From the beginning of his career twenty-five years ago the figure of Mark di Suvero has loomed large on the artistic landscape. Indeed, he is one of the few sculptors of his generation to have become something of a myth. In i960 he made a dramatic debut at the Green Gallery with an exhibition of oversized sculptures. In the same year he was in a near-fatal elevator accident which for some time dramatically limited the range of his artistic activity. By the late Sixties, however, he was back in full possession of his powers, making sculptures on an even bolder scale than before. In the early Seventies he caused a sensation by going into self-exile, to protest the Vietnam War. And when he returned in 1975 he was greeted by a triumphant retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum. All of this by now has helped to confer upon di Suvero a legendary status. Even his media image is that of the artist-superman—bare-chested, hard-hatted, working the controls of a crane or battling a resistant work-in-progress.

The Whitney Museum’s retrospective was really the crest of the wave. It marked the return of the artist-exile at the moment when America was ending its commitments in Southeast Asia. It also presented di Suvero as both the legitimate heir of David Smith in the tradition of constructed sculpture and a younger, brasher rival to the Englishman Anthony Caro, whose own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art had closed only a few months before. As such the Whitney retrospective signaled the end of one phase of di Suvero’s career—its long, troubled beginning—and the opening of another in which one anticipated that di Suvero would be able to give full rein to his formidable creative powers, undistracted by physical disabilities or political interests. Ten years have passed since then, and now another di Suvero retrospective is on view, this one at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York.[1] How does di Suvero’s work look now that all the hoopla is behind us?

The new exhibition, it must be said, is somewhat misleading. Comprising twenty-one sculptures indoors and eighteen outdoors, it omits the large-scale early works, such as Barrel, Hankchampion, and Che Faro senza Eurydice, that did so much to establish di Suvero’s early reputation and announce his sculptural concerns and intentions. From the late Fifties the exhibition presents only the expressionistic, Rodin-inspired Hand sculptures; it then moves on to the post-accident pieces of 1961-67 without acknowledging in any way the important work that came between.

At the outset, then, we are given a distorted view. As it stands, the visitor unfamiliar with di Suvero’s sculpture is likely to come away from Storm King with the impression that his early works were part of a protracted “warming up” period during which he experimented with many different modes of sculptural expression before finally finding his true artistic self in the later (post-1967), large-scale outdoor sculptures.

The truth is very different. These small-scale works—at least those from 1961-67—represent what I believe to be an interim phase of di Suvero’s work. It consists of work executed during the long period of convalescence, that is, the period before he felt sufficiently recovered to return to making large-scale, gestural sculpture. Thus if we are to get any accurate sense of the inner logic of di Suvero’s work over the years— surely the purpose of a retrospective of this kind—it is vital that we have these early pieces before us.

These small-scale works—at least those from 1961-67—represent what I believe to be an interim phase of di Suvero’s work.

Di Suvero’s early works (happily two are on view at the Modern and at the Whitney) were striking at the time, and remain so today, for the manner in which they fused the language of constructivism and the sensibility of Abstract Expressionism. They were six or seven feet high and formed from worn planks and pilings scavenged from the wharves of lower Manhattan; occasionally they incorporated more recognizable objects, such as ladders or barrels. These disparate elements were held together—and apart—by steel rods and chains in a manner which suggested forces held in permanent tension. While constructivist in their use of discrete, found forms and in their vestigial Cubist syntax, they were without the traditional Cubist “core” which would normally order and lock disparate parts. Instead, all the elements thrust away from the center, creating voids which di Suvero worked as eloquently as his solids. The result was sculpture whose drama resided in both its size and its vigorous, gestural character.

Much was made at the time—and in the years following—of the similarities between this phase of di Suvero’s career and Abstract Expressionist painting, that of Franz Kline in particular. The cantilevered lengths of wood were seen as sculptural analogues to Kline’s bold, black paint swaths, forms which likewise appeared arrested in space.

Yet far more important—and, as far as I know, little noticed at the time—was the way di Suvero altered the formal vocabulary of constructivism as it had existed from Picasso down through David Smith and, later, Anthony Caro. For in using battered pieces of wood and readily recognizable objects, di Suvero departed from the mote tailored, elegant look of orthodox constructivist sculpture.

