The Brooklyn Rail

 

I realized that there was a fracture between the illusory space and the projected space in which I found myself, and that I was the subject of the painting and that Velazquez was looking at me.
–R.Serra.¹

 

Roca Llisa, verano de 1979.

Richard Serra’s artistic relationship with Spain began in 1966, at the Prado Museum, when in front of the painting Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez he realized that nothing more could be said in painting. After that decisive revelation, he returned to Florence, where he was studying on a Fulbright grant, threw all his paintings into the Arno River, and decided to be a sculptor.

My relationship with Serra began in the summer of 1979. At that time, I was working with Everett Rice as curator on the Contemporary Spanish Prints exhibition² that was going to have a two-year tour through the United States. While on vacation in Roca Llisa, Ibiza, my friend Daryl Harnisch, who worked for Sidney Janis Gallery, introduced me to Joseph Helman (from Blum-Helman gallery) who, like many people in the then small world of contemporary art, also spent his summers in the Balearic Islands. As soon as we met, we started talking about the work of Richard Serra, which he represented and which I was enthusiastic about. Joseph, or Joe as he liked to be called, spoke to me about his conversations with the newly appointed mayor of Barcelona, ​​Narcís Serra, regarding the possibility of having Serra make a sculpture for the city. It sparked ideas of trying to get a commission in Madrid. Joe found the idea fascinating, as did Serra, although I only met him months later, when Joe introduced us at one of his gallery openings in New York. Serra and I immediately hit it off; a relationship that was to become one of the most stimulating and long-lasting professional collaborations of my career.

 

Plaza de Callao Project, 1979–1983

At that time, building a project in Spain of the magnitude Serra’s work called for was not an easy task. Although Richard Serra was partly Spanish, due to his Majorcan father, his work was not at all known in a country which was just coming out of a long dictatorship and was opening up to the world and contemporary art. Thanks to the architect José Sarandeses (1940–2003), a close friend and great admirer of Serra, and his sister-in-law, María Gómez Mendoza, I managed to meet Mayor Enrique Tierno Galván and convinced him that commissioning Serra to produce a sculpture in Madrid would place the city on the map of the international art world. Since the city council had no budget, I looked for sponsorship and my friend Jacques Hachuel, a very active collector, came up. He offered to finance the work and donate it to the city. In October 1980, the mayor officially invited Richard Serra to make a sculpture in a public space in Spain’s capital.

After several trips and long walks through Madrid, Serra chose a very popular place in the center, the Plaza de Callao, which he described as “a highly constructed space with great architecture where several streets converge. The square however is out of scale and lacks perspectives. And what is even worse, it is continually crossed by people yet the plaza does not retain them.”

His intention was to transform the space of the Plaza de Callao, give it another meaning, another scale and tension. The process was long and the procedures for sending projects and models were complex, but finally, on July 3, 1981, Richard presented the final model to the mayor. A sculpture made of five sheets of Cor-Ten steel twelve meters high that formed two internal spaces.

The mayor was enthusiastic about the proposal, but shortly after we were informed by the city council that it would not be possible to carry it out. The reason given was that the proposal, with its side entrances that allowed access to the interior, presented possible security problems. There was no way to control what was happening inside. Our disappointment was enormous. The sculpture had been intended for interaction with people; it was conceived “so that people would gather there and create a new space” as Serra himself declared.

The city council asked the artist to make a new proposal, a completely open work. In January 1982, Serra returned to Madrid to present a new version of his sculpture. After this second presentation, the city council proposed a new location, in front of the Atocha Station. This change of location never convinced Richard and that audacious and groundbreaking project unfortunately ended up being diluted.

Barcelona however was able to commission Serra a work in the public space. As there was not enough budget for a Cor-Ten steel work, Serra agreed to create a concrete sculpture, precisely two huge white concrete curved forms each 53 meters long and 3 meters high. La Palmera was installed in the Plaza de la Palmera de Sant Martí in 1984.

