Richard Serra

Summary of Richard Serra

Richard Serra was one of the preeminent American artists and sculptors of the post-Abstract Expressionist period. Beginning in the late 1960s, his work played a major role in advancing the tradition of modern abstract sculpture in the aftermath of Minimalism. His work drew new, widespread attention to sculpture's potential for experience by viewers in both physical and visual terms, often within site-specific, and public setting.

Accomplishments

• Coming of age in the shadow of greats such as Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and Julio González, Serra both inherited and advanced the tradition of abstract sculpture, adapting the medium of welded steel (originally a concern of early-20th-century Cubism) to new, holistic values of the 1960s and 1970s. More recent Minimalist sculptors, among them Donald Judd and Carl Andre, had demonstrated how sculpture and its materials could stand for themselves, or not be forced to serve as vehicles for articulating an artist's emotional and intellectual life. He explored how an art work might relate intimately to a specific setting, how it might take up a physical as well as a visual relationship to a viewer, and how it might create spaces (or environments) in which a viewer could experience universal qualities of weight, gravity, agility, and even a kind of meditative repose.
• Serra's adaptive sensibility in working collaboratively with, or learning from, contemporary musicians, dancers, and videographers, was part of an era in American art in which artists increasingly explored various disciplines for their overlapping and shared concerns with a new kind of art that might push the viewer's experience beyond the purely visual or optical act towards a fully physical, or "somatic" participation. Serra's work is at once a painting, a sculpture, a piece of architecture, and an epic fragment of modern industry.
• Serra's concern with the implicit relationship between his sculpture's conception and its intended site led directly to a new international discourse (often a heated one) regarding the role and governance of art in public spaces such as municipal parks, corporate plazas, and memorial sites - where the work of art might virtually interrupt viewers' daily routines in ways that are not necessarily welcomed by a given community. Serra's sculpture indeed suggests that art should be something "participatory" in modern society, that is, a gesture, or physical insertion into everyday life, not something confined to a cloistered museum space.
• Serra's materials and methods, i.e. large-scale steel panels and welding, have been interpreted by some feminist historians as a "last gasp" of Abstract Expressionism's so-called masculine themes and artistic processes. His work has thus unwittingly inspired a host of counter-responses by subsequent generations, who, decidedly in rejection of his histrionic example, turned in the late 1970s and 1980s toward more ephemeral, everyday materials to suggest that art could be monumental without relying on massive, "in your face" substances and formats.

The Life of Richard Serra

Serra's sculpted pieces, such as Tilted Spheres shown here inside an airport, are larger than life and trully evoke awe in most passerby. Serra took many years of artistic explorations to arrive at such forms.

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Important Art by Richard Serra

Artwork Images

1969/1995

Gutter Corner Splash: Late Shift

Gutter Corner Splash marked the debut of Serra's work in metal sculpture and demonstrated his experimentation with the various properties of the medium. Partly inspired by the gestural example of Jackson Pollock and Action Painting, Serra explained that the Splash series grew out of his interest in an implied, reciprocal relationship between the artist, the work of art, and the subsequent viewer: "I was interested in my ability to move in relation to material and have that material move me.” To create the works in this series, he and his team of assistants splashed thousands of pounds of molten lead into the “gutter” (the space where the gallery’s wall meets the floor. All but one of the resultant castings were then laid on the floor alongside one another, with the final one being left in the gutter. As though Serra were pouring liquid pigments or sketching, Gutter suggests multiple traditions of sculpture, from ancient bronze casting methods to some of the most recent (at that time) reductive concepts of 20th-century Minimalism.

The series also demonstrates Serra's evolving interest in site-specificity, as well as his preoccupation with the natural force of gravity, both of which have retained their importance in most of his subsequent work. Arts writer Rob Marks asserts that “No matter what it evokes, the [Gutter Corner Splash] sculpture eloquently records the process of its construction and renders in metal the structure of the gallery.” He goes on to write that “Upon encountering the sculpture, my first impulse is to breach its border. The desire to enter any sculpture’s ‘personal space’ may, in fact, be essential to the definition of the sculptural medium, the necessary realization of my four-dimensional relationship with the work. Perhaps, in fact, no sculpture that is protected by museum stanchions or guards or convention is ever truly experienced. […] But Serra has found, whether wittingly or not, a solution: the piece itself does the breaching. It advances toward me.”

