Members of the press walk through the sculpture titled "Intersection II" by Richard Serra during the press preview May 29, 2007 at the Museum of Modern Art, "Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years".
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Timothy A. Clary
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AFP via Getty Images
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Topline:
Southern California museums and galleries are showing a range of Richard Serra’s sculptures and works on paper now.
Where to see Serra sculptures: UCLA, the L.A. County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.
Where to see Serra works on paper: The Getty, the Hammer, Gemini G.E.L.
Why Richard Serra was considered such a great sculptor: Bottom line, his work was like nothing that came before.
“What you hope for is that unexpected youth will come along and not deal with the linear history but break new ground and that's what continues to happen decade after decade,” Serra said in 2006 at the unveiling of a sculpture next to South Coast Plaza.
Serra saw himself as a blue-collar worker: He was proud to say that before he was an artist, he’d worked at Bethlehem Steel while he was a freshman playing football at UC Berkeley. “I came from a generation of artists that were blue-collar,” Serra said in 2006.
Richard Serra died last Tuesday. In the last 50 years, he had become a giant in American and world art.
Southern Californians have plenty of opportunities to see a wide variety of his work because of his long relationship with regional arts institutions and philanthropists.
But first …
Things to know about Serra
He was proud to say that before he was an artist he’d worked at Bethlehem Steel while he was a freshman playing football at UC Berkeley.
“I came from a generation of artists that were blue collar,” Serra told me in 2006, during the unveiling of a sculpture in Costa Mesa.
“One of my closest friends is [composer] Phil Glass, he also worked steel mills. Another close friend of mine — a great sculptor named Carl Andre — he worked the railroad, Bob Morris worked the stockyard,” Serra said.
Serra wanted to be a painter during the time of abstract art and minimalism, the Western art movement that broke from depicting people, landscapes, or other natural images and sought a purification of the material used to make the art. “What you see is what you see,” minimalist artist Frank Stella said.
He worked with big slabs of steel
Serra worked a lot with various kinds of metal. In an early work, Serra made a list of dozens of verbs such as to roll, to crease, to fold and began doing that to metal, sometimes melting it and splashing it on gallery walls.
"Band" by Richard Serra on view at the L.A. County Museum of Art.
In the last several decades, Serra mostly created pieces with 2-inch thick plates of COR-TEN steel, often 15 feet tall and 40 feet or longer. He preferred this kind of steel because over time it developed a patina of various shades of amber depending on the location of the piece.
His sculptures were muscular — and took a lot of muscle to move.
A target of the culture wars
In 1981 Serra unveiled a piece called "Tilted Arc," installed in the public plaza of a federal building in New York City. The national controversy that ensued in the next decade entangled office workers ticked off that their lunch walks were interrupted, as well as a federal judge and political conservatives who said Serra’s art was a waste of public money.
In the end, the piece was ripped out. Serra said he did not know where it ended up.
Serra’s signature sculptures dot Los Angeles
The public can see Serra’s work across Southern California, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA, Pasadena, and Costa Mesa.
Richard Serra during the proofing of his series "Rounds" in the Gemini artist studio, 1998
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Courtesy of The Getty
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If we could look through the knot-hole in the fence of the late billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad’s home in Los Angeles, we could see "No Problem," four 15-foot-tall conical sheets and predecessors to Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. The Broad hasthis nice picture of it.
In 1991 Serra installed a slope sculpture at the Gilbert Friesen residence in Los Angeles. It’s part of a series of work that used natural slopes in the land and juxtaposed slabs of steel with the drops in elevation some slight, some steep. It’s unclear if the Friesen sculpture is still there.
And if you see Disney Hall and have a Serra-déjà vu moment — there’s a connection. In the 1990s, Serra was trying to figure out how to bend his sheets of metal around two parallel ellipses while torquing those ellipses 90 degrees or more from each other. It was hard. He didn’t see it occur in nature. At the time, L.A. architect Frank Gehry was trying to solve a similar problem to create sheets of steel to cover buildings.A former aerospace engineer working for Gehry’s showed Serra a French computer program that allowed visualization of these kinds of shapes in 3-D. Gehry used the technology to design Disney Hall. Serra used it to create his most famous series, Torqued Ellipses.
Where to see more
Serra's work — sculpture and also print — is on display in many places across the Greater Los Angeles area.
LACMA boasts that the 2006 sculpture that’s on display now at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA could be Serra’s greatest work. What do you think?
The title stands for Torqued Ellipse UCLA. It’s outdoors at the Broad Art Center at UCLA. It’s a smaller torqued ellipse and gives the viewer an opportunity to walk in and around and see that amber patina out in the real world and how it responds to drizzle, rain, and people leaving their marks on it.
One of the things that makes this piece interesting is that it’s from 1970, early in Serra’s career and the same year Serra had a solo show at the storied but now defunct Pasadena Art Museum. While so much of Serra’s work is vertical, this piece is horizontal but hints at a relationship with the monumentality of the Earth’s arc.
It’s located in the front part of the museum, to the right of the accessible ramp leading to the Norton Simon’s main entrance.
Connector | Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa
Remember the controversy when Serra created a commissioned sculpture for a plaza? Well, philanthropist Henry Segerstrom commissioned Serra to do the same. Serra took a different approach than Tilted Arc.
“I think what was needed here was not something horizontal, but something vertical that would collect people much like a Campanile in an Italian plaza,” Serra told LAist in 2006 at the unveiling.
Gemini G.E.L. has a series of eight etchings. They're only on view until April 5. If you miss that one, the Getty Center has a Serra drawing on display through July. The piece is part of a larger show of photographs and prints related to Gemini G.E.L. and its impact on the art world in L.A. and beyond.