Artists such as Smith and Caro strove continually to de-emphasize—within certain limits, to be sure—the industrial origin of their forms, the better to accommodate them to the overall aesthetic program. Smith, even when using something as distinct as a wrench or a pair of tongs, achieved this accommodation by articulating the form’s purely sculptural qualities—its mass or lack of it, its contours, its spaces. Caro, in turn, eschewed recognizably industrial elements—except for I-beams—preferring more generalized forms. And of course he painted his work. Both men consistently attempted to put a certain amount of distance between their finished sculpture and the scrapyard or the steel mill that was its source. “De-naturing,” as this was referred to at the time, was nothing more—and nothing less—than the passage from nature to culture. The world of things was drawn upon and the object transfigured and so made part of the world of art. Such a transfiguration was vital to the success of constructed sculpture as it had existed prior to di Suvero. David Smith acknowledged this fact when he spoke disparagingly of “stopped images”—sculptures in which the borrowed industrial forms violated the integrity of the whole by affirming too explicitly its identity in “nature.”

Di Suvero, in making no concessions to such refinements, in effect “de-aestheticized” constructed sculpture, bringing it down from the loftier realms of good taste in order to give it a rawer, more direct expressive charge and relation to the viewer. (In this there is a small element of irony, for it reflects the belief that constructivism, originally thought radical in its use of common or debased materials, needed the very sort of bouleversement it had administered to the established practice of its time.)

Nowhere was this “de-aesthetization” more evident than in di Suvero’s unadulterated use of large, recognizable objects—ladders, barrels, and the like. In their consciously incongruous, “look-at-me” character they had a quality of artistic subversiveness and daring that suggested the artist’s willingness to take enormous risks and his desire to make a brash gesture in the interests of making sculpture more “real.”

All of this gave a populist dimension to di Suvero’s work.

All of this gave a populist dimension to di Suvero’s work. He used whatever materials came to hand, as opposed to restricting himself to certain “ideal” forms, the implication being that anything is admissible in the making of art. The more direct, down-to-earth mode of address to the viewer implied a more democratic outlook, one deliberately opposed to the more rarefied, “fine art” creations of earlier constructed sculpture.

Di Suvero’s 1960 accident—he was riding atop an elevator that crushed him when it failed to stop—brought his artistic activity to a halt. When he was well enough to sit in a wheelchair, he could only work by welding pieces of metal in his lap, or by using assistants to move modestly larger forms. These sculptures form an eclectic mix—not surprisingly, really, since they are the work of someone trying to get used to another order, another scale of sculptural operation. They make one realize how much the earlier works were scaled to an upright body. What we have in these works is di Suvero trying to teach himself a new language—new to him, anyway—but without leaving behind the old vocabulary.

Thus among this group there are works which come across as “drawing room” pieces—overly elegant, precious things made of overlapping and intersecting arcs of stainless steel, such as Moonrise (1961-62). Or there is Bachpiece (1962), a masterpiece of sculptural illusionism—admittedly a curious thing in di Suvero—in which a tilted chunk of beaten-up wood and three or four vertical nails stand at opposite ends of a sloping steel “hill,” the tense, charged relation between the disparately scaled groups vividly suggesting four persons confronting a giant monolith. And there is For Giacometti (1962), a moderately large-sized floor piece (four feet high, six feet wide) in which, at opposite ends of a platform, a section of wooden beam wrapped in chain and another with a metal ring projecting from its top tilt away from each other. In its poise, dynamic tension, charged interior space, and gestural character, For Giacometti is closest to the earlier large-scale works. It conflates the essential qualities into what is almost a landscape configuration.

Not until di Suvero gets fully mobile again does he truly recover his sculptural momentum. When he does, it is in a manner even more vigorous and expansive than before.

In 1967 the artist shifted from wood construction to metal and embarked on a succession of enormous sculptures (thirty to forty feet high) made of extended I-beams and cables, apparently in an effort to recapture the impressive gestural style of his earlier phase. Owing to the attenuation of the I-beams, these later sculptures have reduced, linear silhouettes that make them look somewhat fragile and give them a surprising grace and elegance; in relation to their rougher forebears, they are almost refined. The earliest, Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore) (1967), carries over the staccato rhythms of the prior phase and so stands as a perfect point of transition. It is as if the accident had never happened and di Suvero was indeed simply moving on from what he had done before. What differentiates these sculptures, more than their size, is the introduction of an element that will soon become the artist’s signature: the suspended or balanced form. Here it is two I-beam sections joined to form a “V,” and hung by one end so that the “V” floats and rotates in space midway up the sculpture.

Mark di Suvero, Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore), 1967,  Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

If in these sculptures di Suvero does return to his former gestural manner, it is gesture with a new artistic center. This is understandable, for there can be no doubt of the causal link between this new campaign and di Suvero’s full recovery from the accident seven years before. So sudden, and so extreme, is the shift in size, and so aggressively do these sculptures stake their claim to their environment, that they suggest a sudden release, an exultation at the onset of free, unfettered mobility—exactly what one might expect of an artist recently emerged from a period of prolonged physical debility and confinement, particularly an artist whose earlier work had been so animated and physical in character. All at once, it seems, di Suvero moves from a generalized, aesthetic expressionism to one that is personal, even autobiographical.

