On that visit for the boy Richard Serra's fourth birthday to the San Francisco marina, where he was amazed to see how the large masses of steel were moved from one place to another, one of the most fascinating careers in contemporary sculpture began.
That story came to an end this Tuesday, eight decades after that excursion, with the death of a totem of American art: Serra died at the age of 85 in his home on Long Island, near New York.
The cause was pneumonia, his lawyer, John Silberman,
told
The New York Times .
It will be remembered for its large pieces of steel, with graceful shapes despite their several tons of weight.
Capable of creating sinuous interiors in which to get lost, they were revolutionary in their invitation to the viewer to admire them, but, above all, to walk through them.
The best example of this style, a sophisticated and monumental reflection also on emptiness, is in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which has been on permanent display since 2005 and in its most emblematic gallery, a titanium arm extended parallel to the estuary. Nervión,
The Matter of Time
, eight gigantic spheres, spirals and ellipses that marked the end of Serra's journey towards the understanding of space.
The complex ended up achieving the improbable: becoming an icon capable of rivaling the Frank Gehry building that houses it, another masterpiece.
'The Matter of Time', at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Vicente Paredes
It was around that time that the famous Australian critic Robert Hughes, as fond of provocation as he was of slogans, defined him “not only as the best sculptor of the 21st century,” but also as “the only truly great one still active.”
With his eternally frowning brow, his compact complexion and his laconic and reflective personality, with Serra a certain idea of the artist (man) abstracted in a transcendental mission for whom life and work are the same thing also dies a little more. .
Son of a candy factory foreman of Mallorcan ancestry and a housewife who emigrated from Odessa, in what is now Ukraine, he was born in 1939 in San Francisco.
He used to brag about his working-class origins, because, he said, they gave him a strong work ethic.
This attitude, far from dilettante, became evident very soon, in his
List of Verbs
(1967-1968), perhaps his most famous text, which began with “roll, wrinkle, fold, store, tilt, abbreviate, twist” and continued until accumulating 100 infinitives that invited action.
He shaped himself from English literature, which he discovered in college.
He had formidable teachers: he studied with the writers Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, the painter Philip Guston and the composer Morton Feldman.
He read Emerson and the rest of the American Transcendentalists;
He also immersed himself in the French existentialists, especially Albert Camus.
He left the West Coast to study art at Yale, during which time he supported himself by working in a heavy metal processing plant.
In Paris he deeply immersed himself in Brancussi, an influence that was crucial in his drift towards sculpture, while on the other side of the Pyrenees, Eduardo Chillida, but, above all, Jorge Oteiza, were already embarking on similar reflections on steel and metal. space.
Goodbye to painting
In his abandonment of painting there was also the assumption of defeat.
When he saw Las Meninas,
by Velázquez, for the first time
, he surrendered to the evidence: “I thought there was no possibility of getting close to all that: the viewer in relation to the space, the painter included in the painting, the mastery with which he could go from the abstract to a figure or a dog.
[Velázquez] persuaded me [to leave it].
Cézanne had not stopped me, [Willem] De Kooning and [Jackson] Pollock neither, but Velázquez seemed like something much bigger to manage,” he declared in 2002 to
The New Yorker
.
He made a name for himself in New York straddling the tribes of minimalists and post-minimalists.
It differed from the first by its taste for heavy materials.
With the latter, in 1968 he shared the legendary exhibition at Leo Castelli's gallery that earned him a name on the scene, thanks to his films and a piece in which he threw molten lead at the wall.
After that early exploration of practices and materials, his love affair with steel would not take long to arrive.
His sculptures are spread throughout museums and cities around the world, from the Glenstone open-air park in Washington to Liverpool Street station in London.
In some countries, such as Germany and Holland, they held special veneration for him.
Despite the fame that accompanied him for decades, that list ended up being a most random list.
The city of New York, after eight years of controversy, ended up demolishing his piece
Titled Arc
(1981), installed in the lower part of Manhattan, and on one occasion rescued two of his works from a Bilbao park upon learning that they were going to be auctioned.
'Equal Parallel / Guernica-Bengasi'/ 'Equal-parallel: Guernica-Bengasi' (1986), by Richard Serra.
Although nothing surpassed the scandal of the disappearance at some point between 1992 and 2005 of a Madrid warehouse of
Equal Parallel/Guernica-Bengasi
(1986), property of the Reina Sofía, a museum that today exhibits it in its permanent collection in a 2007 version It was one of the most bizarre stories of Spanish art in democracy, and inspired the book
Masterpiece,
by the writer Juan Tallón.
When reminded of that nonsense, Serra used to respond with detachment that he believed that the thieves or those who were careless had surely “sold it to make razors.”
In recent times, health problems caused his incorruptible work ethic to lead him to dedicate himself to drawing daily, an art in which he also left his original mark.
For him it was not a means (for the sculpture sketches he preferred to create 1:50 scale models), but an end, to which he also dedicated himself from very early on.
In an interview with EL PAÍS held at the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, on the occasion of an exhibition of his drawings, he recalled that he was associated with that medium for the first time, as early as “five or six.” years".
There he realized what it meant to be a creator.
“My mother would bring huge rolls of pinkish paper from the butcher shop that I would spread out on the asphalt of the street to draw on them.
Wherever we went, she introduced me as her son, the artist,” Serra said.
'Rotterdam Vertical #10', drawing by Richard Serra exhibited in 2017 at the Boijmans museum in Rotterdam.
He attended the appointment with his wife, Clara Weyergraf, who survives him.
With her, his companion since 1981, he divided his days between New York, Long Island and Cape Breton, an enclave on the Atlantic coast of Canada, which has served as a refuge for other key artists of the New York avant-garde such as Philip Glass or Joan Jonas, who was Serra's partner in the seventies.
That day in Rotterdam, another port city, like Bilbao, he had written down his ideas on a piece of paper, so as not to forget anything he wanted to say.
“My drawings do not impose a discourse, nor do they pretend to be a representation,” he warned.
“I don't want them to serve as a metaphor, or evoke something pre-existing.
His task is to refute language knowing that this is impossible;
We interpret everything through him.
That is ultimately the ultimate function of abstraction: to refute superficial readings.”
A couple of weeks after the Dutch meeting, he did something that they say he used to do: send an email to the journalist to qualify his arguments in the context of a discussion about the political usefulness of creation, during which he assured that “the best “art is intrinsically useless.”
“There are two positions an artist can take;
“engage politically or respond to his own internal needs,” he wrote then.
“Both options were clearly represented by [Jean Paul] Sartre and [Theodor] Adorno.
The first took the path of politics, Adorno opted to individually articulate his own aesthetics, divorced from ideology, in something that he, in his own way, understood as a form of political resistance.
"I have always leaned towards Adorno's option."
The origin of that discussion was in criticism of his last great work, at least in ambition, a 2014 installation of four monoliths in the Qatari desert.
Despite being a sought-after creator, he liked to show himself as an artist away from the management of the market.
Business, he considered, had spoiled contemporary art, and particularly, the New York scene.
He blamed the generation following his own, the one that, led by Jeff Koons, embraced money shamelessly in the 1980s.