The Brooklyn Rail

Untangling the intertwined lines and structures of the eclectic work of Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) is difficult and rewarding. The American sculptor was born in California to Japanese-immigrant parents. With her family—she was one of seven children—Asawa spent sixteen months in an internment camp during World War II. There, she found herself continuously drawing in any available mediums.“Sometimes good comes through adversity,” Asawa said.  “I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am,” she wrote. She further observed, “I think [art] did help with the anger, but I didn’t know at the time.” She had been raised on a farm, attentive to nature and the available culture of her time, watching TV and attending to the news of the day and capturing its imagery. At the same time, she learned to draw with both hands.

A good student and a profoundly intuitive practitioner, Asawa obsessively explored the paths of seeing through nature, craft, history, material matters (such as paper folding), and drawing styles, including the Greek meander (that is, the classical winding geometric pattern that can continue indefinitely), and performance and dance. As a result, she left behind a highly styled and tightly controlled body of work that soundly situates itself between compulsively wrought craft and delicately conceived fine art.

This show, Ruth Asawa Through Line, on view at the Whitney through January, focuses on the artist’s drawings, collages, watercolors, stamped prints, copper foil works, and sketchbooks, positioning Asawa prominently among the artistic progeny of such pivotal teachers as Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, and the mathematician Max Dehn, all of whom taught at the experimental progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina where Asawa studied in the late 1940s. Known mostly for her wire, basketlike sculptures, Asawa here demonstrates her pathway to sculpture, tracing her origins via line, paper, and construction. By reading her signature style, we pursue her work from inside out, via endless patterns, repetitions, and associations—mind, body, and material blended along with her cultural heritage and experience of the American landscape. Even her family—six children and her architect husband—were part of the fabricating and inspiration for her practice.

Visually, we see how space creates texture and pattern where least expected. Asawa was more consistent than a compulsive creator. She would draw every morning, working around her children and their activities so that housework and care were always part of her art. Process was paramount. She would layer her pigments and brushstrokes in such a way as to produce new approaches to viewing at every level. For example, in her drawing Bentwood Rocker (1959–63), composed with a felt-tipped pen on paper, she varied the density of tone to create motion through spiraling. She’d use both sides of the paper not merely for economy’s sake, but also to allow for transparency, which led to depth and variety of line, enabling the viewer to see inside out. It also illuminated her design sensibility, showing how her mind accommodated form and function.

The breadth of Asawa’s investigations was wide. She made stunning watercolor abstractions, reminiscent of some of Paul Klee’s, and then finely limned sketches of figures and objects, sensitive but not sentimental. She also made insightful portraits capturing subtle characteristics of her subjects, including a portrait of her close friend Imogen Cunningham (1975) bearing a string of beads, as well as spontaneous drawings with varied effects, such as the expressive Plane Tree #12 (1959), with its eerie brushy black gesturing, suggesting inner turmoil. Especially moving is her introspective ink-on-paper self-portrait (1960) in which she captures her own self-absorption in the act of drawing. She is clearly at one with her process. It was Albers, with whom Asawa was especially close at Black Mountain, who encouraged her straightforwardness. As she recalled, “Some regarded Albers as a Fascist, a dictator, because he didn’t react to or condone your feelings … He wasn’t terribly concerned with what we felt. He was concerned with what we saw and that we learned to see.”

Asawa was a model of intelligence and adaptability, uniting such polarities as abstraction and figuration, art and design, the natural and the artificial. The only thing missing, it seems, is technology … and that is very refreshing.