicated in the space of the painting. Where you became part of the subject matter of the painting and the people in the painting were looking at you.
"Now that differs in any painting I had seen up to that point, where in every previous painting the subject matter was what was being depicted, and that was the object of your concern. Here the subject matter was you as you were experiencing part of the space, and I didn't understand how I could do that on the flat. I didn't understand how that planar illusion could project itself into three-dimensional space.
"And when I got back to Florence, I'd been painting with a stopwatch ... and that was getting me nowhere. I took all my paint, all my brushes, all my canvas and threw them in the Arno. I decided I was going to deal with three dimensions and I didn't know how I was going to do it."
Working with steel
"Steel was, from Picasso to Gonzalez to David Smith, the academic material of the 20th century, and I didn't want to get near it. I realized that if I looked at the way that they had used steel,cutting and folding and hanging it out in space, that it was untrue to its structural principles in that it was usually anchored to the ground with bolts.
"Or it wasn't freestanding, or it was welded in a way that was untrue to its balance and tectonics. And it was really a way of making pictures in the open space.
"So it was still a handmaiden to the pictorial concerns that painters had. I had come through steel mills and I had put up buildings. So I understood that there was a different way to use steel. Steel in the Industrial Revolution had been used for bridges and towers and silos, and the way that steel had been used throughout the Industrial Revolution, particularly in the 20th century in America, had nothing to do with the way it was being used in art of that century.
I decided that I would go after steel and space with my own concerns and my own logic and so be it.- Richard Serra
"I decided to use what I knew about steel for its stasis and its weight and its compression and its tendency to overturn and its basic tectonic principles, which up to then had not been applied to sculpture.
"I decided that I would go after steel and space with my own concerns and my own logic and so be it."
Why his art resonates
"When I first showed these Torqued Ellipses in downtown New York, people were startled. At that point the pieces became kind of a sea change in how people were perceiving my work.
"I think because it was a volume of space that is not found in nature; it's not found in architecture and it's available to anyone. You don't have to know anything about art or the history of sculpture to appreciate it. And it seemed to come out of nowhere.
"There was no precedent for that kind of form. It doesn't come out of seashells, it doesn't come out of any kind of biomorphic form. It doesn't come out of anything that had ever been done in architecture. It was startling. And people recognized that from the outside of it, you couldn't discern the inside and from the inside you couldn't discern the outside.
"People appreciated the fact that they were able to walk into, through and around something that was unlike anything that they had seen before spatially. And they looked at the space on the floor, which they could see was an oval. They looked up overhead. They saw an oval at an angle to that oval, and they realized that the walls that were going up around them were either leaning in or out. But the radius wasn't changing. That was something that no one had ever seen.
"And I think people felt that something that they lacked in their perception was being added to their perception, which gave them an interest in seeing more of it.
All art can ever do is enlarge your frame of reference and experience and point to things that you lack.- Richard Serra
"All art can ever do is enlarge your frame of reference and experience and point to things that you lack. And if it points to things that you lack, it fulfils you in ways that you could not have foreseen. And if I say Matisse, that means you can conjure up one image, if I say Picasso another, if I say Pollock another, if I say Cezanne another.
"That's what makes the language of art so rich, is that it allows us to fulfil a need we have for a poetic extension and a lyricism which we ourselves are not available to."
Richard Serra's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