 

Correspondencias: 5 arquitectos, 5 escultores

After the disappointment with the Callao project, I looked for other ideas to exhibit Serra’s work in Madrid, and I found it through Juan Muñoz, whom Richard himself had introduced me to in New York. Juan was not yet an artist and wanted to dedicate himself to curating. He proposed that we co-curate an exhibition on the relationship between sculpture and architecture. Correspondencias: 5 arquitectos, 5 escultores opened at the Palacio de las Alhajas in the fall of 1982. The exhibition maintained a dialogue between the sculptors Richard Serra, Mario Merz, Eduardo Chillida, Joel Shapiro, and Charles Simonds, together with the work of the architects Peter Eisenman, Frank O. Gehry, Venturi-Rauch-Scott-Brown, Leon Krier, and Emilio Ambasz. Both Richard Serra and Mario Merz carried out a work in situ. Serra’s work occupied the entrance stairs to the palace. It was a very radical work that immediately defined the space: Step (1982). This work was financed by the collector Jacques Hachuel, who later acquired the sculpture for the stairs of his garden in Puerta del Hierro, Madrid. Richard Serra also presented the emblematic One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) and an impressive large-format black spot drawing, as well as the models for the project for Callao in 1981.

The exhibition was a success and later traveled to the College of Architects in Málaga, where only the work One Ton Prop (House of Cards) and the great drawing by Serra were included. The exhibition also traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, thanks to the invitation of its director Leopoldo Zugaza who asked Serra to create a new piece for the museum. In order to produce this new work, Bilbao (1983), I drove with Richard Serra and his wife Clara Weyergraf-Serra to a steel scrapping in Avilés, Asturias, where Richard found the material: two blocks of solid steel of nine and seven tons.

During the installation of that sculpture, the artist Txomin Badiola (then a professor at the University of the Basque Country) and the sculptor Pello Irazu stopped by to invite Richard Serra to give a talk at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Richard immediately accepted, despite the museum director’s objection due to tensions between him and the university. Serra ignored him and kept the appointment. He was fascinated by that unexpected, unique encounter with students who kept asking compelling questions in a packed lecture hall.

As an introduction to the talk, a series of slides of twentieth-century sculptors were projected by Badiola and Irazu. Among them was the work of the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza, who immediately interested Richard and with whom he developed a friendship that culminated thanks to art critic Francisco Calvo Serraller (1948–2018) with his appointment, many years later in 2010, as Doctor Honoris Causa of the Oteiza Chair of the Public University of Navarra. Serra’s interest in Oteiza’s work was an important support for the Basque sculptor. Correspondencias closed on April 30, 1984, but due to the museum director’s disagreement with Serra, they did not keep his sculpture and Bilbao ended up abandoned in the museum garden.

That same year, in the fall, I was appointed advisor to the Minister of Culture Javier Solana in the first Socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez, with the task of assuming the direction of the National Exhibition Center. As soon as I took office, the sensationalist press accused me of abandoning Serra’s sculpture. I immediately contacted my friend, the gallery owner Elvira Gonzalez, who in turn told the collector Plácido Arango about Serra’s magnificent sculpture. Plácido Arango did not hesitate for a moment and bought the work to be installed in the garden of his house in El Escorial. Serra’s work is today once again at the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao thanks to the generosity of Plácido Arango himself who, after his decease in 2020, donated it in his will to Miguel Zugaza, son of Leopoldo and current director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, thus returning the sculpture to its original place, elegantly closing the story of this work.

 

Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi.

In 1986, I was still directing the National Exhibition Center and Serra continued to be a presence in Spain. He participated in the exhibition Entre la geometría y el gesto. Escultura Norteamericana 1965–1976 [Between Geometry and Gesture. North American Sculpture 1965–1976] curated by Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall which we inaugurated on May 23, 1986 at the Palacio de Velázquez del Retiro in Madrid. For this exhibition, in addition to exhibiting some historical pieces from the late 1960s, Serra recreated in situ the work Splashing (1968), where he threw hot molten lead to the intersection between the wall and the showroom floor. As the liquid lead solidified, it conformed to the shape of the space.

