The Brooklyn Rail

Whenever I think about Richard, I think of his Verb List (1967), which is both a manifesto and an action plan. It is a declaration of sculpture and drawing as performance, as a willful and continuous act that he pursued for the next fifty-seven years. In claiming actions like to fold or to curve, and also their contexts, of gravity, of nature—Richard makes clear that his art and his life are one—that there is no separation between them. And anyone who knew Richard understood how true this was.

I remember vividly my first meeting with him. In 1998 we were in the process of imagining an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art that was completed in 2004. We convened a meeting with colleagues and artists to explore what we might want to achieve. A critic made the observation that we can only understand Cézanne through Picasso’s eyes. Afterward, on the way to lunch, Richard came up to the critic in the middle of the room, and said that he did not need Picasso or anyone else to understand another artist. The critic tried to explain what he meant but Richard did not give an inch. The conversation heated up and the rest of us proceeded to lunch. An hour later on our way back to the conference room Richard was still hammering home his point. The critic, to his credit, tried to hold his ground—literally—but Richard had advanced forward over the course of the lunch hour and had the critic pinned against the wall. I learned quickly that Richard took matters seriously, that to say something to him meant that you had to be prepared to explain and defend your point of view, because conversation was critical to his thinking—he enjoyed the give and take of debate—and he used it to refine and sharpen his own thoughts.

One of the consequences of the retreat was a decision to build reinforced floors for the galleries on our second floor so that we could install monumental sculptures, like those of Richard. After a lot of consultation with Richard and other artists we determined on a floor-bearing weight of 200 pounds per square foot. At the last minute I decided to increase it to 300 on the off-chance that if we ever did an exhibition with Richard, he would either not remember what we had agreed upon, or would want to challenge us to find new solutions. It turned out to be a good decision as we did, in fact, do a major survey of his work in 2007, and several of his new sculptures exceeded the original weights that we had specified, but fortunately not the ones we used. More importantly, and for this I will forever be grateful to Richard, that exhibition changed the reception of the museum within the art community in New York. At the time we were criticized by some for being too corporate, too cold, and for overly large galleries that did not show art to its best advantage. Richard was keenly aware of this critique, and said to me the summer before the show, don’t worry I will change this narrative for you. He meant this, I came to understand, both professionally and more importantly, personally. He became an ambassador for what the museum could be. It was an act of kindness and generosity I will never forget.

Kirk Varnedoe, who had proposed the show, died tragically in 2003. When I asked Richard who he would like to curate the show instead, he said, without missing a beat, Lynne Cooke and Kynaston McShine. I said, I know Kynaston is brilliant, but, and he finished my sentence, “you mean he can be very difficult.” Yes, I responded, and he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “I think I know about difficult. I have worked with him and Lynne before and I trust them.” And that was that. What I remember most about the exhibition is how easy and enjoyable it was to work with Richard. We planned the show down to the smallest detail, well in advance of the installation, and when the magnificent team from Budco came to do the installation everything fell into place without a hitch as giant slabs of steel were gantried through a huge opening in the museum’s second floor, designed just for this purpose, and then rolled across the floor to their exact locations.

On one occasion I found Richard sitting quietly in a corner of the gallery. When he saw me, he started to laugh. I said “What is so funny?” and he shot back, “I bet you thought I was going to be hell to work with,” which was, indeed, what I had thought. “But now,” he continued “you are feeling embarrassed for being so wrong.” Touché.

It was this side of Richard—warm, generous, and insightful that I loved the most. At dinner years ago with our then teenage daughter Richard talked to her with an openness and thoughtfulness that she was unaccustomed to from adults, inquiring about her interests and life. At one point he asked her if she had a boyfriend—a question Susan and I had been dying to ask—and if she really liked him. Yes, she responded, she had a boyfriend and he was ok, and after a bit she allowed that she was not really that sure about him. Richard listened some more then stared her in the eyes and said, “Ditch him, he’s not worth it.” It was vintage Richard—direct, to the point and spot on. “Ditch him” quickly became a catch word in our family.

