Word: serra
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When viewing the later works of Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, and Willem de Kooning in the current exhibit at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum, lateness itself assumes striking importance. In contrast to modernists recognized for one definitive style--like Barnett Newman and Pollock--Johns, Serra and de Kooning eschew a signature style, instead favoring a perpetually regenerating dynamism...
Jasper John, Richard Serra...
...Richard Serra also seems to have grown more subtle with age. He is one of America's most notorious artists, thanks to his Tilted Arc sculpture commissioned by the Federal Government. None of the antagonism or intrusiveness of his steel and lead sculpture appears in this set of paint-stick creations. Like his Icelandic series on display at the Museum of Modern Art, these "drawings" do not demand but simply invite our musing, our quiet and unrestrained submission to atmosphere...
...these later works that de Kooning, Serra and Johns make painterliness secondary and create room for reflection. The sober confidence in these works attests to their willingness to leave behind the formulas that brought them success and attempt new and varied effects. They continually change and transcend our expectations...
Then Shapiro began to move toward the human figure. This note is struck in the very first object in the Baltimore show, made in 1974, which from across the room (or in reproduction) looks like one of the abstract scatter pieces done by minimalist sculptors in the '70s -- Serra or Barry Le Va -- but is in fact an image of human dismemberment. Look closer, and the bits of wood turn ! out to be an artist's mannequin that Shapiro broke up in a fit of anger -- "I pulled it apart and just threw it around the room," he says...