notes on artists: November 2010

Monday 29 November 2010

Antoine Pevsne

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Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York, NY 10128-0173
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Pablo Picasso, Woman with Yellow Hair (Femme aux cheveux jaunes), Paris, December 1931

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Enlarge1886–1962 Biography

Anchored Cross, 1933. Marble, brass painted black, and crystal, 33 5/16 inches (84.6 cm) long, diagonally. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553.60. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: David Heald

In 1920 Antoine Pevsner signed the Realistic Manifesto drafted by his brother Naum Gabo, proclaiming the intention of Constructivism as they conceived it. They sought to translate their apprehension of an absolute and essential reality as “the realization of our perceptions of the world in the forms of space and time.”¹ They believed that space was given form through implications of depth rather than volume, and they rejected mass as the basic sculptural element. Line, rendered dynamic through directionality, established kinetic rhythms. The Constructivists advocated the use of contemporary industrial materials; they did not carve or model these materials according to sculptural conventions, but constructed them according to principles of modern technology. In their words, “The plumb-line in our hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a spirit as taut as a compass . . . we construct our work as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits.”²

In this work Pevsner complicates the delineation of space by using a transparent substance in conjunction with opaque materials. The glass panes echo both the rounded excised outlines of the construction and its angular metal surfaces. The metal ribs anchor the panes of glass and hinge all planes, real and imagined, resulting in a complex structuring of space. Furthermore, they function visually as an Orthodox cross. The icons of Pevsner’s native Russia, which had played a crucial role in the development of his notions of perspective, may have suggested the form.

Lucy Flint

1. Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art, ed. J. E. Bowlt, New York, 1976, p. 213. The entire manifesto, translated by Gabo, appears in this volume.

2. Ibid.

Source Guggenheim

Carl Andre

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Enlargeb. 1935 Biography

10 x 10 Altstadt Copper Square, 1967, Düsseldorf. Copper, 100 units, 3/16 x 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 inches (0.5 x 50 x 50 cm) each; 3/16 inches x 16 feet 5 inches x 16 feet 5 inches (.5 x 500 x 500 cm) overall. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection 91.3673. © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photo: David Heald

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The work of Carl Andre occupies an essential transitional position in contemporary art. The artist himself places it in a tradition spanning Constantin Brancusi toHenry Moore, yet historically it rests within the more recent context of ideational gestures, starting with the early paintings of Frank Stella. The Guggenheim Museum’s collection covers a wide range of Andre’s oeuvre, including the viewer-interactive 10 x 10 Altstadt Copper Square, in which space is defined by both the work and the spectator who is free to walk across it; Fall, an angle of hot-rolled steel; and Trabum, a cube made of nine interlocking beams of Douglas fir.

These examples embody the characteristic features of Andre’s sculpture, such as the use of ready-made materials, the employment of modular units, and the articulation of three-dimensionality through a consideration of its negative as well as positive space. Andre has sought to reduce the vocabulary of 20th-century sculpture to basic phonemes such as squares, cubes, lines, and diagrams. In his avowed transition from the exploration of form to that of structure and of place, Andre has placed significant emphasis on the relation between site and viewer. His pseudoindustrial, untheatrical arrangements hover between being ideas and testing the limits of physical presence.

Poetics play an important role in Andre’s work, manifested most literally by his experiments with linguistic equivalents to his sculpture. Since the 1960s he has created poems and, in the tradition of concrete poetry, situated the words on the page as if they were working drawings. He has often reached to ancient languages for titles in his attempt to craft a primordial language of form; for example, the title Trabum is derived from the Latin for log or timber. Andre’s consistent search for the simplest, most rational models embodies a moral philosophy as well as an artistic practice.

Cornelia Lauf

Source: Guggenheim