In Stockbridge, standing still enough to savor George Rickey’s sculpture in motion
STOCKBRIDGE — Looking at pictures of George Rickey’s sculpture in a still medium like print means you’re only half-seeing them, if even that much. Rickey, who died in 2002, made things that shouldn’t move, but do, often with balletic fluidity. That dissonance is why we look, and keep looking. They’re little bits of confounding wonder, on par with nature itself.
Through Nov. 1, the Naumkeag estate in Stockbridge has about a dozen of Rickey’s enigmatic pieces on view throughout its grounds and gardens tucked into the Berkshire hills. On a recent gloomy day, I stood and watched as his angular forms and clunky blocks, all in brushed steel, shrugged and turned on the whims of a changeable breeze.
They can be awkward, like “Horizontal Column of Seven Squares Excentric,” 1996, with its square slabs teetering in a blocky off-kilter swoop; or they can be counterintuitively articulate, like “Unfolding Square III,” 1995, with its three long steel rectangles bowing low with the grace of a dancer unfurling an arm. The mechanics of each piece, wildly, all but disappear; despite sharp angles and cold steel, they merge uncannily with the nature that surrounds them, surrendering to it entirely.
There’s something poetic to be drawn from the juxtaposition, surely. Setting mechanical knowhow and steel fabrication to the express purpose of submitting to the natural world is a reversal to savor. In these days of looming climate disaster, it feels like an apology, too late and too little. I don’t know if any of that was on Rickey’s mind when he made them, but as much insight into his thought and process as you’ll ever find can be found in a newish biography by the art historian Belinda Rathbone — titled, if you’ll pardon the pun, “George Rickey: A Life in Balance.” It takes care of all the particulars, cradle to grave.
Rickey was born in Indiana in 1907, and then moved to Scotland with his family when he was 5. According to the book, his interest in mechanics was at least partly seeded on visits to the Singer Sewing Machine factory managed by his father in Clydebank. He also worked there when he was young.
Rickey came back to the United States as an adult and taught history, first at the Groton School, an exclusive boys school northwest of Boston, and then at various colleges and universities. He squeezed his artistic endeavors in alongside a teaching career for more than 30 years. Fascinatingly, Rickey’s turn to kinetic sculpture came courtesy of the US Army. He registered for the
ART REVIEW
draft in 1941 and was sent to a gunnery school in Denver, where he was assigned to maintain aircraft guns. In the Army, his doubts in his ability as a painter gave way to a keen mechanical inclination. He made his first mobile sculptures during the war in the machine shop of an Army base in Laredo, Texas, using scraps of metal and glass.
Rickey rose quickly from there, learning how to cut and weld from the sculptor David Smith while both were on faculty at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. With a rough, elemental abstract style gaining prominence in the United States in the 1950s alongside Abstract Expressionism, Rickey was included in “American Sculpture,” a 1951 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. He became a favorite of prominent collectors like Joseph Hirshhorn, and was included in major international shows like documenta III in 1964. The Guggenheim staged a full-blown retrospective in 1979.
Then, tastes changed. Conceptualism, born in the 1960s as eggheaded formal experimentalism, morphed in the ’80s into a strident strain of art driven by fiery political indictment and dense intellectualism. Work like Rickey’s surely would have seemed quaint, like whimsical noodling; and so, his notoriety faded, like many before him, though he kept working in his East Chatham, N.Y., studio to the very end.
Looking at Rickey’s pieces now prompts at least a little nostalgia for a time when elemental concerns like material, form, and, to a lesser degree, mechanics, dictated what might be considered “serious” art. They don’t mean. They just are. Rathbone seems to acknowledge that much, writing that Rickey’s work is “too delightful to be demanding,” which I wouldn’t take pejoratively. On a blustery fall day in the Berkshires with bright flashes of autumn leaves speckling the hillside, “Untitled Circle,” 2002, a slim arc of steel, swung lazily around a slender rod anchoring it to the ground, catching gusts this way and that. Sometimes, delight is enough.
VIEWESCAPES: GEORGE RICKEY KINETIC SCULPTURE Through Nov. 1. Naumkeag, 5 Prospect Hill Road, Stockbridge. 617-542-7696, thetrustees.org/exhibit/ georgerickey