The many works of his in the Museum’s collection including seventeen sculptures, sixteen drawings, two videos, eighteen films, and nineteen prints we acquired since 1973 when we made our first purchase, are a testament to his importance as an artist, and to the high regard with which he is held at the Museum.

From his earliest works, like One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) now at MoMA, to his last ones like 2022 (2020–22), now in Qatar, made two years before he died, Richard consistently challenged what sculpture could be. Weight, mass, form, space all came under interrogation. He eschewed artifice of any kind, even when making works of dramatic scale and complexity. His torqued ellipses and intersections scrambled the idea of interior and exterior space as separate and different, and made viewing synonymous with experiencing, often adding an element of danger and surprise through the sweeping curves and sharp angles of their walls. While he conceived these works in his studio, modeling them with simple materials, their fabrication was another story—some like the ellipses required computer programs to produce, others like the giant ingots that make up Equal (2015) required Richard to don an asbestos suit, dangle from a crane, and hone them to his exacting measurements. Richard was as interested in the making of his works as he was in their design and never hesitated to push the boundaries of what others thought was materially or technically possible.

There was something deeply restless about Richard—I think he was acutely conscious of how little time he had to realize all of his idea, which may be why he was so productive even in the last years of his life as he continued to make one great work of art after another, often requiring multiple gallery shows to take place at the same time. There was also something magical in his ability to surprise himself.

In 2014, I was with Richard, Clara Weyergraf, and Mimi Haas, on the eve of the opening of his astonishing East-West/West-East (2014) in the Brouq nature reserve, deep in the Qatari desert. It is a vast work consisting of four monumental steel blades, spanning over a kilometer, and set between majestic dunes. As we walked around the installation, one of several commissioned by Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani in Qatar, looking at it from various vantage points, it was clear that even Richard was a bit awe struck by how well the work had turned out. He said that despite all the planning that went into it, there was no way that he could have anticipated how the shifting light, the rise and fall of the dunes, the sound of the wind, would transform the work into such a timeless and powerful statement. Every time we climbed a dune to look at it from a different point of view, he would pace back and forth, trying to gauge whether he had placed the blade correctly, and then shake his head in wonderment at what he had achieved.

I saw that same wonderment when we visited the Altamira caves together. As we explored the caves, our torches picking out the illuminated paintings, I lost sight of Richard. I found him a moment later alone deep inside the cave where the damp ceiling was barely above our heads. He was staring at a painting. Slowly, he raised his hand, extended a finger, and then touched the ceiling, just on the edge of the painting. With his other hand he took out the notebook he had in his pocket and pressed the finger that had touched the ceiling to the paper. In that instant it was as if 15,000 years of artistic creativity had been transmitted through the paintings to Richard. The moment was electric. He shook his head and kept looking at his notebook. When I asked him about this later at dinner, he said he could not stop himself, that he felt such a powerful connection to the artists who had made the paintings, that he needed to complete the circuit. He was completely overcome by the intensity of the moment—and the fact that it was still possible to communicate so directly with artists who had worked so long ago. Art was his life in every sense of the word.

I cherished my conversation with Richard because he was so well read and always wanted to discuss weighty—I don’t mean that as a pun—matters. He could, if pressed, make small talk but he would quickly shift the conversation to something more important, either political or about art. Words and ideas mattered to him and he expected you pay attention to them as much he did. If you did not, he was quick to challenge you by what you meant.

But, for all his verbal ability, I came to understand that he thought through drawing—it was his language of choice. As he once put it, drawing is a verb and his drawings were always actions—the result of an idea translated to the application of force to paper. I once asked him about this and how his drawings related to his sculpture. He started to explain this to me but before long he took out the little notebook he had with him, and began scribbling a drawing to show me what he meant. It is just a little sketch, really. A few quickly drawn lines on paper. It sits on my desk and I stare at it every day. It means the world to me.