Don Gummer by ACC Art Books

DON GUMMER

Don Gummer

Don Gummer INTRODUCTION BY

John Yau ESSAYS BY

Peter Plagens Linda Wolk-Simon

THE ARTIST BOOK FOUNDATION NORTH ADAMS

MONDRIAN, 2014 Painted aluminum and stained glass 132 x 96 x 44 in. (335.3 x 243.8 x 111.8 cm) Collection of the artist

Artist’s Statement

DON GUMMER

Introduction

JOHN YAU

Elegant Energy

PETER PLAGENS

Plates Sculpture

Don Gummer: Drawings and Sculpture

183

LINDA WOLK-SIMON

Plates Paintings, Drawings, and Wall Reliefs Acknowledgments Chronology

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Awards, Public Collections, and Public Commissions 265 Selected Group and Solo Exhibitions Bibliography

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Photography Credits Index

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Artist’s Statement DON GUMMER LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK FEBRUARY 2020

FIG. 1. Reflection,

1965

Oil on canvas 20 x 26 in. (50.8 x 66 cm) Collection of the artist opposite Don Gummer with

Passage, 1983

“Start by starting,” my high school art teacher repeatedly advised. Those words, though obvious and simple, have continued to influence me in how I approach my work: it’s about having the discipline to start. While I began my career as a painter, I realized when I began to make sculpture that I was meant to build things. I’ve grown from making simple forts as a kid in Indiana to creating more complex sculptures in Russia, Europe, Japan, and the United States. But the basic principle underlying all of them is that they must contain an inherent logic. For my large, vertical sculptures, I start from the ground up, and the viewer’s eyes are also drawn upward. I’ve often thought that this is related in part to my family history. I was named for my mom’s twin brother, a fighter pilot in World War II who was shot down and killed. In my work, it’s as if, in creating sculpture that starts from the bottom and soars into the air, I can reverse his fate. Another theme that repeats itself in my work, especially the sculptures made with large boulders, is separating and connecting. Suspended in the air, often with cables that hold them aloft, they suggest a palpable tension between separation and togetherness. It’s a universal quandary: what you hold on to and what you let go of. My art career began when I left Indiana for Boston, separating myself from the family and town I grew up in. I moved to New York City in 1973 and worked as a union carpenter on the fifty-one-story Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue. That experience of watching a building rise was similar to the process of making sculpture: simple, straightforward, logical, and minimalist. Space—whether it’s in an early painting of a girl, as in Reflection (fig. 1), her back to the viewer, facing an image of herself across the space of the room, or the space within a wall relief—is critical in my work. I am always aware of my work existing within space as well as the space within the work itself, and that interchange has to make sense according to the general rules I’ve set for the work. My career has taken me around the world, and I’ve had a number of art teachers and learned from my fellow artists. But I owe a debt of gratitude to my high school teacher who made me realize that art was a profession. She taught me to respect and take care of my art materials. She entered my work in art contests, which ultimately led to a portfolio. That portfolio was my entry to art school and my eventual career as an artist. But most of all, she inspired and encouraged me, which gave me the confidence to believe that one day, I might lift myself out of the place I was raised and find another space where I could start by starting.

Elegant Energy Making a resolved piece of sculpture that has a spark of life is hard.1 —DON GUMMER

PETER PLAGENS NEW YORK, NY 2019

Primary Separation, 2005 Mixed media 15 x 45 x 33 ft. (4.6 x 13.7 x 10.1 m) Permanent installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA

The artist and I stand in his capacious Long Island City studio, close to an eleven-foot-tall model for a sculpture that, for a museum show, will be cast in a greenish bronze and stainless steel. “It’s another version of Brâncuşi’s Endless Column,” Don Gummer says,2 with a faint smile indicating that the piece is both an homage (what decent sculptor wouldn’t pay occasional tribute to Brâncuşi?) and not one—it’s clearly one of Gummer’s own in much more than mere signature. We’re talking about the difficulty—inside the studio and without—of being an abstract sculptor—a sculptor in this age of rampant dematerialization of the art object. “I wanted to make objects I could put in a crate and ship to other parts of the world,” Gummer told the critic and curator Robert Storr in 2015.3 A sculptor of remarkable consistency—Gummer has been making art for 50 years—he has three surprisingly distinct modes of working. The first is vertically, in which he finds a connection to nature that transcends the machine-made quality of a nearby work’s separate parts. “It needed to go up, through ‘clouds,’ then thinner clouds, in a kind of ascension,” he says of one work in his studio, then adds that the horizontal, metaphorical, metal stratocumuli “actually make the piece physically stronger. It’s tricky, like trying to build a tree up and around a house.”4 Gummer’s second mode is architectural, often incorporating floor plans in which the draftsman’s lines are rendered in slim lengths of wood or metal; such work is, however, usually installed vertically on a wall in what might be called geo-romantic relief. The third mode, to employ a solecism, is more different. It employs in various ways poles, cables, and enough occupied ground underneath to imply—if not demand—commissions to be realized. The signal work in this category is Primary Separation (p.18; plate 63), conceived as a model in 1969 when the artist was only 23, and then fully realized as a commission in 2000 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams. Although Gummer has completed a number of large, commissioned sculptures over the years, they’re not of this sort, and Primary Separation remains rather, well, separate. What unites the various modes of Gummer’s work are drawing (in his case, the Modernist definition of sculpture as “drawing in space” applies in spades), integrity of materials (he never tries to make a sculptural ingredient look like something it isn’t), and an abiding love of, and respect for, Constructivism. He cites Vladimir Tatlin, Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, and George Rickey as influences. In all his modes, including the architectural wall reliefs, it is of first importance that the piece’s proportion, balance, and liveliness are to be seen and

