Internationally celebrated as one of the leading sculptors working today, Martin Puryear (b 1941) is known for his painstakingly constructed, wood abstractions of rich, symbolic beauty. Using time-consuming, handcrafting methods, he frequently blends wire mesh and tar with wood, often evoking associations with animal, vegetable and human forms, as well as such artifacts as nets, tools and vessels.
Puryear’s meticulous handling of wood draws on his 1960s Peace Corps experience working with craftsmen in Africa and his subsequent study of furniture design and construction in Sweden.
A gifted member of the post-Minimalist generation, his powerful and evocative pieces are notable for their inventive forms, consummate craftsmanship and unusual beauty.
“His sculpture,” Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art has said, “draws upon many and various sources of imagery, while bearing the deeply individualized markings of the handmade; unsurprisingly, it has been widely celebrated for its mystery and allusiveness.”
The imagination, skill and charm of the oeuvre of this African American sculptor are splendidly showcased in “Martin Puryear,” featuring 46 works, including one monumental piece created especially for the exhibition tour. Already seen at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it will be on view at the National Gallery of Art through September 28.
The exhibition is organized by John Elderfield, MoMA’s chief curator. Says Elderfield, “Puryear’s modern art maintains a postmodern belief in forming objects that negotiate the limits of human imagination and practice.”
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., the son of a postal employee and a schoolteacher, Puryear took an early interest in the natural sciences and often visited the Museum of Natural History and the National Zoo. Tours of the National Gallery of Art helped stimulate paintings and drawings of animal and bird species, suggesting an ambition to become a wildlife illustrator.
Puryear showed great curiosity about how things are constructed and how they work. “When I was little,” he recalls, “I was extremely conscious of materials, of how things were made and put together.”
An art major with a concentration on painting, he graduated from Catholic University of America in 1963. He took only one required sculpture course. At first he rejected abstractionism, focusing instead on representational art in the manner of Andrew Wyeth, believing that the “measure of one’s ability [is] the ability to faithfully reproduce reality.”
His attitude toward abstraction began to change after some painting courses and exposure to avant-garde exhibitions in Washington and New York City. Puryear won some prizes for his early canvases.
During several years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, he observed traditional techniques of cloth dyeing, pottery making and weaving, and learned wood craftsmanship from local woodworkers and ebony carvers.
Accepted by the printmaking program at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, Puryear made etchings and, on the side, worked on sculpture. In addition to observing modern Scandinavian furniture-making, trips to Western and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union exposed him to a wide variety of art and designs.
Before long, Puryear began to focus on sculpture rather than painting, reflecting his realization that he was “more interested in making objects than in creating two-dimensional images of objects. The pleasure I took in making things found expression in sculpture.”
Between 1969 and 1971, he earned an MFA in sculpture from Yale University, and began to make wood his primary material. As a graduate student, he created an arrangement of industrial milled wood of standard lengths that was held together by gravity and tension.
During a brief stint teaching at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., at the invitation of distinguished African American art historian David C. Driskell, Puryear began to use oak, pine, poplar and Osage orangewood saplings, as well as such nontraditional materials as concrete and rawhide in his pieces.
Beginning with his first solo museum exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1977, Puryear has compiled an extraordinary record of shows, retrospectives and awards. In July 2001, Time magazine critic Robert Hughes called him “America’s Best Artist.” Puryear was based in Brooklyn (1973‱977), then in Chicago (1978‱990), and now lives and works in Ulster County, N.Y., two hours north of New York City.
This is the first exhibition in the gallery’s history to be installed in both the West and East Buildings. The classical geometry of the West Building, where 40 works are displayed, offers a striking contrast to the artist’s organic anthropomorphic forms. Likewise, the modern triangulated shape of the East Building contrasts with the six pieces shown there.
The older works, scattered around the West Building, include such simplified forms as “Bask,” 1976, a 12-inch-long black sliver of stained pine that resembles a boat hull, and “Circumbent,” 1976, an arch formed by bent and dyed ash. In “Self,” 1978, Puryear covered an armature with a half-inch-thick black sheath, which he then removed, leaving the wooden “skin” of stained and painted red cedar and mahogany. Similarly, in untitled, 1997, the opacity of the painted cedar and pine skin gives it a feeling of density and mass, although it contains only a skeletal armature. The latter work suggests Puryear’s continuing examination of the relationship between interior space, form and volume.
“For Beckwourth,” 1980, a cone-shaped form made of oak, pitch pine and turf, is one of two works whose title refers to an early Nineteenth Century, semimythical son of a white man and black slave who traveled West, becoming a chief of the Crow Indian nation and serving as a guide for US troops in the Cheyenne-Arapaho War. Among the jagged shaped sculptures made of molded rawhide is “Rawhide Cone,” 1978.
Between 1978 and 1985, Puryear created a series of wall-mounted ring forms mostly constructed from strips of wood bent, glued and shaved into shape. In untitled, 1978, he twisted hickory and Alaskan yellow cedar into a circular form while the saplings were still green. Other “Ring” series works in the exhibition are untitled, 1981‱982, made of painted Ponderosa pine and 60 inches in diameter, and “Big and Little Same,” 1981, a painted pine and unpainted pear wood piece that measures 62 inches in diameter.
