“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” the painter Ad Reinhardt once famously opined, and it’s true that the physical accommodations that sculptures demand have made them problematic for many collectors. They take up so damned much space, and their weight, for anything larger that a table-top piece, means they’re pretty much going to stay wherever they’re plopped. This inconvenience is true for institutions as well as for private collectors: a church the size of St. Peter’s in Rome can handle a 14-foot-high sculpture such as Bernini’s Saint Longinus; most American churches can’t.
This means that large-scale sculpture usually works best out-of-doors. Baroque princes had formal gardens with occasional sculptures sited at strategic points. Contemporary sculpture, however, often finds itself in a park devoted to the art. Roberta and I live within an easy hour’s drive from two such parks.
Storm King Art Center, established in 1960, occupies almost 500 acres of beautiful landscape outside New Windsor, NY. An hour north of New York City, it attracts around 200,000 visitors a year from all over the world. The collection is world-class, featuring a Who’s Who of major contemporary sculptors such as Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, and many others.
Mark di Suvero, E=MC2, 1996-1997. Steel, 92-3/4 feet high.
Collection Storm King Art Center. Photo by author.
Storm King is an environment that rewards Abstract-Expressionist inspired, testosterone-fueled sculptures. The environment practically shouts, Go Big or Go Home. George Rickey is a wonderful sculptor, but compared with di Suvero’s behemoths, Rickey’s 14-foot-high sculptures, displayed in a grove of trees, seem like early mammals, cowering in the bushes while dinosaurs were stomping about the plains. (I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the female artists at Storm King don’t seem to feel the need to thrust themselves against the sky – Maya Lin’s Storm King Wave Field is literally grass and earth, seven undulating waves of soil stretching across four acres.)
Storm King is extremely well-run and easily accessible off the New York State Thruway. Accommodations have been made for visitors with disabilities. Visitors can rent bicycles at the entrance, and trolleys transport people to the farthest corners of the park. It’s a wonderful day trip from New York City, and I highly recommend it.
The other site, an hour north of Storm King, has an altogether different vibe. Opus 40 in Saugerties, NY, was constructed by Harvey Fite (1903-1976), who taught sculpture at nearby Bard College for many years. Originally a dancer, Fite became drawn to sculpture and studied in Italy. A 1938 trip to Honduras introduced him to Mayan dry-stone architecture, which became a profound influence. That same year, he purchased a 12-acre played-out bluestone quarry, and he built a house overlooking the quarry from beams salvaged from a 19th century barn.
Fite had originally envisioned the quarry to be a source of stone and a setting he could shape to be a backdrop to his sculptures. He began constructing ramps and walkways, working mostly alone with traditional stonemason tools. Over time, Fite came to realize that the space he was constructing was more interesting than the academic sculptures he was making. Opus 40 (so named because Fite thought it would take him 40 years to complete the work) was one of the first examples of a genre of sculpture since termed “land art” or “earth art,” a type of environmental art that creates sculptures in the landscape using natural materials or by shaping the land itself. By the time Fite was killed in an accident on the site, he had been working on the project for 37 years.
Opus 40 cannot be taken in at a glance; it requires exploring the labyrinthine paths that Fite devised. One moment you’re standing atop a wall with the sun beating down; the next moment you’re threading your way along a cool, shadowy path barely wider than your shoulders. Fite had originally placed one of his carved statues, Flame, at the center of the work, but he decided that the work clashed with what he was trying to do, and he replaced it with a 14-foot-high, nine-ton block of hewn bluestone that he found lying in a creek near the property. Like the gnomon on a sundial, the monolith serves as a centering piece for the project.
Harvey Fite. Opus 40, 1938-1976. Bluestone. Photo by author.
Opus 40 is much quirkier than Storm King. It’s harder to get to (the roads are narrow and unpaved), and it has few amenities. Yet this literally hand-made work, the result of a driven man’s ambition, holds undeniable power.
Reflecting on the difference between Storm King and Opus 40, Roberta said, “One is about money. The other is about passion.” On further reflection, she decided that that wasn’t fair; the sculptors at Storm King are obviously driven by artistic passion. So Roberta changed her evaluation: “One is about passion; the other is about obsession.”
Passion, obsession, and money (or the lack thereof). Throw in sex and death, and you’ve pretty much summed up an artist’s life.