PLATE 1

SEPARATION, 1969 Concrete, stone, stainless steel, wire, and turf 18 x 48 x 36 in. (45.7 x 121.9 x 91.4 cm) With aluminum base, 51 x 48 x 36 in. (129.5 x 121.9 x 91.4 cm) Collection of the artist

PLATE 2

KING AND QUEEN, 1970 Concrete, stone, stainless steel, and wire 24 x 48 x 36 in. (61 x 121.9 x 91.4 cm) With aluminum base, 56 x 48 x 36 in. (142.2 x 121.9 x 91.4 cm) Collection of the artist

above PLATE 29

ESCAPE, 1995 Cast bronze 90 x 72 x 84 in. (228.6 x 182.9 x 213.4 cm) Collection of the artist

opposite Detail of Escape, plate 29

Detail of Primary Compass, plate 47

opposite PLATE 47

PRIMARY COMPASS, 2000 Stainless steel and stained glass 20 x 23 x 18 ft. (6.1 x 7 x 5.5 m) Permanent installation at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

Detail of Primary Separation, plate 63

opposite PLATE 63

PRIMARY SEPARATION, 2005 Mixed media 15 x 45 x 33 ft. (4.6 x 13.7 x 10.1 m) Permanent installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA

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PLATE 64

MAQUETTE FOR TOWERS, 2006 Foam board, mat board, hot melt adhesive 128 x 56 x 26 in. (325 x 142 x 66 cm) Collection of the artist

opposite PLATE 65

TOWERS, 2006 Stainless steel 136 x 60 x 30 in. (345.4 x 152.4 x 76.2 cm) Collection of the artist (See fig. 3)

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PLATE 67

STUDY FOR FOUNTAIN FOR VILLA ASTALDI, 2007 Pastel and pencil on paper 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm) Collection of the Villa Astaldi, Rome, Italy

opposite PLATE 68

FOUNTAIN FOR VILLA ASTALDI, 2007 Stainless steel, granite, and marble 138 x 43 x 43 in. (350.5 x 109.2 x 109.2 cm) Collection of the Villa Astaldi, Rome, Italy

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PLATE 86

OPEN EYES MAQUETTE, 2011 Foam board, mat board, and hot-melt adhesive 23 x 7½ x 7 in. (58.4 x 19.1 x 17.8 cm) Collection of the artist

opposite PLATE 87

OPEN EYES, 2011 Stainless steel and stained glass 204 x 60 x 60 in. (518.2 x 152.4 x 152.4 cm) Permanent installation at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Eye Institute, Indianapolis, IN

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opposite

Detail of Frontier, plate 105

PLATE 105

FRONTIER, 2017 Stainless steel and bronze 22 feet high (6.7 m) United States Embassy Moscow, Russia

Don Gummer Drawings and Sculpture

LINDA WOLK-SIMON NEW YORK, NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 2019

Venice Spring, 1990 Oil on wood 71 x 95 x 14 in. (180.3 x 241.3 x 35.6 cm) Private collection

