Word: tuckers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...opened last month at Storm King Art Center on the Hudson River in Mountainville, N.Y., 55 miles upstream from Manhattan. It is a concise survey of the past ten years of work -- 17 sculptures, 19 powerful charcoal and oil-stick drawings -- by the British-born sculptor William Tucker, 53, who has lived in the U.S. since...
...scale sculpture. Anything displayed there must face not only the permanent collection of pieces by David Smith, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero and other virtuosos of bigness, but the setting itself: a mountain with sweeping green ledges and infolding valleys whose scale can reduce lesser work to mere bibelots. Tucker's show, which runs through October, survives both comparisons...
...Tucker was perhaps the most gifted of the English sculptors nurtured by % Anthony Caro's teaching at St. Martin's School in London 30 years ago. They were all struggling to get out from the monolithic influence of Henry Moore by constructing open sculpture from wood or steel, instead of carving or modeling. By the late '70s Tucker was bringing an unusual intensity and even drama to his constructed work. He made pieces like the magisterial House of the Hanged Man, 1981, out of weathered, blackened balks of timber and bits of roof trusses and piers held together with massive...
These frame- and cagelike structures became more modeled and blunter in the early '80s. All the same, one was not ready for the swing that appeared in Tucker's work in 1984. He turned to bronze, to figures -- everything his early sculptures had eschewed. This was as unexpected as the moment in 1970 when Philip Guston, known for 20 years as a painter of fugitive gray-rose webs, showed his first paintings of Ku Klux Klansmen and sent an avalanche of taste rolling toward "clumsy" figuration. What was the erstwhile constructor up to? This show tells...
Sifton would steal the show were it not for Adam Barr, who steals it from him. Barr, in the role of Tucker, the Gurney family manservant, injects the production with a dose of much-needed comic relief. As Tucker degenerates from perfect manservant to drunken, pitiable fool, Barr maintains his command over the stage and the audience...