The Brooklyn Rail

Sculptor Richard Hunt (1935–2023), who died in December at the age of eighty-eight, is honored with a comprehensive exhibition of his early works, currently on view at White Cube. Early Masterworks homes in on the artist’s output from 1955–69, a fruitful decade that saw the young Hunt—later to become acclaimed for his large, public sculptures—testing, experimenting, and refining the distinctive style that would become his own.

Though Hunt was celebrated in his lifetime, including with a large survey at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971 when he was just thirty-five years old, his seventy-year career has still flown beneath the radar. Part of this may have had to do with geography. A lifelong Chicagoan, with strong roots in that city, his work has never quite gained the same traction in New York as it has in his home city. Part of this may also have had to do with race. Hunt trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a visiting artist at Yale University in the 1960s, and was an appointee to the National Council on the Arts, yet was never fully recognized for the alchemical dexterity of his works made of welded steel, aluminum, and wood. Sculptures that easily could be conversant with the likes of Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, or David Smith were perhaps overlooked the first time around because Hunt was Black, and the art world has long bypassed equally talented artists of color who were always there, working among their better-known white peers. Early Masterworks offers the beginnings of a corrective to this myopic oversight.

The works on view show a sculptor in full command of his materials even at age twenty, when Hunt made the earliest of these objects. Cylindrical Construction (1955), though relatively small compared to many of the other sculptures on view, is nonetheless a deft abstraction of welded steel. A svelte construction that stands just under three feet tall, it is highlighted by two thin wires of metal affixed delicately at a fluid angle. The graceful curves of these armatures give an impression of lightness and buoyancy, an implied kineticism that makes it seem that if gently touched they would sway back and forth on their respective fulcrums. Coil (1965), a sophisticated piece from a decade later, is likewise imbued with implicit movement. A sinewy oxbow of copper is topped by biomorphic appendages that from some angles suggest soft bodies and at others the whetted blade of a knife.

In nearly all cases, the formal rigor of Hunt’s sculptures is evident. That he was able to coax something human from a slab of metal that appears to have come from the fender of a car (and may well have, as Hunt frequently scavenged metal from scrapyards and back alleys for his working materials), as he does in Figure Form (1966), is a testament to the artist’s virtuosity. Like Cylindrical Construction, it stands lean and tall in an almost anthropomorphic posture. Hunt has not conferred upon it any obvious corporeal details, but its stance is decidedly mortal and reinforced by a tarnished backbone of metal that runs down the back of the sculpture, akin to a spine. Elsewhere, works like Linear Sequence (1962) unfurl an impressive and sprawling tangle of chrome, woven like an unfathomable neural network. From certain angles, the sculpture appears delicately balanced, nearly off-kilter. And though made of sturdy, reinforced metal, it perches on what appear to be fine-pointed legs, giving the impression it could teeter irretrievably at any moment. Hunt’s playful insouciance towards balance recurs in works like Opposed Forms (1965) where a thick heap of twisted chrome, alit on precarious legs, is attached by a tightrope of metal to an open, gossamer composition. Despite the heaviness of the one side at odds with the tenuity of its opposition, Hunt achieves a symbiosis in the sculpture’s construction as a whole. The tension in the apparent mass of each side of Opposed Forms ends up equaling the other out, like an elegant mathematical equation.

During his lifetime, the artist noted that he witnessed the open casket of Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager who was brutally murdered by white perpetrators in 1955, while visiting relatives in Mississippi, an experience that permanently altered Hunt’s consciousness and shifted his approaches to making art. Though few of his early works expressly reference our often cruel, material world, two small early sculptures make oblique reference to this life-changing experience. Hero’s Head and Man on a Vehicular Construction (both 1956) are both small works where Hunt has broken from his trademark abstraction to express sorrow through figuration. Hero’s Head casts a simple, hollowed-out face in metal, resting on a stainless steel base, its empty eyes staring blankly into space. Nearby, Man on a Vehicular Construction depicts a small human skeleton attached to a crude, two-wheeled machine, inexorably propelled forward into an uneasy unknown. A viewer can’t help but stop and catch her breath at the proficiency Hunt had already reached by the time he was only thirty years old. That we’re able to reconsider the early years of such a precocious career is a gift, albeit one that is long overdue.