Equilibrium and imbalance, stasis and flow, gravity and loft, muscularity and grace, emotion and reticence—these paradoxical impulses are poetically reconciled in Don Gummer’s art. But it’s not just about a bold fusion of antitheses. Offsetting this dialectic is a subtle countercurrent: continuum—a fluid and seamless metamorphosis of forms through different iterations that lies at the core of Gummer’s approach to making drawings and sculpture. Although they represent two distinct bodies of work, the connections between his drawings and sculpture are fluid, and it is profitable and illuminating to consider these two categories of artist production together. Don Gummer is perhaps best known for his Constructivist sculptures, powerfully graceful, ascending creations of bronze and steel. (Several were installed along a stretch of Broadway in New York City in 2015.) But his sizeable corpus also comprises painted wood wall reliefs, collages, drawings, monochrome encaustic painting, and watercolors, as well as earthworks incorporating rock, soil, and water. And though he has abandoned printmaking and oil painting, these, too, are part of his repertoire. Historically, drawing was an integral part of a sculptor’s training and practice —an essential skill, and a preliminary step in the creation of a finished marble or bronze sculpture. The early Renaissance master Donatello purportedly avowed that drawing was the very foundation of sculpture, and artists like Michelangelo, Bernini, Canova, and Carpeaux made drawings in order to experiment with, elaborate, or delineate ideas to be cast in metal or carved in stone: what would ultimately be a three-dimensional work was first given life as a two-dimensional sketch. This seamless union of drawing and sculpture is no longer intact. Many modern and contemporary sculptors, to be sure, are accomplished draftsmen, but their ideas for sculpture are not necessarily first explored in drawings. Sculptors who draw often make drawings as parallel, autonomous, and discrete bodies of work—independent, finished creations in their own right—rather than as stages (messy, tentative, and provisional stages at that) in an artistic process that culminates in a sculpture. Richard Serra, author of supremely elegant, monumental monochrome drawings that are graphic analogues of his sculptures without being studies for them, comes to mind. One exception to this siloing is the sculptor Martin Puryear, for whom drawing is an essential part of the preparatory process. Don Gummer is another. His drawings almost always have some relation or connection, be it direct or oblique, to his sculpture.

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Cézanne and Picasso. Wandering further back in time, he alights on Delacroix, praising his “looseness, color, and expression.” Delacroix’s contemporary, Ingres, advocate of an alternative, more sculptural and sober manner of painting, also appeals to Gummer. So does Ingres’s revered hero, Poussin, whose style is fundamentally about order, structure, and classical reticence—qualities that are also central to Gummer’s own art. And Donatello? The great Renaissance sculptor also came in for particular praise from this modern-day practitioner. Returning to the subject of the centrality of drawing in his artistic practice, and asked if he would disagree with Donatello’s maxim that drawing is the foundation of sculpture, Gummer replied, “No. I think it’s the foundation of everything.” And he wasn’t just responding to the questioner’s biased prompt. Observing that the items scattered across his desk included both a pencil and a lump of modeling clay, I asked Gummer which of those implements he instinctively reached for when daydreaming or talking on the phone. The pencil won. Drawing prevails. For the 2016 exhibition of Gummer’s work at the Fairfield University Art Museum, I formulated the subtitle The Armature of Emotion. Intended to carry multiple associations, the turn of phrase warrants a brief explanation because it gets to what I discern to be the essence of his art. In traditional practice, an armature

top Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)

Oedipus Explains the Riddle of the Sphinx, 1808 Oil on canvas, 6⅜ x 4¾ ft. (1.89 x 1.44 m) Musée de Louvre, Paris, France Bequest of the Comtesse Duchâtel, 1878. 1878; R.F. 218 © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York, NY Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863)

bottom

Death of Sardanapalus, 1827

Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594–1665)

Oil on canvas, 12⅞ x 16¼ ft. (3.92 x 4.96 m) Salon of 1827, Musée de Louvre, Paris, France

The Four Seasons, Autumn, or the Grapes Brought from the Promised Land, 1660–1664

Acquired on the arrears of the bequest of

Oil on canvas, 46⅜ x 62⅞ in. (118 x 160 cm)

Maurice Audéoud, 1921; R.F.2346

Musée de Louvre, Paris, France, INV 7305

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is the metal framework around which a sculpture is modeled in clay. An armature can also be an exterior skeleton that holds up and contains a sculpture in progress. (Some of Gummer’s drawings actually depict a sculpture inside an armature, and his studio is littered with models of all sizes supported within such structures that he fabricates.) The presence of armatures, real and implied, signals internal and external controls: they are the supporting frameworks that keep forms from collapsing

Study for FG, 2015 Watercolor and colored pencil on paper 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61 cm) Collection of the artist (See plate 106)

and hold excess or imbalance in check. They are also scaffolds for channeling the energy and indelible optimism that animate his work—that sense of infinite ascent toward some higher plane. Armatures, then, are always present in some way in Gummer’s sculptures, signifiers of the structure he brings to everything he creates. This essay is adapted from an article published by the author in Venü magazine in Spring 2016, which was written to coincide with the exhibition I curated in 2016 at the Fairfield University Art Museum, Don Gummer – The Armature of Emotion: Drawings and Sculpture.

NOTES:

1. Rosalind Krauss, “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition,” October, vol. 116 (Spring 2006), 55–62. 2. Jim Crace, Continent (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). 3. All comments by Don Gummer are taken from an interview the author conducted with the artist at his studio in Salisbury, CT, during November–December, 2015.

