Word: liberman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...birds in the flock," Art Critic Thomas B. Hess recently observed, "Liberman is the rarest." It is a rare bird indeed that he resembles: the eye's moist, inquisitive glitter; the sharp ruffle of conversational feathers; the exact poise...
Peculiar Touch. Considering the scale and bulk of his work, it is a trifle startling to see Liberman in his studio among the woods of Warren, Conn.; by what power does this wrenlike Russian contrive to lug about and assemble immense steel objects, which run to 25 ft. in height and several tons in weight? The prosaic answer is that he has an assistant, hoists and a crane; but the preservation of Liberman's peculiar touch on such a scale is impressive. Where, for instance, did he get the great squashed cylinder that went into Ascent, 1970 (opposite)! "Well...
...Alexander Liberman is one of America's leading sculptors. His work has a stringency and a humanistic resonance that have seldom met in a sculptor's work since David Smith died. Yet his name is not always on the list of instant preferences that a curator might reel off. "I have always been plagued," Liberman sighs, "by suspicions that in some indefinable way I am not quite serious. And that's because I have a job." The job is as editorial director of Conde Nast; he has been there in one position or another since 1941, when...
Kinetic Metaphor. Control is the dandy's key, and Liberman's control is of a peculiar and highly tuned kind: it consists of letting two creative systems play with each other. On one hand, designed accident; on the other, a strictly organized language of geometrical form -circle, cylinder, triangle. "I like the steel to lie around in my yard, fallow," says Liberman. "Eventually some combination imprints itself on me: this sheet belongs to this rod; it attracts that tank end. It's very much a gamble." (His interest in chance as a provoker of form has existed...
...just as the chance is impure -being edited by Liberman's preferences-so too his shapes are not wholly abstract. A disk may allude to the sun, to a breast or to an altar; a triangle to a pyramid or a bird's spread wings. With its vertical masts and calm progression of red, sail-like forms, Odyssey, one of the monumental sculptures at Hammarskjold Plaza, suggests an archaic flotilla dipping through the Aegean. Sometimes a sculpture will work not as an object but as a kinetic metaphor of force. Ascent includes a blade of red steel that...