In the sculptures following Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore) the balancing element is no longer incidental: it is central to the entire work—in a way similar to Calder’s stabiles, where forms are also suspended from firm structural supports. Additionally, these sculptures are not the spreading configurations of old: they are architectonic, structural affairs divided into two parts, “support” and “action.”

It goes without saying that at such a scale, such feats as di Suvero performs are highly dramatic. The sight of Mon Père, Mon Père (1973-75)—with its enormous “V” form suspended horizontally some twenty feet in the air—is captivating, and not a little terrifying. Yet once one has gotten past the drama, these aspects strike one as gestures undertaken for their own sake. They have a decided attention-attracting character to them, a character one had seen earlier in di Suvero’s work but now isolated and made the “subject” or point of the work. Other sculptors, notably George Rickey, have made balancing their “subject,” but in Rickey’s work it has a symbolic as well as plastic raison d’être, expressing continuity, stability, equilibrium. Di Suvero’s balancing, by contrast, has no meaning outside itself. Even as an expressive gesture it falls flat, functioning as a diluted, more genteel version of the dynamic tension of the earlier works. What we have here, then, is not the coordinated set of aesthetic relations we associate with orthodox constructivism but instead a heroic demonstration—a demonstration of freedom from physical considerations and principles.

With this freedom comes another development in di Suvero’s form vocabulary, again an outgrowth of tendencies seen in the earlier sculpture. If previously the artist used whole, recognizable objects in his work in order to “de-aestheticize” the constructivist language, to make it more “real” and accessible, in the large, post-1967 outdoor works he uses recognizable objects without giving them even vestigial aesthetic roles. Thus, suspended from the middle of She (1977-78)—a low, laterally spreading sculpture—is a steamroller drum. It hangs there inert, with no relation to anything else around it. Similarly, affixed to one end of Sunflowers for Vincent (1978-83)—a bright yellow, horizontal sculpture—is a stainless steel ship’s propeller.

In these sculptures di Suvero’s populist stance becomes more pronounced. The directness and relative ease of access of the early works—always, it should be stressed, existing on an aesthetic plane—is transferred to the physical realm as the artist increasingly makes sculptures with parts that can be pushed, rotated, or otherwise maneuvered by the spectator. The ultimate version of this is his increasingly frequent practice of suspending low platforms off his sculptures— there is one suspended from She—designed for the viewer to sit or recline on. In di Suvero’s exhibition of recent work this summer at the Oil & Steel Gallery in New York there was even a piece whose “sculptural” members were only supporting such a platform. Clearly here the imperatives of constructed sculpture have been overturned and put in the service of a kind of “playground sculpture.”

By renouncing his earlier aesthetic logic and formal rigor he has left us with the casual, the utilitarian, the entertaining.

The emphasis on demonstration as the principal artistic statement, the increasingly explicit use of recognizable objects, and the more physical, interactive aspects of his sculpture tell us that di Suvero has moved a long way from the tradition of orthodox, constructivist sculpture. Indeed one might say that at this point di Suvero’s sculptures are not so much constructivist as simply constructed. He has tried to extend into these monumental works the vernacular expressionism of his early pieces, but he has succeeded only in emptying them of any but the most transitory satisfactions. By renouncing his earlier aesthetic logic and formal rigor he has left us with the casual, the utilitarian, the entertaining.

As such di Suvero’s sculptures represent not the vital extension of a tradition but the playing out of one. They anticipate, even clear the ground for, a figure like R. M. Fischer, who combines discarded industrial forms to make not abstract sculpture but “abstract” lamps, domesticating the constructivist impulse and taking the anti-aestheticism announced in di Suvero’s work to its ultimate conclusion. Di Suvero’s work thus stands as an important benchmark in the journey from late modernism to the formulation of the so-called postmodern canons of irony and the commonplace.

What a difference a decade makes! Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable to suggest that di Suvero stood in anything but the mainstream of modernist sculpture. That we can no longer hold this view is a consequence of the passage of time and the displacement effected by new art. No doubt di Suvero’s artistic persona is robust enough to withstand these changes. Still, it is unlikely that we will ever again look upon his sculpture with the same innocent enthusiasm as we did before.

  1. “Mark di Suvero: Twenty-five Years of Sculpture and Drawings,” which will be on view until October 31, was organized by David R. Collens, the Director of the Storm King Art Center. The exhibition’s catalogue-brochure ($4.00) contains an essay by Phyllis Tuchman. Go back to the text.
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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 4 Number 1 , on page 55
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