For much of his career, Puryear has been concerned with forms of shelter and the interplay between exterior and interior shapes, as exemplified by “Bower,” a large but intricate, hull-like piece made of Sitka spruce and pine, and “Confessional,” 1996′000, a wire mesh and tar construction.
The largest work on view in the West Building, “Desire,” 1981, consists of a huge wooden wheel held in place by a 32-foot-long beam attached to a tall, inverted basket woven from wooden slats. This fascinating piece stretches across an entire gallery.
Several works build on the artist’s boyhood interest in animals. “Old Mole,” 1985, constructed of woven strips of red cedar and measuring 61 by 61 by 34 inches, resembles a burrowing rodent. A series called “Stereotypes and Decoys” features necklike forms protruding from a larger base that suggest the animated gestures of swimming birds or waterfowl decoys. “Sharp and Flat,” 1987, is a squat, birdlike form made of unpainted pine planks, while “Timber’s Turn,” 1987, is constructed of unpainted Honduras mahogany, red cedar and Douglas fir.
In “Alien Huddle,” 1993‱995, Puryear fastened carefully tapered, unpainted bands of cedar to a pine core to form a large spherical shape from which two smaller globes emerge. Some observers suggest this piece symbolizes the growth and expansion of seedpods, protozoa or a dividing cell. Another work of pure pine, “Deadeye,” 2002, takes on a special beauty in the artist’s hands.
By contrast, among the painted works on view is the gallery’s own graceful “Lever No. 3,” 1989, made of carved Ponderosa pine painted black.
In a number of sculptures, Puryear has incorporated tar over wire mesh, which allows him to create a visually dense form that upon closer inspection is almost veil-like in the transparency and delicacy of its skin. Examples include the appealingly shaped “Maroon,” 1987-1988, with a bulbous form, circular wooden cap and a variety of materials and textures, “Dowager,” 1990, and “Dumb Luck,” 1990.
Whereas Puryear’s earlier sculptures often consisted of solid wooden surfaces, in later works he activated the interior space without concealing it. The swollen shape of “Brunhilde,” 1998′000, made of thin strips of cedar that were glued, stapled and clamped together, suggests the inflated lungs of the Valkyrie heroine of Richard Wagner’s operatic “Ring” cycle. Similarly intriguing is “Thicket,” 1990, whose dimensions are a whopping 67 by 62 by 17 inches, which consists of tightly woven strips of basswood and cypress. Looking at these two pieces, as with so many others in the exhibition, one wonders how the artist does them.
At the center of the West Building, in the soaring rotunda, is the highlight of the show, Puryear’s 36-foot-tall “Ladder for Booker T. Washington,” 1996. Made of ash and maple, it narrows and recedes as it ascends into space, exaggerating its length and distance from the viewer. Unlike earlier works that call attention to their tactile surfaces, “Ladder” invites viewers to contemplate the sculptor’s position, suggesting potential ascension from the physical world.
In his catalog essay, Michael Auping, chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, recalls that Washington, an African American educator who “advocated self-advancement through developing agrarian, domestic and manual skills,” was opposed by black intellectuals, “who believed that without being politically active their people would never attain significant equal rights and economic gains.” Writes Auping, “The acute narrowing of Puryear’s ladder may&uggest the inaccessibility of upward social and economic ascension for African Americans.” In any case, “Ladder” is a memorable sight.
Standouts among the half-dozen works in the East Building are “C.F.A.O.,” 2006′007, and “Ad Astra,” 2007. The former is made from an old wheelbarrow found by Puryear in 1993 while he was an artist-in-residence at Alexander Calder’s studio in Sache, France. Based on African tribal art, it consists of a dense thicket of interlocking pine scaffolding to which is attached an oversized impression of a mask made by the Fang people of Gabon in West Africa. The title’s initials refer to the Compagnie Francaise de L’Afrique Occidentale, a Nineteenth Century trading company that sailed between Marseille and West Africa. The workman’s wheelbarrow combined with the mask form suggests themes of colonization and early contact and cultural exchanges among different societies.
The soaring “Ad Astra” is a sapling reaching to the heavens and supported by a 6-foot-wide, many-sided work mounted on wagon wheels that Puryear also brought home from France.
These latest works suggest that the ever-inventive and ambitious Puryear, at age 67, continues to create works of enigmatic meaning and idiosyncratic beauty. His art has special appeal because, as he puts it, “I think there are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated. It gives me pleasure to feel there’s a level that doesn’t require knowledge of or immersion in the aesthetic of a given time or place.”
“Martin Puryear” is a grand exhibition that does justice to one of the most interesting and innovative sculptors of the last and current centuries. The exhibition, MoMA director Lowry declares, reflects “one of the most extraordinary achievements in the art of our time.”
After closing in Washington, “Martin Puryear” travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 1⁊anuary 25.
The 215-page exhibition catalog contains helpful essays by Elderfield, Auping and Elizabeth Reede, and a conversation with the artist by Richard J. Powell. Published by the Museum of Modern Art and distributed by DAP/Distributed Art Publishers, Inc, it sells for $60 hardcover and $35 softcover.
The National Gallery of Art is on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. For information, 202-737-4215 or www.nga.gov .
