The Brooklyn Rail

Richard Serra was a rare artist whose work appealed to a large audience, was appreciated in museums and public spaces, and yet contributed to a highly specialized intellectual discourse. This was not always the case. But in the second half of his long career, his sculpture, especially the Torqued Ellipses, became widely exhibited, and the large group of such works, known as The Matter of Time, at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, is one of the wonders of the modern world, and has become an essential destination for aficionados of contemporary art.

Richard always maintained that his work was primarily a physical and bodily experience, and a material presence. He was delighted when he saw a group of small children carefully pacing and measuring the spaces between the five steel elements of Promenade (2008), the monumental work he installed at the Grand Palais in Paris. “They got it!” he told me. And he could relate that to his own formative experience of seeing an enormous steel ship hull being launched into the sea from the shipyards in San Francisco where he grew up.

His work had a unique ability to seem at once disarmingly simplistic, and at the same time to remain deeply considered, highly complex, and subtle. His early work To Lift (1967), a single sheet of vulcanized rubber, lifted by hand from the center of one side, contains within it almost all of his subsequent preoccupations—weight, density, line, plane, interior and exterior volumes, horizontal and vertical surfaces—which then found their apotheosis in his later “Torqued Ellipses.” By that stage, he was also stimulated by his appreciation of Baroque architecture in Rome and Münster, and by the spatial physicality of early Romanesque abbeys and cloisters in France. In the same way, his extensive interest in the history of art could be informed both by the pure intensity of a black square Malevich painting, and by the immeasurable complexity of a Cézanne still life.

Richard has a unique historical status, between the Industrial Revolution and the post-industrial technologies of the present, which he acknowledged when he said: “I don’t think anybody will follow what I’ve laid out.” Nobody can, and nobody will. It was an honor to have known him, and worked with him, for over thirty years.