On May 26, 1986 we inaugurated the Reina Sofía Art Center at the historical San Carlos Hospital, an eighteenth-century building by the architect Francisco Sabatini. Its large spaces fascinated me and seemed ideal for a contemporary art museum. I had initially discovered it with my friend the Doctor José Luis Barros before I ever became part of the Culture Minister Solana’s cabinet. For the opening of this new art museum I thought big and I did so with the exhibit Referencias: un encuentro artístico en el tiempo which proposed a dialogue between what, for me, were the best current Spanish and international artists of the moment. In sculpture I chose Eduardo Chillida, with a selection of works, and Richard Serra, whom I asked to create a work for the space and the occasion. During the process of conception, production and installation of the four solid blocks of Cor-Ten steel (two rectangular and two square) he created for the occasion, Richard often visited Picasso’s Guernica (1937), then installed in the Casón del Buen Retiro. According to what he told me, on one of those occasions, when he left the Casón, he bought the Herald Tribune and read about the bombing on April 15 of the Libyan city of Benghazi by American aircraft against the Gaddafi regime. He decided to title the work: Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi, establishing a simile between the bombings of the city of Guernica by the German Condor Legion in April 26, 1937 that inspired Picasso’s painting and the bombings of Benghazi in 1986 by the United States.

The opening of the Reina Sofía Art Center meant in Spain “having definitively broken with all those ghosts of isolation that distanced us from our contemporaneity,” as the Minister of Culture Javier Solana stated. In the international art world it had an immediate impact and success. A year after the inauguration, in July 1987, the famous North American art critic Roberta Smith of the New York Times published “Spain Shows Modern Art in a Vintage Setting,” a laudatory article about the Reina Sofía Art Center that was a definitive boost for its consolidation as a future museum.

After the inauguration of the Reina Sofía, Serra’s work was present in Madrid in different exhibitions I curated during the eighties. First in 1988, on the occasion of the presentation of Raymond Nasher’s formidable collection of twentieth-century sculptures, which included Richard Serra’s fundamental piece, Inverted House of Cards (1969); secondly, in the exhibition of the Sonnabend Collection between October 1987 and February 1988; and finally in the exhibition dedicated to the Panza Collection, between the months of March and December 1988.

In 1990 Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi was exhibited for the second time at the Reina Sofía. Serra’s sculpture was acquired in 1987 by the museum and without considering my criteria. Despite my friendship with Serra, the art center was not yet equipped to store works of this nature. To store it, the museum hired an external company, Macarrón SA, a family business that for many years had been the only one dedicated to installing exhibitions in a truly professional manner. Years passed with the work in storage, and despite the Macarrón family’s constant demands to return the sculpture to the museum, there was no response. The company finally went bankrupt, in part due to the delay in payments by the museum itself and the Ministry of Culture, and Serra’s work, which weighed thirty-eight tons, was abandoned on a lot outside the warehouse. Years later, the museum’s management remembered it and wanted to recover it, only to discover it had disappeared. Richard took this bizarre story with humor, and agreed to reproduce the work on condition of a permanent exhibition space in the museum. Serra was personally in charge of the assembly and thus Equal-Parallel: Guernica-Bengasi was definitively installed in Room 102 of the museum.

There is a book titled Obra maestra published in 2022 by Juan Tallón where this bizarre story is described in a humorous and fictional way. More recently, filmmaker Isaki Lacuesta is adapting Tallón’s book to film.

In 1992, the Museo Reina Sofía, directed by María Corral, held a Richard Serra retrospective in the series of beautiful rooms at floor 0, presenting a selection of sixteen works, mostly made of large, heavy steel plates held up by a harmonious calculation of balance. Sabatini’s building had spaces without foundations that rested directly on the ground and this offered “the unique opportunity to see sculptures of great tonnage in an interior space” as the artist himself explained.

 

Guggenheim Bilbao, Fish Gallery

In 1994 the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was yet to be built. I had been working since 1989 as Curator of Twentieth Century Art for the Guggenheim in New York, directed by Thomas Krens, and was very involved in this future museum designed by Frank Gehry. I had already worked with Frank Gehry in 1982 while organizing the exhibition Correspondencias 5 arquitectos 5 escultores where Gehry himself participated. Krens, who was well aware of my long professional relationship with Serra, proposed dedicating a space in the museum to his work. I thought it was an excellent idea and very relevant as I knew how important this harsh, post-industrial city had been to Richard. But the idea was not easy to achieve, so Krens first proposed including a new work by Serra in the inaugural exhibition. In 1995, Serra visited the construction of the Guggenheim Bilbao to scout the location and the commission was then formalized. Serra created Snake (1994–97): three enormous, serpentine slabs of hot-rolled steel that would be permanently installed in the museum’s “Fish” gallery on the ground floor.