Lead - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Artwork Images

1968-69

Verb List

Early in his career, Serra wrote his Verb List, intended as a tool for catalyzing sculptural concepts within his work. For instance, he took the verb “to prop” as a prompt from which he produced an entire series of “Prop Sculptures” between 1967 to 1987. He once explained “The Verb List gave me a subtext for my experiments with materials. The problem I was trying to resolve in my early work was: How do you apply an activity or a process to a material and arrive at a form that refers back to its own making? That reference was mostly established by line. In a sense you can’t form anything without drawing.” Other verbs in the list include “to roll,” “to fold,” “to scatter,” and “to impress.” In addition to verbs, the list also contains a section of prepositional phrases related to movement, such as “of waves,” and “of friction.” The list has more recently been displayed alongside Serra’s sculptures in retrospectives of his work, calling attention to the way in which his sculptural practice is simultaneously conceptual and action-centric (as opposed to the artist setting out simply to form a particular object).

Artwork Images

1969

One Ton Prop (House of Cards)

Considered in retrospect, One Ton Prop suggests the outcome of Serra's mature works, where various properties of gravity, weight, counterforce, sinuous movement, and other physical and visual properties are embodied by steel, a material commonly considered the stuff of architectural skeletons rather than objects, in their own right, of visual attention. Arising out of the recent, rather deadpan history of Minimalism, One Ton Prop reintroduced to sculpture a comparatively witty and even whimsical sense of bodily pleasure, each plate of lead leaning gently against the other (who, here, is doing the "hard work" of supporting?) as though in a continuous round-robin of "passing the buck" along to the next guy, calling to mind the endless staircases by Dutch graphic artist, M. C. Escher (1898-1972), where it is impossible to ascertain beginning or ending, origin or destination, or (to be cosmic about it) genesis or death. Aa art historian Gary Garrels notes, “All of Serra’s work has a strong relationship to the body, to the activities of the body, the body’s relationship to gravity, counterbalance, cantilever, the relationship of one body to another body.”

Drawing from his Verb List, which was intended as a tool to “establish a series of conditions to enable me to work in an unanticipated manner and provoke the unexpected,” Serra took the verb “to prop” as the conceptual impetus for the piece all of and others in his “Prop” series, which contain no bolts, rivets, screws, soldering, or fastenings of any kind. Serra later explained “Even though it seemed it might collapse, it was in fact freestanding. You could see through it, look into it, walk around it, and I thought, ‘There’s no getting around it. This is sculpture.’” Elsewhere, he elaborated, stating that “The prop pieces are really about a kind of defiance of gravity, they’re really about […] having two things come at an arrested motion, and allowing them to reach a stasis because of the leverage of one to the other. If they’re really done well, there’s a quality that, in some pieces, where there’s a weightlessness; where even though they’re being pinned, one seems to just fly away from the other.” Tragically, however, a worker was killed during the installation of a prop piece in November 1971 when one of the plates fell, though the courts found that the blame fell on the manufacturer, rather than the artist or the museum.

Lead antimony, four plates - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artwork Images

1981

Tilted Arc

Serra’s most contentious artwork, Tilted Arc, sparked controversy not because of its form (it was simply a 120-foot-long, twelve-foot-high, slightly tilted and gently curving plate of COR-TEN steel) but because of the way it intruded into the site in which it was installed. Bisecting Foley Federal Plaza in Manhattan from 1981 to 1989, the artist’s intention was that "the viewer becomes aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. Contraction and expansion of the sculpture result from the viewer's movement. Step by step, the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes.” However, the sculpture was seen by locals not only as an eyesore, but as an impediment to the flow of foot traffic in the busy business district. The work has thus become a centerpiece in discourse on site-specificity in public sculpture.

According to culture writer Gregg Horowitz, in fact, the dispute over Tilted Arc had less to do with its obstruction of physical space, and more to do with its intrusion into symbolic space. Indeed, when asked what he thought people found so problematic in this work, Serra laughed and replied, with typical impatience for too much interpretation over the art work's own "meaning," that it was the curve to which the general public was negatively responding: "They hadn't seen that before. Modernism was at a right angle; the whole 20th century was a right angle.” Public outcry over Tilted Arc led to a federal lawsuit, and, ultimately, the removal of the work. Serra refused to ever install the work in any other location, insisting on its site-specific creation for Federal Plaza and no where else, stating “To remove the work is to destroy the work.”

Weatherproof steel

Artwork Images

1994-97

Snake

Created specifically for the Guggenheim Bilbao’s Fish Gallery (and working in harmony with the curved, undulating exterior of the museum, designed by Frank Gehry), Snake is another example of how the natural and built environment factors into the conception and subsequent experience of Serra's sculpture. The pathways created by each portion of the sculpture direct one's attention to the spaces between them, rather than to the materials themselves. Is not the art work, then, composed of air as well as steel itself? In fact, the winding, narrow routes (to which artists commonly refer as "negative space") and tilted walls of Snake offer a heightened perception of human vulnerability, or physical precariousness, no matter the work's secure grounding. Thus they draw a viewer's attention to the potential instability and danger implied in all structures of astounding tonnage.