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PLATE 129

SILK HEXAGON, 1981 Nylon and painted wood 96 x 96 x 14 in. (243.8 x 243.8 x 35.6 cm) Private collection

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PLATE 130

SILK ROAD, 1982 Nylon and painted wood 96 x 96 x 14 in. (243.8 x 243.8 x 35.6 cm) Private collection

213

PLATE 136

DRAWING FOR ACROSS JAPAN, 1989 Watercolor on paper 44 x 55 in. (111.8 x 139.7 cm) Collection of the artist

opposite PLATE 137

CHINA AND JAPAN, 1990 Painted wood 69 x 101 x 14 in. (175.3 x 256.5 x 35.6 cm) Collection of the artist

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PLATE 144

DRAWING FOR DARWIN’S MAP 3, 2000 Pencil, watercolor, and collage on paper 41 x 29 in. (104.1 x 73.7 cm) Collection of the artist

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PLATE 145

DARWIN’S MAP 3, 2000 Silver leaf and oil on wood 38 x 26 x 9 in. (96.5 x 66 x 22.9 cm) Private collection

229

PLATE 177

LONDON STUDIO, 1984 Oil on canvas 20 x 30 in. (50.8 x 76.2 cm) Collection of the artist

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Acknowledgments

Elva Strouse, my high school art teacher, made me aware of a future in art and that sense of possibility continues to inspire me. The many instructors and artists from the Herron School of Art and Design, the Boston Museum School of Art, and the Yale University School of Art and Architecture were invaluable in my development as an artist. In particular, David von Schlegell, the head of sculpture at Yale, served as a mentor and role model. I deeply appreciate my artist friends in downtown New York City for their ongoing support. While many people have been invaluable in my career, a special thank you to: Henry Eckert, Jane Eckert, Agnes Gund, Irving Sandler, and Angela Westwater. Charles Arnoldi is generous of spirit, and his foundry in Los Angeles marked my entry into casting bronze sculptures. Mike List, Dick Polich, and the other craftsmen of Argos Fine Arts Foundry and the Polich/Talix Fine Arts Foundry, as well as Connecticut craftsmen Frank Grusauskas and Natale Marasco, enabled my artistic visions to become a reality. Bill Tingley of Quercus Corporation, Miguel Balaguero, and Patrick Motter have helped in many ways to insure the logistics of transporting and installing large sculptures. For that and much more, I am thankful. My assistant Russell Williams has been enormously helpful and I am appreciative of his dedication and wide-ranging skills. Artists are indebted to foundations and other institutions that support them in various stages of their careers. As a recipient of grants from, among others, the Ford Foundation, Tiffany & Co., and the National Endowment for the Arts that included a traveling fellowship, I am grateful for their ongoing efforts to further the arts. As part of the Broadway Mall Association’s mission to bring art to public spaces, nine of my sculptures were placed on various Broadway intersections in New York City. Billy Morrison and Deborah Foord’s dedication to art in general is a gift to all. Joe Thompson, former director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, helped to envision a sculpture I made in 1969, Primary Separation, as a larger, permanent sculpture that found a home at MASS MOCA. It was an honor to be asked to create a sculpture for the United States Embassy in Moscow, Russia. It would not have been possible without the efforts of Jo Carole Lauder, Chairman, Foundation for Art Preservation in Embassies (FAPE); Robert Storr, Chairman, FAPE’s Professional Fine Arts Committee; Agnes Gund, FAPE board member; and FAPE Director, Jennifer Duncan. Family is the bedrock of my life. I am fortunate to have a family who share a similar artistic aesthetic, work ethic, and an interest in engaging in the world creatively. Most importantly, they have loved and supported me unconditionally, as I do them.

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Don Gummer on a Manhattan construction site, c. 1974

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1946

Don Gummer is born in Louisville, KY. 1955

Moves to Indianapolis, IN. 1964

Graduates from Ben Davis High School. 1964

Enters John Herron Art School, Indianapolis, IN. 1966

Moves to Boston, MA, and studies at the Boston Museum School. 1967–1968

Works at WHDH-TV in Boston in the art department, designing and building sets. 1968–1969

Works for WBZ-TV in Boston making illustrations for upcoming movies.

Chronology

1969–1971

Works as a taxi driver in Boston. 1970

Receives Traveling Fellowship from the Boston Museum School and travels to Europe and Africa. 1971–1973

Attends Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT; studies with David von Schlagel, among other established artists from New York City; graduates with a BFA and MFA in art, receiving top sculptor award on graduation. 1973

First exhibition in New York City is held at 112 Greene Street gallery. Moves to New York shortly thereafter and lives and works in a Tribeca loft. 1974

Works on the Olympic Tower in Manhattan as a union carpenter. 1974

Exhibits at the Artist Space Gallery in Soho; participating artists are chosen by established artists. 1976–1978

Works as general contractor in New York City and participates in gallery shows throughout the city.

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