Word: wilmarth
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When the sculptor Christopher Wilmarth committed suicide at the age of 44 some 18 months ago, there were no headlines. Wilmarth was not a "star," and so, ignored by the mechanisms of art-world hype, his work was left to find its own level. It is now doing so. The time for a complete Wilmarth retrospective has not arrived, but the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan has mounted a small exhibition of 25 of his sculptures (through Aug. 20), sensitively curated with an excellent catalog essay by Laura Rosenstock. Even from this limited evidence, it is clear that Wilmarth...
...popular artists come and go, but there is a degree of aesthetic literacy that cannot be faked. Wilmarth's originality was of the only kind that counts, born of long reflection on the past. He was a child of the museum, which is why this posthumous show seems so much like a homecoming. He was steeped in a great tradition of which the exemplars were, in poetry, Stephane Mallarme; in painting, Henri Matisse; in sculpture, Constantin Brancusi. Wilmarth was a man of wide visual curiosity, but of all modernist movements the one that interested him most was symbolism, which reached...
Mallarme had written of the impalpable reality that poetry must somehow approach: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence . . . comes close to the act of creation." Wilmarth's singular project was to create the spirit of reverie that surrounds the "negated object," but in that most object-affirming of arts, sculpture, and to seek its poetic effects in heavy industrial materials -- steel and glass. Typically, Wilmarth, a Californian who spent most of his working life in New York City, adopted...
...artist of Wilmarth's age there was nothing radical about steel. It was the bronze of modernism, the normal substance of constructed sculpture for the past 60 years and more. What was unusual was his decision to combine it with glass and thus make transparency, as much as spatial enclosure, a part of the sculptural effect. Wilmarth loved light. It was his madeleine, a trigger of memory, as a particular smell might be to others: "I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time." In fact, glass came before steel in his work...
...association of glass with steel that gives his work its peculiar evocative power. Wilmarth worked the glass, bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges. The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define...