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                                                                                ART, Page 61

Delight in a Shaping Hand


An exhibit of the craftsmanlike, poetic forms of Martin Puryear
shows why he is one of the best sculptors alive

By ROBERT HUGHES


    If you wanted to create a list of the American artists
who came through the ugly, corrosive decade of the '80s with
their aesthetic values intact and a robust body of highly
original work to show, it might not be very long. But it would
certainly include the sculptor Martin Puryear. Puryear is 50,
and his midcareer retrospective, organized by Neal Benezra for
the Art Institute of Chicago, is now on the second stop of its
tour, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. Through 1992 it
will also be seen in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, though not,
alas, in New York City. New York's Whitney Museum of American
Art, though it likes to talk about "minority art" and plans the
full treatment in '92 for that feeble ephemerid Jean-Michel
Basquiat, is not taking this exhibition by a man who is both
black and one of the best sculptors alive.

    And one can guess why: Puryear is, above all, a maker. His
imagination is rooted in craft and promotes delight in the
action of the shaping hand on material substance. It is about
vigorous embodiment, pathos, nature, dreams and humor. It is
totally unlike the overconceptualized gibberish, with its dull
embroidery of French post-Structuralist theory, that lies like
a pall over the corpse of the American avant-garde and
substitutes for thought in some quarters of the museum world.

    Puryear works mainly in wood, though mud, wire and tar
also figure in his repertory. His bank of cultural memory is
filled with images of canoes and framed tents, ceremonial staves
and coffins, trestle framing and basketry. In particular,
having spent two years in the '60s teaching for the Peace Corps
in a village in Sierra Leone, he was influenced by the work of
West African carpenters.

    But an equally important part of his education was his
encounter, in 1966, with the cabinetmaker James Krenov. Because
of the irrational gap that exists in America between "arts" and
"crafts," few of the people who can rattle off the monikers of
this or that "emerging artist" could attach any significance to
Krenov's name. But for anyone who knows the difference between
a stopped rabbet and a sliding dovetail, and can appreciate the
deep levels of aesthetic decision that go with an understanding
of wood, his work is a kind of talisman. Krenov, says Puryear,
"opened my eyes to an entirely new degree of commitment and
sensitivity to materials." And when this growing appreciation
of substance -- of the subtle nature of material as an entity
with its own rights, not just inert stuff to be chopped into a
predetermined shape -- intersected with Minimalism, the "heroic"
American style of Puryear's youth, his real line of development
began.

    The work of Minimalist artists like Donald Judd and
Richard Serra had always contained, in its heart, an industrial
metaphor; it was just that Puryear preferred earlier industrial
forms, those of the wooden-pattern maker, the wheelwright, the
cooper. As Robert Storr points out in his catalog essay,
Puryear's project was "to recover the creative possibilities
offered by highly refined crafts that have been marginalized by
industrial society, or simply lost to it." This meant rescuing
a different kind of craft for sculpture, using it to realize in
organic materials, chiefly wood, large mysterious forms that
bordered on nature and drew poetic strength from its limitless
variety.

    Puryear's work has the exact American-grain quality -- if
not the episodic fussiness -- of that earlier virtuoso of the
dovetail and the lamination, the sculptor H.C. Westermann. It
also has some of Westermann's laconic humor. Sanctuary, 1982,
is one such piece: a cubical box of thick wood mounted on two
raw branches with the bark still on them, which turn out to be
"legs," pedaling a wooden wheel -- a sort of absurd unicycle,
designed for flight.

    Shelter is a favorite image of Puryear's. For Beckwourth,
1980, presents a kind of solid wooden hogan with an ovoid top
plastered in cracked mud, recalling both the primitive hut and
the origins of the pendentive dome. (Jim Beckwourth is a figure
often invoked by Puryear's sculpture. The freed son of a white
man and a black slave woman, he served as a guide for various
Western expeditions in the early 19th century, fought in the
Mexican War and was at one point made a chief of the Crow
Indians -- a symbol of multicultural America if ever there was
one.)

    Behind Puryear's work one also sees, as a pervasive
presence to whom constant homages are paid, Constantin Brancusi.
Of all 20th century sculptors, Brancusi did the most to combine
a reductive, Modernist sensibility with the language and
techniques of vernacular carpentry. There are echoes of the
great Romanian right through this show, from the roughly notched
beam like a huge crosscut-saw blade in Some Tales, 1975-77, to
the somber egglike or coffin-shaped forms of Maroon, 1987-88,
or Lever #2, 1988-89.

    The joint, said the American architect Louis Kahn, was the
beginning of all ornament. Puryear's work accepts and celebrates
this. In Thicket, 1990, his intersections run free variations
on the notching, lapping and tenoning of practical carpentry in
order to generate a curved form with straight balks of pine. The
mysterious dark, shiny lump of Self, 1978, is one of those forms
that would be banal in fiber glass or even bronze; but it is
made of laminated and coopered wood, and its variations of
sanding and cutting, the slight bumps and dimples of the
black-painted skin, give it a peculiar organic eloquence.

    Where Puryear is altogether marvelous is in the pieces
that speak directly and in a closely disciplined way for their
own substance. Among these is the spectacular arc of Night and
Day, 1984, half white and half black, a wooden effigy of the
track of the sun. Especially there is the delicately ordered
construction based on a nautilus shell, Bower, 1980. Its wooden
web is as precise as the skeleton of an aircraft wing and yet
is imbued with a promise of shelter: one would be happy to crawl
inside it and rest. With this piece, Puryear's desire for an
eloquence of craft and his interest in the metaphorical
relations between architecture and sculpture were fulfilled
early. He seems to be that contemporary rarity, a wholly
integrated artist -- in short, the real thing, and a figure of
undeniable importance in American sculpture.