Architectural metalwork designer John Desmond writes of experiencing Snake that “One of the passages anticipates a compression of space, restricting access to it, whilst the other feels more expansive and inviting. Walking inside the piece one can feel the textured lateral surfaces of the corten sheets, their unique deep orange, and the intensity of the oxide. The sense of being and moving within such space changes as the leanings of the metal afford different spaces of possibility whilst surrounding us with delicately sinuous surfaces. There is a sense of adventure, for the body feels animated as if pulled forward by an uncertain force. Transiting the long passage, one can feel disoriented and scared at times. Snake is a dynamic encounter with accessible and inaccessible spaces, gravity, directionality and multiple perspective points.”

Snake also serves as an example of the way in which Serra’s art has assumed a place in history as a centerpiece in a larger discussion of gender representation in art, ever since one viewer (presumably female) scribbled "DICK ART" on the side of one of his “prop” sculptures, which drew attention to the work's imposing, even "machismo" bravado. His works' reliance on "dangerous" processes of iron welding, along with its large, or monumental scale has often been associated with masculine bravado (as was the former era's obsession with the mural-sized canvas, as though "size always matters"). Other observers, however, find the sinuous, arabesque curves of many of Serra's sculptures, like Snake, as notably reminiscent of the female figure.

Weatherproof steel - Guggenheim Bilbao

Artwork Images

1996

Torqued Ellipse I

Serra’s Torqued Ellipse (of which he went on to make several versions) takes the form of an open-topped, slanted cylinder, with one section removed so as to permit viewers to physically enter the shape. Art critic Kenneth Baker notes that the unique form “throw[s] itself open to the entering visitor, [and] introduces the physical logic of Serra's series of curved enclosures.” Baker adds that “viewed from the inside, its wall of steel appears weightless. It can even seem to lift itself out of time, as well as out of gravity's grip.” Serra himself noted that “As you step inside, the piece seems to have a great elasticity as it moves around. It either leans over your head or leans away from you, depending on where you are. […] When these pieces were first shown people who walked into them were startled, because it was obvious this wasn't something that had existed before.” Art historian James Romaine writes that “The torqued ellipses have proven to be Serra’s most popular works, in part because they are his most gracious and open, despite their towering presence. Even after several visits, the experience remains fresh and full of unexpected turns. These forms have the feel of organic, living things.”

The artist explained how the piece developed conceptually, stating that “I realized that there wasn't a large vocabulary of building with curvilinear forms, particularly in a city [New York] that's made up of right angles. The only curvature building I can think of any note in the city at that time was Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum. And I wanted to build something that would inform my experience.” He also explained how he was inspired, in part, by visiting the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, which was designed in the fifteenth century by Baroque architect Francesco Borromini. Serra said of the experience, “I looked at the floor and I looked at the ceiling, and I thought that the simple ellipse on the floor was turned in relationship to the one overhead When I walked to the center of the floor, I realized that it was just a regular ellipse that rose like an elliptical cylinder, straight up. What interested me was my misinterpretation.” Additionally, the form of the Torqued Ellipses alludes to the day of the artist’s fourth birthday when, during a visit with his father to the launch of an oil tanker at the Marine Shipyard in San Francisco, he became mesmerized by the powerful curved form of the ship’s hull.

Weatherproof steel - Dia Art Foundation, New York

Biography of Richard Serra

Childhood

Richard Serra was the second of three sons born to a Russian Jewish mother, Gladys (née Fineberg) Serra. and a Spanish father who had immigrated from the island of Majorca, Tony Serra. As a young boy, he lived with his family amidst the sand dunes of San Francisco. Staying mostly within the boundaries of his home life, he knew little of the outside world, let alone the fine arts. However, he explained that, as a stereotypical “middle child”, seeking his parents’ approval and to differentiate himself from his siblings, he attempted to impress his parents by drawing. His talent in drawing was, in fact, first noticed by a third-grade teacher who encouraged his mother to take him to museums.

