the role of materials in my geometric and abstract sculpture: a memoir

Leonardo

The Role of Materials in My Geometric and Abstract Sculpture: A MemoirAuthor(s): Marie Zoe Greene-MercierSource: Leonardo, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 1-6Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574334 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 1-6, 1982 Printed in Great Britain

0024-094X/82/010001-06$03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd.

THE ROLE OF MATERIALS IN MY GEOMETRIC AND ABSTRACT SCULPTURE: A MEMOIR

Marie Zoe Greene-Mercier* Abstract - The author describes the role of materials in the development of her sculpture during her career of more than 40 years. An initial influence in 1934 was a Hans Arp relief in painted wood. In 1937 at the New Bauhaus, Chicago, under the direction ofLaszlo Moholy-Nagy, her preoccupation with materials was encouraged. She presents examples of her early work in wood and glass and also some of her recent large nonfigurative sculptures in bronze and painted welded sheet steel.

I.

In an over 40-year career as a sculptor [1], a consciousness of material has been a strong element in the development of my work. New materials have stimulated fascinating ideas for exploration, despite their often contradictory demands and the need to develop techniques not previously established.

Are my contemporaries and I the last to remember making drawings under the light of a gas mantle? If so, we are the last to remember when there existed a preponderance of the literary idea in painting and sculpture. We were presented with a statue, for instance, as a vehicle for a moral principle. We were cognizant of a prevailing iconography conveying the notion of liberty, of nurture, of courage. We recognized as symbols the sheaf of wheat, the broken wheel of fate and justice balanced on a very thin thread.

In 1905, Benjamin Ferguson in Chicago left money to the City of Chicago in a public charitable trust for the erection of sculpture that would inspire passersby, preferably the young and still impressionable, with thoughts of an uplifting kind. Such sculpture might or might not have been regarded as beautiful, but its message was a sermon in stone or in bronze. The message was often delivered in prose and poetry. Since then there has been a development toward a less categoric in- terpretation of Benjamin Ferguson's intentions, notably perhaps, most recently, the large Henry Moore bronze work erected at the University of Chicago on the 25th anniversary of the splitting of the atom on its grounds by Enrico Fermi, in which the conceptual rather than the literal dominates, but I can remember the old intent like echoes of music well learned.

As a child in the early 1920s I was taken to visit

*Sculptor, P.O. Box 2049, Duxbury, MA 02332, U.S.A. (Received 9 Feb. 1981)

the studio museum of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Cornish, New Hampshire-mysterious and silent in grandiose evocation. I read the story of the virtuoso performance of a Florentine sculptor carving a lion with abandon out of a block of butter for a Medici banquet table. In a day when one had been taught not to drop a candy wrapper to the ground, much less to desecrate a statue with hurtful hands, I passed the bronze monuments in the Boston parks and wished they were not placed so entirely out of reach. Beauty was apprehended in terms of certain views of harmony, appropriateness and order, and such apprehension was supported by certain moral ideas expressed in terms of either literary or historical allusions.

One was soon to witness, however, the beginnings of the idea that the material of an art object was of key importance and that imaginative aids provided by literary and historical narratives related to moral conduct could be replaced by other reactions to aspects of life in industrial societies. Cubist works containing pieces of wallpaper, music scores and newspaper glued to a support by Picasso and by Braque and the depiction of geometrical forms in nonfigurative works by Malevich appeared in Europe at about the same time. Picasso with sheet metal and Malevich with wood soon executed such works in three dimensions. These new approaches to visual art often involved the use of nontraditional materials and the treatment of subjects not con- sidered of aesthetic significance in the past.

II.

My university education took place between 1929 and 1933 at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts. The course on the history of French painting ended with the impressionists, and neither I nor, I doubt, any of my fellov students felt that anything was missing. My complaisance was rudely shaken in 1934 when James Johnson Sweeney and his wife Laura, returning from Paris, brought to the

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Marie Zoe Greene-Mercier

Renaissance Society for an exhibition at the University of Chicago not only examples of works by Picasso and by Braque but also by others such as Miro, Juan Gris, Leger, Mondrian, Alexander Calder and Hans Arp. Hans Arp! His work was a small relief, perhaps 35 x 25 cm; stark white on white; in wood, two saw-cut forms glued to a background. It was my first direct encounter with a message dominated by material. Its simple message was that certain organic forms can give aesthetic satisfaction without a narrative support. Although Arp had eliminated the qualities of wood grain by a covering coat of white paint, I understood that even the consistency of the wood and its resistance to being cut was part of the message he wished to convey.

