Richard Serra at his Matter of Time exhibit. (Getty Images)
April 3, 2024
-by John Gillis
The world lost a giant in the field of sculpture last week with the passing of artist Richard Serra at the age of 85 at his home in Orient, New York.
The cause of death cited was pneumonia on March 26th.
Serra, who spent nearly half the year at his home and studio near Inverness, Cape Breton, since 1970, was known for his large site specific sculptures, usually in steel, which were exhibited the world over. He was also known for the intensity with which he practiced and pursued his art.
Serra always emphasized the importance of Cape Breton in his work, noting that he always felt very much at home here and that he loved the quality of the northern light Cape Breton offered.
Serra was among an avant garde group of artists and musicians who made a home here in Cape Breton since the 1970s – all the while creating work that was exhibited on the world stage. They were artists who were committed to creating something new rather than copying styles or works that came before.
That group included friends such as musician Phillip Glass, writer Rudy Wurlitzer, artist Joanne Akalaitis, writer and editor Helen Tworkov, photographer Robert Frank, and painter and sculptor June Leaf, among others.
Serra also had an association with Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
In a statement after the artist’s death, NSCAD noted: “Serra had several connections with NSCAD over the years. Most notably, Richard Serra received an honourary doctorate degree from NSCAD in 2004, and he addressed the graduating class during convocation. At the same time, the late Professor Gerald Ferguson had arranged with Serra to display five works in the 1995 suite entitled WM Prints at the Anna Leonowens Gallery. To the delight of everyone, Serra then donated the works to the University’s Permanent Collection.”
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Serra was born in San Francisco in November of 1938, the middle of three sons born to working class parents. His father was a Spanish immigrant who worked in a shipyard and his mother was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants from Odessa. His mother encouraged Richard to keep a sketchbook from an early age and to draw on a daily basis, which he continued to do throughout his lifetime.
Serra enrolled in University of California at Berkeley to study English and began working his summers on a rivet gang at U.S. Steel; not realizing at the time how this work might influence his future artistic production.
He later continued his studies, mostly in painting, at Yale University where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1964. At this time and at Yale he met artists such as Nancy Graves (to whom he was briefly married), Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella.
Serra later befriended composer Phillip Glass while both were studying in Europe. It was in Europe that Serra made a departure from painting to sculpture. After viewing a painting by Diego Velazquez, he decided he would never reach that pinnacle of achievement in the medium and put painting behind him in favour of sculpture – although he continued his life-long love of drawing and printmaking. Prior to that, his major influences in painting included the Americans Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack. In Europe, Serra had also come under the influence of the work of sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi.
Serra moved to New York in 1966 and began a long-time association with the Leo Castelli Gallery there, which offered him his first solo show in sculpture. At that time Serra was experimenting with film as well as non-traditional materials such as neon, lead, and rubber. Later, he would work almost exclusively in steel as the scale of his works outgrew galleries and museums and he increasingly created large, heavy site specific works.
Phillip Glass, who introduced Serra to Cape Breton, became a close personal friend and for a brief time, an assistant to Serra. Glass also worked for a time as a plumber to support his music and Serra also started a moving company in New York to support his own artistic pursuits. They lived in inexpensive Manhattan lofts and debated many of the emerging art movements of the times in the local coffeehouses. New York was then a hot bed of abstract expressionism, pop art, conceptual art and minimalism. Serra then found land in Inverness County in 1970.
Serra was also a friend and associate of the American land-based artists and sculptors Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, best known for the work Spiral Jetty. According to a recent article in The Guardian, Serra, “assisted them (in 1970) with Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake in Utah and, after Smithson’s death in 1973, Serra helped to complete Amarillo Ramp in an artificial lake in Texas.”
In 1971, a sculpture created by Serra toppled over after being moved by a worker at The Walker Arts Centre in Minneapolis, pinning the worker underneath and he later died on the way to the hospital.
The experience had quite a profound impact on Serra who stopped working for a year.
“I was harassed, ridiculed, disgraced, and was told by friends, other artists, museum directors, critics, and dealers to stop working,” he said. Serra was devastated by the tragedy and its aftermath. “It sent me into analysis for eight years,” he said, “and it put me on the road. I went to Europe and started building there.”
Another incident, his 1981 sculptural installation, Tilted Arc (a commission from the U.S. Federal Government) drew the ire of New York office workers and others who led the charge to have the sculpture removed from its public space in the mid-1980s. It led to critics calling Serra arrogant and to people reading things into his work that were unintended as well as to calls to dismantle his sculpture. Deeply hurt by this development, Serra fought back with a $30 million dollar lawsuit to keep the piece in its original location, but he unfortunately lost. The large piece was carted off to a New York auto salvage site much to the dismay of Serra and many of those who supported the arts. Subsequently, Serra spent much of his artistic efforts in future creating works in Europe and his various countries such as Qatar.
Serra explained to The New York Times in 1989 that: “In Europe you have a historical continuum of public sculpture that’s gone on from Donatello to Rodin and continues today. In the United States, you have just the opposite; the government has excluded the possibility of any public sculpture that does not reinforce the official ideology of the state.”' Serra obviously felt much more appreciated in Europe than he did at home in America.
Due to the scale and complexity of his work, Serra often worked closely with engineers, shipbuilding companies, steel companies or foundries, with riggers and tradesmen of all types to create and install his sculptural pieces.
Following his death, Larry Gagosian, a New York art dealer said that, “Serra was a titan who transformed the very definition of sculpture and drawing.”
Lynne Cooke, senior curator, National Gallery of Art, said after Serra’s passing that his six-decade-long career “irrevocably changed our understanding of what sculpture is and may be.”
Serra’s friend Joan Jonas remembered his love of dance, theatre, and poetry in an interview. “He was a great supporter of the work of people that he believed in, often and particularly the work of women. Like many of us, he loved the landscape of Cape Breton, Canada. It was simply a wonderful experience to have known Richard for five decades,” she stated.
Of his work in Qatar, Serra noted in an interview that it was the most fulfilling work of his career.
Over his lifetime, Serra was the recipient of numerous awards and accolades including a Fulbright Grant, a Guggenheim Award, a National Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, a J. Paul Getty Medal and many others too numerous to mention. His works are in the collections of most major galleries and museums the world over in addition to being exhibited internationally for several decades including two major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1986 and 2007).
Serra is survived by his wife Clara Weyergraf.
Condolences to his wife Clara, his family, friends, and colleagues on his passing.
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