One of Serra’s earliest sparks of creativity came from spending time at the shipyards, where his father worked as a pipefitter.According to the artist, the foundations of his art took shape on his fourth birthday, during the launch of an oil tanker at the Marine Shipyard in San Francisco: "All the raw material I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory." In particular, he recalled later in life the powerful horizontal curve made by the ship's hull, and the contradictory lightness and speed that impressed him when the vessel took off through the water. It was around this same time that Serra began to draw, an activity that he believed to have aided the growth of his imagination and sense of invention, as well as provided him with the necessary confidence to recognize his artistic potential.

Early Training

Serra earned a Bachelor's degree in English literature in 1961 from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where his teachers included Margaret Mead, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isherwood. At the same time, he took painting classes under Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun. He supported himself during his studies by working at a steel mill, an occupation that would come to inform his later work as an artist.

Serra continued with his Master's studies at Yale University in 1961, where he was trained in painting with contemporaries Brice Marden, Chuck Close, and others, most of whom he considered, at that time, "more advanced" students. At Yale, his most influential teachers included painter Philip Guston and the experimental composer Morton Feldman. In 1964-65, Serra received a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Europe. He went to Paris with his then-girlfriend, sculptor Nancy Graves, and the two were married during the trip. While there, he spent a great deal of time drawing near a reconstruction of Brancusi's studio. Although he later claimed to have known little of the modernist master or the recent history of sculpture at the time, Serra nonetheless acknowledged Brancusi's "authoritative" example.

After Paris, Serra and Graves went to Italy, where he began painting a series of grids in random colors. He later learned, by way of a recent issue of Art News, that Ellsworth Kelly was painting in a similar style, so Serra abandoned the technique. During a side trip to Spain, Serra's viewing of Velásquez's Las Meninas made him realize he was dissatisfied with the two-dimensional limitations of painting. The event virtually changed the course of Serra's artistic career; soon searching for an alternative direction, he began creating works using live and, in other instances, stuffed animals in cages. After incorporating live animals in his first solo show at Galleria La Salita, Rome in 1966, the public uproar was so great that the venue was promptly shut down by the local police.

Mature Period

On his return to the United States in 1966, Serra settled in New York, renting a loft in TriBeCa with Graves. It was there that he began making his first sculptures out of rubber, which are said to have been inspired by the horizontal progression in Jackson Pollock's painting, Mural (1943). Between 1968 and 1970, Serra worked on his Splash series, which were semi-sculptural works derived from the artist's splashing molten lead onto the spatial junction, or gutter, where the vertical studio wall conjoined with the horizontal floor plane. Serra's "gutter" works, as well as others by contemporaries whose work similarly highlighted a confluence in their work of action, environment, and medium, soon came to be classed by critics and art historians as Process Art.

The following Prop series, which Serra began in 1969, may be considered the immediate precursor of the enormous metal works for which the artist is best known. Explorations of balance, weight, and gravity, the Props are perhaps also the beginnings of Serra's recall of his childhood memories of the oil tanker skimming the surface of the ocean. From an early stage, his sculptures came up at the center of controversial media stories. In 1971, a rigger was crushed to death by a plate of one of his sculptures that was being installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. As art critic Roberta Smith reports, “Many people in the art world — artists, curators, critics, museum directors — urged Mr. Serra to stop making sculpture, even though an investigation revealed that the crane operator had not properly followed the rigging instructions.”

Serra also experimented with video art as early as the late 1960s, producing his first of many video art films, Hand Catching Lead, in 1968. Hand features the artist repeatedly trying to catch pieces of lead falling from the top of the frame. Serra describes his films as providing a supplementary understanding of his sculpture, and he has since made several others that showcase metal, and in particular his favorite medium of steel.

During his early years in New York, Serra similarly became involved with music and dance. Recognizing that the factors of space and balance so characteristic of works in music and dance were similar to his own in sculpture, Serra collaborated in performances and installations with Yvonne Rainer, Stephen Reich, and Joan Jonas. Perhaps in tribute to his musical roots, Serra has been mentioned in Vampire Weekend's song, White Sky, and his art has been featured on the cover of the Monoliths & Dimensions album by Sunn O))).

In 1970, the year that he divorced Graves and began a relationship with video and performance artist Joan Jonas, Serra assisted friend and artist Robert Smithson in the latter's execution of the Environmental work, Spiral Jetty. Serra's exposure to Environmental art in this instance reinforced the idea of site-specificity, or the phenomenon of a work of art being conceived and executed as an integral part of its surroundings (this had been implied, if subtly, in the Splash series). Increasingly working in larger formats, Serra developed a growing interest in the spaces created (or otherwise highlighted) by the art work itself, as well as the work's physical and visual relationship to the viewer. This can be seen in Serra's Spirals and Ellipses, works that invite the viewer to participate in their environment by walking around the work and experiencing it through bodily (i.e. somatic) as well as through visual perception.