The room for this exhibition at the University of Chicago had been built within a room with Gothic windows and these were hidden. I was the gallery attendant that summer, and, when entering it, I had to switch on the lights. But once, before switching on the lights, I happened to notice that a faint band of sunlight penetrated into the room extending along a wall and fell upon the Arp relief. Every day during the next two months I noticed that the shadows on the relief varied a little, so I stopped turning on the lights immediately on entering and watched for a moment what today would be called a son et lumiere performance presented to me by the Sun.

At the time I was unaware of the limits imposed by the process of cutting forms of wood on a band saw. In 1937, I had the opportunity to learn about these limits during a one-year postgraduate course at the school of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, newly opened under the direction of Laszlo Moholy- Nagy.

During that year, for which I am grateful, we made not only works in wood (Fig. 1.) but also paper constructions, positives of photographic film exposed to light either with or without a camera, objects of clay, plaster, metal tubing and metal sheets. Moholy-Nagy's obsession with the idea of integrating the many manifestations of humans in the domains of science, technology and the arts led him to include in our program the construction of a metal flute. I wished it had been a violin, for we were offered violins to play. In 1961 I came close to such an opportunity in Cremona, Italy, where the school of violin making tempted me to learn the craft. In the 1950s I entered an industrial welding school in Chicago, and, since then, I have made many welded works. But it was during my earlier training period that I had taken account of artworks in wood, metal, clay, plaster and film in the workshops of Hin Bredendieck, Gyorgy Kepes, Henry Holmes Smith and Alexander Archipenko at the New Bauhaus in Chicago.

Just how important for me and others had been the approach to the significance of traditional materials and of new materials that became available in t the 20th century, presented by the teachers of the Bauhaus at Weimer and Dessau,

Fig. 1. 'Hand Sculpture', mahogany. string, 23 x 32 x 12 cm, 1937. (Collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum fur Gestaltung,

West Berlin)

Germany (1919-1932), is slowly becoming evident [2,3]. The best history of the ideas developed by the Bauhaus is contained in the book by Hans M. Wingler [3], since 1960 Founder-Director of the Bauhaus-Archiv in Darmstadt, Fed. Rep. Ger., and now also Director of the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum fur Gestaltung, Berlin (West) in a newly erected building designed by Walter Gropius. He has told me that he has a book in preparation devoted to the influence of the Bauhaus ideas in the U.S.A. Personally, I found that the Bauhaus training had a strong impact on the direction of my own work [4]. The adventure of exploration has a fascination for me, even if it only involves going through an unfamiliar stretch of woods or searching for information in a library.

III. The challenge was to integrate my approach to

exploration in sculptured works. There were two simultaneous developments: a series of 3-dimensional works in traditional materials of clay, plaster and bronze of nonfigurative or abstract subjects with figurative titles and 23 collages of paper, string and glass (1945-55) (Fig. 2). The 23 collages, including 3-dimensional materials on five superimposed sheets of glass, are described in Ref. 4. Here my explora- tions were limited by the properties of the materials used (razor-cut paper for linear and scissor-cut for curved shapes). The next step could have been to make a set of panels of these types of objects designed to fit one against another. But I did not make them, because, although my solo exhibition of

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The Role of Materials in My Geometric and Abstract Sculpture

Fig. 2. 'Collage IX' paper, string, on four sheets of glass, 28 x 36 cm, 1946. (Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Dordal, Chicago, IL,

U.S.A.)

these objects in the Prints and Drawings Depart- ment of the Art Institute of Chicago under Carl O. Schniewind proved gratifying, few of the objects were sold. Since I needed money, I accepted portrait commissions and bided my time.

