The Brooklyn Rail

I first saw Richard’s work in 1968. Joe Helman, who at the time was a nascent St. Louis-based collector, helped organize an exhibition at Washington University of works by a group of young artists including Richard Tuttle, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, Robert Ryman, and Richard Serra—none of whom had yet had solo shows in New York.

I was a curator at the St. Louis Art Museum at the time, but these younger artists were completely unknown to me. I frequently returned to this exhibition, and indeed, it was Richard’s work, which included lead prop pieces and a wooden beam with inserted candles that resonated the most with me.

Things moved quickly. A year later, Joe Helman opened a gallery in St. Louis and presented a group show that included Richard’s work. I bought for myself a lead corner prop sculpture on monthly installments, and I installed it in my bedroom, the only place in my apartment with unbroken walls extending from the corner. Shortly afterward, my father, who headed an insurance agency, visited and he told me in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t have that sculpture there. It remained, but one night soon after his visit, I dreamed I woke up dead!

During the Helman Gallery exhibition, I invited Richard to give a talk at the St. Louis Art Museum. When I picked him up at the airport, I was dismayed: he looked like he hadn’t slept in days and was possibly on drugs, no doubt due to the recent breakup of his marriage to Nancy Graves. In the audience that night was Joe Pulitzer, who became my husband in 1973, and this made Richard’s impending talk even more terrifying for me. I underestimated both Richard and Joe.

As a result of that talk, Joe Pulitzer invited Richard to make a permanent site-specific work on his property, which included woods, a former pasture, and two small houses. The commission provided an opportunity, as well as personal challenges for Richard. He had just returned from six weeks in Kyoto, walking and thinking about the history and concepts of its temple gardens.

Spending time on Joe’s property, he must have also been thinking about the context in which his work would exist, near the summer house, which contained works by Barnett Newman, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse. He also must have been contemplating his ambitions: how he and his artist friends—including Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer—all wanted to challenge and reimagine how artworks could be made and experienced. The prospect of meeting or exceeding the inventiveness of his peers and the historical works that he admired was daunting, though extremely generative and creative for him.

Months later he came back with the concept of a stepped field work. The natural elevation of the field shifted fifteen feet overall, so he proposed placing each of the three five-foot-tall, two-inch-thick steel plates where each of the five-foot drops in elevation was the steepest. The length of each plate was determined by the distance of the five-foot change in elevation in each place.

For more than fifty years, I have had the extraordinary privilege of living with Richard’s field sculpture. Among my cherished memories is watching my grandchildren using Richard’s plates as balance beams—understanding the shifts in elevation in a way that I suspect Richard would have enjoyed.

Joe’s and my friendship with Richard deepened after the field piece was installed, and sometime later Richard mentioned that a then little-known architect named Tadao Ando was doing very interesting work in Japan. Much later still, when Joe and I were looking for an architect to renovate a former automobile factory, Ando’s name came up again during a conversation with Ellsworth Kelly, who sent us publications on Ando’s work. Joe and I looked through them and decided immediately that we wanted to work with him. After my husband’s death, that renovation plan evolved into a new building, and what became the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Knowing that Ando admired the art of both Richard and Ellsworth, I invited them to create works for the building and its courtyard. Richard suggested the first of his three torqued spirals. Richard and I met with Ando at the construction site, where Richard presented his model of the sculpture. Ando was so impressed with Richard’s proposal that he immediately cut into the foam core model of our building, and replaced the originally-planned vertical windows with horizontal ones which provide perfect views of Richard’s sculpture. Richard named our torqued ellipse Joe in appreciation for the important opportunity Joe Pulitzer had provided him.

The early 1970s field works radically altered our understanding and experience of art objects in the landscape, making them sometimes difficult to comprehend. In contrast, the later torqued spirals and ellipses that evolved from geometric forms manipulated into complex configurations, attract the viewer and inspire varying, and often very personal responses. Marriage proposals have occurred at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation inside Richard’s Joe sculpture. On another occasion, one man, who had spent most of his life in and out of prison, spoke of relating the effects of walking through Joe to his own life: tilting first one way, and then another, until he arrived at the center and could stand up straight, which was where he felt he was at that time in his life.

Seeing the transformation of Richard and his art, his revolutionary drawings and sculptures, as they evolved over the course of decades, has been a great privilege.

With success, maturity, and his extraordinary wife Clara—who drew out Richard’s generosity and thoughtfulness toward others, while supporting his creative art endeavors—Richard became a thoughtful and generous human being, who revolutionized sculpture and drawing in our time.

I will always treasure my memories of him.