A Modernist Pharisee on the Road to Damascus

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The New York Sun

William Tucker’s monumental bronzes, grouped on a sloping bank in Westchester County’s Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, didn’t look like sculpture as I first drove past them on a recent rainswept Sunday afternoon. I know what Tuckers look like, and was keen to find them, but the initial impact was of nature, not nurture: They has the defiant sense of stuff that belonged there, like boulders or meteorites that been there longer than any of the park’s visitors.

On closer inspection, the group of five pieces, ranging in date from 1985 to 2001, take the aspect of a prehistoric stone circle, rather like the henge at Avebury in Mr. Tucker’s native Britain. (Born in Egypt in 1935, the artist immigrated to America in 1978.) Before they register as individual, self-contained sculptural expressions, the works cohere in their temporary group as a singularly effective ensemble. A sixth work by Mr. Tucker is installed at a distance from its peers.

Even as you try to engage with a given piece it resists interpretation. It isn’t that his work goes out its way to alienate, or plays the modernist/postmodernist game of defying aesthetic experience. On the contrary, the surfaces are energized with expressive handling. The bronzes are cast from modeled clay or plaster, and despite their scale — the tallest piece, “Eve” (2000) stands at more than 7-1/2 feet — there is evidence of the hand of the artist. But the works revel in ambiguity, constantly evading fixed cognizance. You make out a limb or what could be a facial feature, but, as soon as you move on to what should be a neighboring feature the first one has slunk back into the crowd.

“The Hero at Evening” (2000) — the title is a reference is to Simon Bolivar on his last journey as recounted by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in “The General in his Labyrinth” — offers the most legible face of the group. A nose, a half-closed eye, the brow, and an ear on this reclining head buck Mr. Tucker’s penchant for diffused form. But still, the totality defies immediate recognition. In its scale and outdoor location it resists its eponymous heroicism to remain matter in transition. Much of the emotional charge in this artist, however, resides in the sense of interconnectivity between the human form and the experienced universe. Engaging with his work — trying to read it and allowing yourself to be seduced by the strange totality — puts you in mind of the existential physicality of creating it.

When Mr. Tucker left Britain in the 1970s, no one on either side of the Atlantic would have guessed that he was on track to be the late 20th century’s heir to the monumentalist tradition. It is true that he was turned on to sculpture, like so many of his generation, by the heroic achievements of Henry Moore. But Mr. Tucker was closely associated in the 1960s with a group of young sculptors who broke radically with Moore’s romantic humanism. Led by Anthony Caro, Moore’s rebellious former assistant, these artists were concerned with severely pared-down, geometric abstraction. Their work often played against gravity, favoring new materials, synthetic color, and an industrial look. Sculpture wasn’t supposed to look like a body on a plinth any more.

Mr. Tucker was a key player in this new aesthetic. His landmark 1974 book, “The Language of Sculpture,” was based on a series of lectures delivered in Leeds the previous decade, and argued against “romantic histrionics” in sculpture, stressing weightlessness and play. His own work at the time was resolutely streamlined, using twisted piping or construction elements, exploring sensations of space through line.

But there was a key to his later shift toward volume and mass and use of traditional materials in the brooding, existential titles he gave early works: “Portrait of K.” (after reading Kafka); “The Prisoner,” and “The House of the Hanged Man.” The latter, a 1981 work in wood taking its title from a Cézanne painting, was seen recently at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, “Against the Grain: Contemporary Art From the Edward R. Broida Collection,” which included several works by Mr. Tucker.

Still, it represented a major shift in gear for an abstractionist who has been a spokesman for sculptural formalism to embrace the traditional medium of modeling and casting in bronze, to produce works of monumental expressivity. Previously, Mr. Tucker had been signed up to a view of sculpture that privileged “pure opticality,” in which painting and collage set the standards for sculpture to follow. Then legibility gave way to generalized emotion. Vision made room for the sense of touch. The figure was back. He told a critic that he wanted to work in a “human rather than an art language.” It was as if this modernist Pharisee had been blinded on the road to Damascus.

By the mid-1980s Mr. Tucker was launched in what has become his signature style. Like earlier modernists harking to a “return to order” — Picasso after World War I, for instance — he turned to classical myth. But tellingly, as with “Thetys” (1985), the earlier work in his Westchester exhibition, he was drawn to the pre-Olympian deities, to the primordial Titans, as more suited to his chthonic sense of primordial emergence from chaos.

From one side “Thetys” can read like a dolman, with its flat top leaning at a diagonal and perched precariously on a boulder-like base, into which it is merged. But from another side there is a crease suggestive of flesh — the nape of the neck, perhaps, or an ankle with the foot extended. In that case the majority of this Titan goddess’s body is to be imagined underground. Many of Mr. Tucker’s works from the 1980s tease with suggestions of bodily fragments that nonetheless cohere as self-contained figures.

“Vishnu” (1995) and “Eve” (2000) continue the primordial theme, and are the most convincing figural representations. “Vishnu” is a torso with a heroically expanded diaphragm and belly. We sense the concentration of muscle around the upper back and fragment of thigh. Seen on a misty, dark day, this fulsome presence evokes Edward Steichen’s classic nocturnal photograph of Rodin’s Balzac.

“Homage to Rodin (Bibi)” (1999), displayed at a distance from the other pieces, is the most portrait-like of the group. While “The Hero at Evening” is clearer in its facial features,”Bibi” has specific, observed, felt-for human presence. The title is an acknowledgement not only of Mr. Tucker’s link to a sculptural tradition that connects him to the Venus of Willendorf and Michelangelo, but also a debt of honor to an artist he had belittled in his earlier theoretical writings.

“Victory” is at once the most fragile and defiant work among the six. It has the sense of a shorn-off top that puts you in mind of a fragment of an Egyptian head where, despite half the piece missing, the quality of the remainder ensures its wholeness. The seemingly inchoate modeling gradually coalesces into an expressive skull whose most distinct feature is its jaw. Perhaps its title is a reference to the “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” the great Nike figure who greets visitors to the Louvre. Or perhaps it signifies the persistence of an elemental impulse to describe experience through representation of the body — as a “human rather than an art language.”

On view through April 2008 (Routes 35 and 121 South in Cross River, N.Y., 914-864-7317).


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