A few years later, in 1999, Thomas Krens asked me to curate an exhibition dedicated to Serra at the Guggenheim, Bilbao. The exhibition Richard Serra Sculpture 1985–1999 was to occupy the entire Fish gallery around the Snake piece. Serra proposed to bring a monumental set of eight works from the “Torqued Ellipses” series he had recently finished. We spent a long period in Bilbao: Richard, Clara, and I supervising the complex installation and assembly process. The result was impressive with a strong affinity between the space projected by Gehry with its fluctuating rhythms and the formal forcefulness and material rawness of Serra’s works.

 

La materia del tiempo, 2005 (The Matter of Time, 2005)

As a result of this exhibition, the symbiosis between Serra’s sculptures and Gehry’s architecture became clear and the museum proposed that he permanently occupy the Fish room. I participated as curator and organizer of the project. Serra conceived seven monumental sculptures, with elliptical and spiral twists, created for the longitudinal special space of the Guggenheim Bilbao. These works, added to the work Snake, makes up The Matter of Time, which opened in 2005. For me it represented the culmination of a process and a long journey that had begun in 1979, that summer in Roca Llissa, Ibiza, when I met Joe Helman and we first began to talk about the work of Richard Serra.

 

Though an abandoned project, an existing work

Richard Serra’s relationship with Spain has been so long and intense that it seems poignant to also recall the projects that were not realized, but that remain etched in my memory due to the power they contained. Especially meaningful was the exhibition project of modern and contemporary sculpture that Francisco Calvo Serraller and I had conceived for the monastery of El Escorial in 1998. Serra, who had been impressed by this monastery since he first saw it while visiting Madrid for the Callao project, proposed an in situ work: Three plates of steel for the Monastery of El Escorial. The proposal was composed of three monumental pieces measuring 46 1/2 feet by 13 3/4 feet by 5 inches would be placed on the main and north façades of the monastery. The encounter between this Spanish architectural masterpiece and Serra’s work never happened, yet even if it never took place, each of us can project it in our imagination.

I also often recall the intervention that Miguel Zugaza, then director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, and I proposed in 2007. “The idea was to delve back into the memory of the first visit to the Prado museum by Serra, when on his visit he first encountered Velázquez and in front of Las Meninas decided to dedicate himself to sculpture” recalls Miguel. For that project, we selected three spaces in the museum to intervene. One of the spaces was in the center of the Villanueva crypt, where Serra thought of placing an octagonal iron solid, consolidating in the work the power of the sides of the cyclopean space. The second space we worked on was in the patio created by Rafael Moneo to celebrate the original apse by the architect of the Prado, Juan de Villanueva. For that location, Richard thought of placing one of his undulating Cor-Ten steel walls, placed by a crane from Casado del Alisal Street. The third and last location chosen was none other than the entrance porch of the Velázquez Gate, sheltered behind the colonnade leading to the Paseo del Prado. For that space the idea was to introduce another self-supporting iron prism about four meters wide by two meters high. Unfortunately, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the global economic crisis, the museum lost much of its public funding and Richard’s project could not be realized.

 

Epilogue

In 2010 Richard Serra received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts “for his audacity to give structure, from a minimalist perspective, to the most significant human spaces on an international scale, through works of great visual power that invite reflection and wonder.” This distinction, the most important in Spain, was more than deserved. Richard had fallen in love with this country when he was very young, since that first encounter with Las Meninas that changed his path as an artist. Later, once he had decided to follow his artistic path focused on sculpture, Serra’s other great Spanish influence would come: Picasso’s Guitar, “For me Picasso’s Guitar (1912) was enormously important because it opened up the possibility of entering into a space of overlapping planes.”³ He was one of the contemporary artists most sensitive to the austere beauty of this country and who best understood the essence of its culture. Like few foreign artists, he committed himself to the process of democratization of Spain, thinking only and always about art. As for me, it has been an honor to collaborate with Richard Serra and I am happy to have helped to promote what I consider to be the most important sculptor of the twentieth century after Picasso and Brancusi.

I would like to thank César Borja, for the first writing and research, of Ana Mingot for the first editing and translation and of my daughter Nathalie Trafford who took care of a second editing and a certain cinematographic touch.