Eventually, I took up again the making of the kinds of works of my 1945-1955 period. Even then, I did not narrow my interests to either a particular style or a particular content. For example, I had an empathy for Roman Baroque in 1928-29 during a college year in Rome (my introduction to Austrian Baroque came much later). But it was long stifled because of art-world pressures, until the Baroque influence surfaced in contemporary music, with the full approbation of the tastemakers. Strangely enough, in music the term has been synonymous with disciplined, logical, ordered formulae, unless one wishes to include prophetic dissonances in Mozart's works. In music it is 19th-century Romanticism that bears a marked Baroque charac- ter. At an impressionable age in Rome, it was the post-Renaissance Baroque sculpture related to architecture that drew my serious attention. In 1936, after a summer in Mexico, I was offered, on the basis of a thesis outline on Mexican baroque sculpture related to architecture, a tuition grant in the graduate Fine Arts Group at New York University, but, with misgivings, I eventually had to decline the offer for financial reasons. Nevertheless this offer vindicated my passionate attachment to Baroque art.

I suppose my linear, geometrical, nonfigurative sculptures in bronze display a Baroque feeling. One European writer, accurately enough as it happens, relates them to my acquaintance with North American forests [5]. The 'Arboreal' series that I began in 1953 with the bronze 'Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes' (height 1.8 m) I have continued up to the present (Figs. 3-9). The series merged in 1969 with the 'Cubic' series that includes the bronze 'Arboreal Form' (Fig. 5), which stood in the Campo San Moise in Venice for a year (1972-73) and, in

Fig. 3. 'Arboreal Form 1970', bronze, 4.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 m, 1969.

Fig. 4. 'Arboreal Form 1971', painted steel, 5 x 4 x 2 m, 1971. (Installed on the beach at Musee des Sables, Port Bacares, France)

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Fig. 5. 'Arboreal Form 1972', bronze, 4.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 m, 1972.

Fig. 7. 'Arboreal Form 1974', painted steel, 4.5 x 2.2 x 0.8 m. (Installed before Landratsamt, Homburg/Saar, Fed. Rep. Ger.)

Fig. 6. Untitled. mock-up, pressed wood, 4.5 x 2.2 m, 1974.

Fig. 8. 'Twenty Cube Composition', painted steel, 7.5 x 3.2 x 2.4 m, 1977. (Installed at Verlaine Junior High School (CES),

Saint Nicolas-lez-Arras, Pas-de-Calais, France)

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The Role of Materials in My Geometric and Abstract Sculpture

Fig. 9. 'Container Series Assemblage 14', bronze, 160 x 37 x 37 cm, 1976. (Photo: I. Lommatzsch, Berlin)

1978, in the gardens of the Palais Royal, Paris, as one of the entries in the invitational International Sculpture Triennale.

In 1953 I conceived of the bronze piece 'Multi- plication of the Loaves and Fishes' as a calligraphic form for a hill site at the confluence of the Port Tobacco and Potomac Rivers in the U.S.A. This was not the first time that I was preoccupied with both environment and the form and the material of which a sculpture is made. I remember in 1937 Moholy-Nagy getting down on hands and knees before his class of astonished students and asking them to do as he and to observe the fascinating appearance of an array of chair legs. We followed his suggestion, and, since then, I have many times applied selective attention to unusual aspects of objects from different viewing points.

My linear 'Arboreal' series bronzes are based on highly abstract interpretations of figurative subjects. This series, initiated by the 1953 'Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes', cast in bronze in 1956 through the generosity of Margaret Carter Metcalf

of Duxbury, Massachusetts, was followed by the 'Miracle' series and by two pieces entitled 'Bread into Roses of Elizabeth of Hungary' (height 15 and 60 cm) and several 'Burning Bush' versions. The Orpheus legend, an inspiration for much music, dance, etc., was the inspiration for several sculptures. My interest in subject matter origins then subsided, and I returned to a continuation of the 'Arboreal' series in which the properties of different materials were a special concern.

