At the age of 85, the well-known American sculptor Richard Serra, who became famous for his giant rusting structures, died. He was given space in the world’s leading galleries and at events such as the Venice Biennale or the Documenta traveling show.
He never had a solo exhibition in the Czech Republic, only in 1992 visitors to the National Theater in Prague could see a production of Rite of Spring by the Japanese dancer Min Tanaka, for which Serra prepared the stage. Archa Theater participated in the project. About the artist’s death on Wednesday informed The New York Times, citing Serra’s lawyer. The cause was pneumonia.
Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1938 to a Spanish father and a Russian mother. In his childhood, he often visited the shipyard where his father was employed. Later, he himself worked in a steel mill, which influenced his work. Although his works more often stood out for their gigantic dimensions than their detailed sophistication, from an artistic point of view he was called a minimalist.
Richard Serra in 2008 at an exhibition of his works at the Grand Palais in Paris. | Photo: AFP / Profimedia.cz
After studying at the University of California at Berkeley and Yale University, Richard Serra moved to New York, where in 1966 he began to create objects from industrial materials such as metal, fiberglass, rubber, sheet metal or steel sheets, which he allowed to rust in the open air. He described himself as a formalist, he rejected metaphors, and he considered aspects such as width, weight and material to be the most important.
One of his works from 1981, located in Manhattan, New York, became so hated that the city hall finally had to remove it. The controversial 36-meter-long and 3.6-meter-high installation, called Tilted Arc, was made by Serra from weather-resistant steel and placed in Federal Plaza in front of a building where more than a thousand government officials worked. It was a city order. Work chose expert commission and after completion it became the property of the state, which paid the author 175 thousand dollars for it.
Richard Serra’s curved arch in the 1980s outraged New Yorkers. | Photo: ČTK / AP
“Thanks to this work, the viewer is aware of himself and where he is moving across the square,” argued Serra, according to whom the Bent Arch uproots a person who was previously used to running quickly across the square and not noticing the world around him.
At the same time, in his words, Serra wanted to create a work that would be “equal, not subordinate” to the surrounding architecture of office buildings and glass skyscrapers.
Supporters of the work included the composer Philip Glass, the artist Keith Haring or the artists Claes Oldenburg and Frank Stella. Its preservation was also supported by William Rubin, then head of the sculpture collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or Robert T. Buck, director of the Brooklyn Museum. According to the website Artnews.com The Leaning Arch “went down in history as one of the most hated works in public space in the history of New York”.
People who lived and worked around the square wrote a petition against it. And reservations also appeared in the press. For example, the New Yorker magazine wrote that it is “entirely legitimate to question whether art that appeals to so few people, regardless of its sculptural contribution, should be placed in public space and funded with public money.”
After a stormy debate, the statue was finally removed in March 1989 “simply because of how many people hated it”, summarizes the website Artnews.com. Serra tried to prevent the removal in court, but was unsuccessful. The work ended up in a warehouse in the state of Maryland and will probably never be placed in a public space again, because according to the author’s instructions, it was intended only for a New York square.
The case surrounding the Tilted Arc was recalled last year by the short documentary film Tilted Arc, which was filmed by Baxter Stein. He was seen at festivals. | Video: Method M Films
The day after it was dismantled, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial entitled “Pay God”, while the New York Times they uttered the fear that, as a result of the case, the wider public will become suspicious of the artists, and the artists, in turn, will be suspicious of the government, which will order a custom-made work from them, only to have the authors plundered by the public and finally liquidate the result.
Removing the statue cost another tens of thousands of dollars, so in total the project cost taxpayers nearly a quarter of a million dollars.
The installation called East-West was placed by Richard Serra in the desert in Doha, Qatar. | Photo: Shutterstock
Richard Serra already traveled to Spain in the early 1980s, where he studied architecture there. Already in the same decade, however, he earned the recognition of critics, especially on the old continent, when he had large solo exhibitions in German and French museums.
At the same time that Americans protested his Leaning Arch, for example, French President François Mitterrand awarded him the Order of Arts and Letters. And for example, as recently as 2008, his show in the Paris exhibition pavilion Grand Palais was one of the cultural events of the season.
“Europeans maintain a historical continuity of sculpture in public space that stretches back to Donatello or Rodin. There is nothing like that in America, and the government has excluded from public space all art that does not reinforce the official ideology of the state,” the artist explained the discrepancy between its acceptance in the US and Europe.
He was particularly successful in Spain, where his father came from. A retrospective exhibition at Madrid’s Queen Sofia National Museum in 1992 was a turning point for Serra, and in the new millennium he presented himself, for example, in a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by architect Frank Gehry. The Spanish curator of the exhibition, Carmen Jiménez, called him “undoubtedly the most important living sculptor”.
Although Serra remains credited to the wider public as the author of The Leaning Arch, the vast majority of his works have not caused a similar stir in the US either. He placed more than 100 works in the public space that can be find in the American Philadelphia or St. Louis, but also, for example, in São Paulo, Brazil, or Doha, Qatar.
The New Yorker magazine printed an article about him in 2002 called Man of Steel Based on the Superman Movies. In it, Serra explained, among other things, when he realized he wasn’t going to be a painter – when he saw a famous painting in Spain’s Prado Court ladies by Diego Velázquez from 1656.