Word: puryear
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...black artist in a Danish fishing village. "I myself feel like a primitive man," he told an interviewer in 1935, echoing the modernist founding fathers (Gauguin, Van Gogh), "like one who is at the same time both a primitive and a cultured painter." In essence, as the sculptor Martin Puryear points out in the catalog, European modernism let Johnson see himself anew; it provoked him into negotiating "his racial dilemma as a black artist moving between several worlds, on terms that are never stable...
...Behind Puryear's work one also sees, as a pervasive presence to whom constant homages are paid, Constantin Brancusi. Of all 20th century sculptors, Brancusi did the most to combine a reductive, Modernist sensibility with the language and techniques of vernacular carpentry. There are echoes of the great Romanian right through this show, from the roughly notched beam like a huge crosscut-saw blade in Some Tales, 1975-77, to the somber egglike or coffin- shaped forms of Maroon, 1987-88, or Lever...
...joint, said the American architect Louis Kahn, was the beginning of all ornament. Puryear's work accepts and celebrates this. In Thicket, 1990, his intersections run free variations on the notching, lapping and tenoning of practical carpentry in order to generate a curved form with straight balks of pine. The mysterious dark, shiny lump of Self, 1978, is one of those forms that would be banal in fiber glass or even bronze; but it is made of laminated and coopered wood, and its variations of sanding and cutting, the slight bumps and dimples of the black-painted skin, give...
...Where Puryear is altogether marvelous is in the pieces that speak directly and in a closely disciplined way for their own substance. Among these is the spectacular arc of Night and Day, 1984, half white and half black, a wooden effigy of the track of the sun. Especially there is the delicately ordered construction based on a nautilus shell, Bower, 1980. Its wooden web is as precise as the skeleton of an aircraft wing and yet is imbued with a promise of shelter: one would be happy to crawl inside it and rest. With this piece, Puryear's desire...
...craftsmanlike Martin Puryear is one of the best sculptors alive...