I began with cubic designs in 1957-62 and, eventually, used them in two French Government commissions (Figs. 4,8) [7] and in the Monica Beck Gallery 1974 Sculpture Symposium in Homburg/ Saar, Fed. Rep. Ger. (Fig. 7). Here welding an arrangement of sheet-steel cubes posed intricate problems of construction. Before undertaking these large pieces, I made models of them of Styrofoam parts glued together. The glue I used hardened so slowly that I had to use sewing pins to hold the parts together until the glue had set. I then made detailed working drawings of the small model and made it again more solidly in Coreboard (a sheet of 3 mm- thick Styrofoam faced on both sides with paper). Choices of colours were usually made on the initial Styrofoam model.

The linear 'Arboreal' series and the cubic series are so different stylistically that some people say I am inconsistent in my work because I use them alternatively. This is especially the view of many critics who like to divide an artist's work into distinct, separate periods. Such is not true of Robert Pincus-Witten, panelist at the June 1980 Inter- national Sculpture Conference in Washington, D.C., who stated that he referred to 'autobiography, confession, the diaristic and things like that' of artists to arrive at his observations on their work [8]. The different properties of materials utilized in these two series particularly intrigue me, and, when I turn from one to the other, their properties strongly influence the style of a work [9]. I do not accept the view that an artist must be restricted to the use of either any one material or medium or to any one style for a specified, limited period.

IV. That some materials do tend to dominate a style

is certain. Thus, welded steel leads to sculptures that are so stylistically similar that sculptors risk being confronted at a large exhibition with works re- sembling theirs. Exploration in the use of materials often leads to similar results just as the same result of scientific research can be obtained independently and simultaneously by different researchers [10]. There are limits to what can be done with wood and a band saw, with brazed brass and welded steel, with thin metal and with wood armatures, etc. Manipu- lation of a material is finally inexorably limited by the materials's physical properties.

Critics and scholars like to speak about 'influences' upon a sculptor's style and highly value 'signature'

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identifications of distinct personal styles. But they ignore the fact that the properties of certain materials used by sculptors often dictate similar solutions reached entirely independently of one another. Tracing influences and stylistic distinctive- ness is often chronologically inaccurate. The significance of a sculptor's work in non-pliant materials resides in the imaginativeness and originality of its conception and design.

I envy, in some ways, the fewer limits imposed on artists who use pliant materials, even some of those who produce Conceptual Art, involving any material whatsoever (the printed word, mounds of dirt, photographs, etc.). I am fascinated by the recent productions of Book Art, for example by Dieter Rot [11] and by Richard Kostelanetz [12]. There are many temptations for me to escape from the limitations imposed by the particular materials I have chosen to use, but, up to now, their very limitations continue to enthrall me.

REFERENCES 1. H. M. Wingler, Marie Zoe Greene-Mercier, Sculptures,

Collages, Drawings, 1937-77, Preface to catalogue (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv Museum fur Gestaltung and Amerika Haus, 1977).

2. W. Gropius and H. Beyer, eds., Bauhaus (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938).

3. H. M. Wingler, The Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969).

4. L. C. Engelbrecht, Marie Zoe Greene-Mercier: The Polyplane Collages, Art International, p. 21 (No. 6, 1978).

5. G. Perocco, Greene-Mercier, Le Arti p. 256 (June 1970). 6. 1. Mussa, Greene-Mercier(Rome: Sifra, 1968)p. 39, Fig. 30. 7. L. G. Redstone with R. R. Redstone, Public Art: New

Directions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980) pp. 150, 151. 8. R. Pincus-Witten, New Directions of Sculptural Criticism,

1th International Sculptural Conference (Markham, Ontario: Audio Archives of Canada, 1980) Cassette Esc 15, side 1, 516-520.

9. F. Elgar, Greene-Mercier (Paris: Le Musee de Poche, 1978) p. 16.

10. R. B. Fuller, Synergetics (New York: 1972) p. 72. I1. D. Rot, exhibition catalogue (Basle: Kunst Museum, 1973). 12. R. Kostelanetz, On Book-Art, Leonardo 12, 43 (1979).

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the role of materials in my geometric and abstract sculpture: a memoir

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