Richard Serra, sculptor of massive masterworks
Richard Serra, the creator of some of the biggest, most prominent — and occasionally most controversial — sculptures of the last half-century, died March 26 at his home in Orient, on Long Island. He was 85.
The cause was pneumonia, said his attorney John Silberman.
Beginning in the 1960s, Serra spearheaded a dramatic shift in the nature of sculpture, from discrete items that stood on pedestals to installations that fill cavernous galleries or anchor sprawling outdoor sites. New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman has called him “probably the most original and significant sculptor of his generation.”
However arresting his sculptures — generally slabs of rusting Cor-Ten steel teased into spirals and ellipses — Serra said his creations were only a means to an end. “Space is my subject,” he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose in 2001. “I use steel to organize space.”
Serra burst into the public consciousness after his “Tilted Arc,” a rusting steel eyebrow 120 feet long and 12 feet high, was installed in the plaza of a federal building in Manhattan in 1981.
Workers in the building complained that the sculpture made it difficult to cross the plaza, and in 1985 some 13,000 people signed a petition demanding that it be removed. At a public hearing, the work was denounced as “garbage,” “an irritant,” “a calculated offense” and “scrap iron.”
Serra resisted, telling interviewer Marc H. Miller in 1982 that art was “the scapegoat for everybody’s political uptightness in this country.” He verbally attacked government officials who, in an unrelated case, had asked him to put flags atop a sculpture in the District of Columbia. He added: “I find the notion of what this country consumes as art absolutely reprehensible.”
In 1989, the General Services Administration removed the Manhattan sculpture, which has been in storage ever since. But if Serra lost the battle, he won the war. His pieces, which have sold for more than $4 million at auction, are in the collections of most of the world’s best art museums.
As for the “Tilted Arc” controversy, Serra told Rose that as a young man he was “aggressive, obstinate, macho.” “I’ve always wanted to be respected for my work,” he added, “not for my personality.”
Richard Antony Serra was born in San Francisco on Nov. 2, 1938. His father, who worked as a pipe fitter in a shipyard, had emigrated from Spain. His mother was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Odessa.
In 1992, when Serra exhibited a work called “The Drowned and the Saved” at the Stommeln Synagogue in Pulheim, Germany, he wrote in the accompanying catalogue: “When I was five years old I would say to my mother: What are we, who are we, where are we from? One day she answered me: If I tell you, you must promise never to tell anyone, never. We are Jewish. Jewish people are being burned alive for being Jewish.”
Serra continued: “I was raised in fear, in deceit, in embarrassment, in denial. I was told not to admit who I was, not to admit what I was.”
As a boy, he began to draw as a way of competing with his older brother, Tony, who was “taller and bigger and stronger.” He explained that drawing was a way “to capture the affection of my parents.”
But three-dimensional objects already held him in thrall. Once, he told Rose, his father took him to the shipyard to watch the launch of a vessel. As the enormous ship was eased into the water, Serra said, he realized that “an object that heavy could become light, that that amount of tonnage could become lyrical.”
Serra worked in steel mills to put himself through college, first at the University of California at Berkeley, then at UC-Santa Barbara, where he studied English literature and received a bachelor’s degree in 1961. “I worked on a rivet gang,” Serra later told the Times. “It was a great experience. I liked the scale of it all, the color of it all, the sound of it all.”