In 1981, Serra married German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf. That same year, a civic controversy attending the public installation of Serra's Tilted Arc, in lower Manhattan's Federal Plaza (in front of the Javits Building), assumed the status of a notorious footnote in his career. The installation of the commissioned work provoked vociferous, negative outcry from area office workers, who regarded Tilted Arc as little more than an ugly monstrosity that attracted graffiti and litter. The escalating protests against Tilted Arc drew so much international attention that the municipal government was compelled to hold a series of public hearings on the matter, during which Serra testified - in recall of his belief in his art work's site specificity - that "to remove the work is to destroy it." The incident set off a wider, international debate about contemporary art in public spaces and the role-indeed power-of public opinion. In fact, the hearings resulted in a court decision to have Titled Arc permanently removed from its site. Serra appealed the decision, to little immediate effect: the sculpture was ultimately dismantled and carted off from Federal Plaza in 1989.

Late Career

Serra continued to explore the themes of both visual and bodily experience of sculpture through large-scale works from the 1980s through the early 2020s. Though he preferred to weld his works in in Cor-Ten steel, he notably distanced himself from the "heroic" status of Pablo Picasso, Julio González, and David Smith, who were modernist pioneers in the mastery of welded sculpture.

In the final decades of his career, Serra executed a number of public commissions, including nine in Germany alone, and eight installed permanently at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2005. One of his final commissions, East-West/West-East, was completed in 2014 at the Brouq Nature Reserve, in the desert about forty miles from Doha, Qatar. He received several awards an honors during his lifetime, including the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association and an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the California College of the Arts, Oakland, both in 1994, and Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2010. In 2015 he became a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour.

Serra passed away due to pneumonia at his home in Orient, New York, on March 26, 2024, at the age of eighty-five. In the New York Times obituary for Serra, critic Roberta Smith wrote that his “most celebrated works had some of the scale of ancient temples or sacred sites and the inscrutability of landmarks like Stonehenge. But if these massive forms had a mystical effect, it came not from religious belief but from the distortions of space created by their leaning, curving or circling walls and the frankness of their materials. This was something new in sculpture; a flowing, circling geometry that had to be moved through and around to be fully experienced.”

The Legacy of Richard Serra

Serra is widely considered to have been one of the most influential sculptors of the late-twentieth century. A modern Renaissance man with a forceful personality, Serra's interest in painting, sculpture, music, dance, film, performance, and installation art has affected legions of artists during his long career. Architects and urban planners today often cite Serra's influence, which the artist scorned in keeping with his belief that true art is never utilitarian.

Art historian Christopher Masters asserts that “above all, Serra’s sculptures create a remarkable interaction with the public and a strong experience of gradual discovery.” The artist himself once explained “I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the spaces and places where it is created in this sense. I am interested in work where the artist is a maker of ‘anti-environment’ which takes its own place or makes its own situation, or divides or declares its own area.” Elsewhere, he explained “What I make is the opposite of an object. I create an object with a subject - the person who will enter it and experience it. Without that person, there is no artwork.” Critic Roberta Smith recognizes that, as much as his work was thus rooted in the dematerialization of art, minimalism, and post-minimalism, “in many ways his sculpture [also shared] something with the Abstract Expressionists, who felt that their large paintings should be experienced up close.” The critic Robert Hughes even once described him as “the last abstract expressionist.”

By embracing new ideas regarding what sculpture could be and how it could function in the world, Serra often found himself at the center of controversy, with painter Chuck Close stating in 2002, “It’s a goddamn good thing he’s a great artist, because a lot of this stuff wouldn’t be tolerated.” As evidenced forcefully by Tilted Arc, Serra's work is, at any rate, difficult to ignore and has been important in moving the discourse about public art to the critical forefront. His work also inspired the founding of a public art program at the University of California (in his hometown of San Francisco), and Serra himself supported the development of sculpture parks across the United States.

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Artists

• Carl Andre
• Constantin Brâncuși
• Alberto Giacometti
• Jackson Pollock
• Robert Smithson

Friends & Personal Connections

• Eva Hesse
• Rosalind Krauss

Movements & Ideas

• Abstract Expressionism
• Environmental Art
• Minimalism

Artists

• Maya Lin
• Vito Acconci

Friends & Personal Connections

• Frank Gehry
• Matthew Barney
• Kirk Varnedoe

Movements & Ideas

• Post-Minimalism
• Process Art

Open Influences

Close Influences

Useful Resources on Richard Serra

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