Engineering Optimism
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

By the time Stalin coined the phrase “engineer of the soul” to describe the ideal Soviet artist his regime had already crushed the visionary Russian art movement to which the term would actually have been applicable: Constructivism.
The suppressed impulse of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International enjoyed an unlikely afterlife, however, in the career of a Shanghai-born, California-raised Italian-American abstractionist. Mark di Suvero has populated sculpture parks, coporate plazas and university campuses across the world with fiesty, gravity-defying, bright red-painted or artfully rusted exclamations in steel. Thrusting their limblike elements into the air in a spirit of defiant optimism, his structures operate like emblems of some long lost ideology.
An early masterpiece from his hand has been reconstructed at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, an appropriately hangar-like structure to accommodate the 24 foot high steel and wood construction. Mr. Suvero put together Nova Albion in 1964-5 on the beach in northern California using sawn logs and entire trunks. The original wood has since rotted, but the steel elements bracing them together were kept in storage for decades.
Somewhat uncharacteristic in this more poetic than workerist early piece is the delicacy with which shaped and welded metal locks into warm wood. Pure and perennial di Suvero, however, is the fearless sense of conquest the soaring forms engender.
Mr. Cohen, editor of artcritical.com, is art critic of the Sun.