TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/062689/06268900.068

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 94 lines

ART, Page 88

Poetry in Glass and Steel

A posthumous show confirms Christopher Wilmarth's stature

By Robert Hughes


    When the sculptor Christopher Wilmarth committed suicide at the
age of 44 some 18 months ago, there were no headlines. Wilmarth was
not a "star," and so, ignored by the mechanisms of art-world hype,
his work was left to find its own level. It is now doing so. The
time for a complete Wilmarth retrospective has not arrived, but the
Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan has mounted a small exhibition
of 25 of his sculptures (through Aug. 20), sensitively curated with
an excellent catalog essay by Laura Rosenstock. Even from this
limited evidence, it is clear that Wilmarth was by far the best
American sculptor of his generation.

    Bad popular artists come and go, but there is a degree of
aesthetic literacy that cannot be faked. Wilmarth's originality was
of the only kind that counts, born of long reflection on the past.
He was a child of the museum, which is why this posthumous show
seems so much like a homecoming. He was steeped in a great
tradition of which the exemplars were, in poetry, Stephane
Mallarme; in painting, Henri Matisse; in sculpture, Constantin
Brancusi. Wilmarth was a man of wide visual curiosity, but of all
modernist movements the one that interested him most was symbolism,
which reached its height around 1890 under Mallarme's leadership
and which, through its effect on Matisse and others, lay at the
very root of 20th century art. For the symbolists, art was a matter
of evocation, not description.

    Mallarme had written of the impalpable reality that poetry must
somehow approach: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help
of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface
themselves in a complementary silence . . . comes close to the act
of creation." Wilmarth's singular project was to create the spirit
of reverie that surrounds the "negated object," but in that most
object-affirming of arts, sculpture, and to seek its poetic effects
in heavy industrial materials -- steel and glass. Typically,
Wilmarth, a Californian who spent most of his working life in New
York City, adopted as one of his heroes John Roebling, the designer
of the Brooklyn Bridge.

    For an artist of Wilmarth's age there was nothing radical about
steel. It was the bronze of modernism, the normal substance of
constructed sculpture for the past 60 years and more. What was
unusual was his decision to combine it with glass and thus make
transparency, as much as spatial enclosure, a part of the
sculptural effect. Wilmarth loved light. It was his madeleine, a
trigger of memory, as a particular smell might be to others: "I
associate the significant moments of my life with the character of
light at the time." In fact, glass came before steel in his work
of the early '70s, and some of his most beautiful pieces consist
only of glass plate laced together with tension cable -- flat, bent
or subtly curved, as in Tina Turner, 1970-71, an astonishing tour
de force for a sculptor in his 20s.

    But it is the association of glass with steel that gives his
work its peculiar evocative power. Wilmarth worked the glass,
bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This
frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from
a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the
face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges.
The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its
declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather
an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define.

    In large works like the Nine Clearings for a Standing Man,
1973, Wilmarth achieved the kind of grandeur of light and
pared-down form that one associates with Rothko at his best, and
something more: the sense of a figure, not described but evoked by
a flat vertical plane, behind the glass. Even in a smaller piece
like Is, Was (Chancing), 1975-76, there is a fascinating exchange
between dark and light, solidity and translucency, underwritten by
the economical logic of its making: a single sheet of steel cut and
folded, a single plate of glass. And the cables that hold such
pieces together are not mere connectors. They are conceived as
drawing: exact lines whose tautness is both visual and structural.
The ancestor whom they evoke is the pre-1914 Matisse, whose near
abstract views of Notre Dame through the studio window had as much
effect on Wilmarth's sculpture as they did on Richard Diebenkorn's
Ocean Parks.

    In Wilmarth's later work of the '80s, the hidden figure becomes
explicit. Wilmarth's sign for it was in part a homage to Brancusi:
an egg-shaped form, a glass sign for a head. Sometimes it appears
on its own -- once, in a piece called Sigh, 1979-80, with the
"face" cut away and resting resignedly inside the egg, an image of
exquisite poignancy. Usually the head is fixed to a metal plaque
with edges and attachments that suggest a window frame, and thus
someone (the sculptor himself) looking out into our space. These
pieces are darker and less restrained. The smoothness of the glass
gives way to textures of rust and even spattered lead -- the
silvery color of the lead functioning, like paint, as light. They
are Giacomettian in their sense of endurance, remoteness and loss.
But the phase of Wilmarth's work that they began was not to be
completed. This was a sad subtraction.