Seamless by Max Weiss

seamless

featuring an introduction by Jessica Ann Maxwell and design by Max Weiss

THE WORKS OF MARTIN PURYEAR

seamless

featuring an introduction by Jessica Ann Maxwell and design by Max Weiss

Simon & Schuster Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10020 Copyright © 2021 by Martin Puryear All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Simon & Schuster and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Design by Max Weiss (SAIC 2022) Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Puryear, Martin

Seamless: The Handcrafts of Martin Puryear

p. cm.

1. Puryear, Martin—Sources. 2. Puryear, Martin—Notebooks,

Sketches, etc. I. Title.

N6537.L54 A2 2021 709’.2—dc21 00-028026 ISBN 0-684-83417-0

Contents

EXHIBITION

INTRODUCTION Heterogenous Objects: The Sculpture of Martin Puryear

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction Heterogenous Objects: The Sculpture of Martin Puryear by Jessica Ann Maxwell

INTRODUCTION

to sculpture, a mode of physical making in which the sculptor’s hand is the primary agent of production, is particularly unique. Puryear’s sculpture is widely appreciated today for its traditional craft and technical competency, rich display of various woods and its formal allusions to the vehicles and vessels of non-Western cultures. In a manner distinct from most other mainstream contemporary sculptors, Puryear constructs his abstract yet highly referential sculptures with layers of wood that he cuts and assembles together, usually around a hollow center. While Puryear’s handwork and appeal to preindustrial materials appear specifically misplaced in our modern present, these practices were actually in close affiliation with those loosely identified as postminimalist around the time of his emergence in the early 1970s. Countering the austere geometry and anonymous surfaces of minimalism, these practices involved the per-

uryear is, above all, a maker,” declared the late critic Robert Hughes of Time magazine. “What makes him different is his hand. Puryear makes his sculptures – of cedar, oak and hickory, of poplar and of ash – with planes and saws and spokeshaves, with a cabinetmaker’s skill. Somehow he’s restored an unfamiliar warmth to the look of current art,” a critic for the Washington Post concurred. “Above all, there is a personal touch, with faint echoes of African-American roots and ancient cultures, setting him apart from other mainstream sculptors. In an age of high-tech fabrication, his is a labor-intensive craftsmanly approach, incorporating folk traditions and motifs,” wrote another for Cleveland’s Plain Dealer in 1993. In a declarative statement on his “craftsmanly approach” to sculpture, Puryear finally proclaimed: “I am fundamentally a maker, in the physical sense, in the literal physical sense. ” I

Robert Hughes, “Delight in A Shaping Hand,” Time 158, no.1 (July 2001): 78.

Richard, “He Sawed & Conquered — Sculptor Martin Puryear’s Homecoming at the Hirshhorn,” Washington Post, February 5, 1992, B1.

Cullinan, “Getting to Know Award-Winning Sculptor Martin Puryear,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer,

In an era in which the majority of sculptural production plays itself out in the strategies of commodity art which largely involve the appropriation and manipulation of existing cultural goods, Puryear’s “craftsmanly approach”

December 26th, 1993, ARTS & LIVING, 41. 4

Puryear, as quoted in Leonard Lopate Show, November 29th, 2007, “Sculptor Martin Puryear at MoMA,” Leonard Lopate in conversation with Martin Puryear and curator John Elderfield.

SEAMLESS the children’s art classes of local artist, Cornelia Yuditsky and frequented many of Washington’s museums, including the National Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology, the Washington Zoo where he drew animals, and the Natural History Museum which impacted him enormously. Books were also a staple of his curious diet: During the last two years of high school and all through college I worked after school in a public library, and so for seven years was surrounded by books. I read a lot, on a variety of subjects. This has not stopped,” Puryear reminisced.

formance of manual procedures on such raw substances as rope, leather, and felt, producing an aesthetic with wh ich art historian and critic Jonathan Crary identified Puryear’s own handmade constructions At first this kind of log-cabin ‘minimalism’ seems an ironic comment on 1960s sculpture, but it is really part of a specifically ‘70s sculptural practice, seen in work by Jackie Ferrara, Jackie Winsor, and others. It involves working with intrinsically simple shapes, then overlaying them with supplementary signs of the artist’s physical activity and obsessiveness.

‘‘

Supplementing his book knowledge with practical experience, he made things such as classical guitars, small boats, and furniture, with his hands and the aid of instructive books. Though he concentrated in painting at the Catholic University of America in Washington, he took a required sculpture course. There, he began to adapt his acquired woodworking and guitar making skills to his experiments with sculpture. However, before his spatial turn to the three-dimensional volumes of constructed sculpture was complete, Puryear would carve into the shallow recesses of woodblocks made for printing.

‘‘

Born in 1941, in Washington DC, Puryear grew up in the early days of desegregation, attending a segregated public school until the sixth grade, when his family moved to the more affluent northeast quadrant. He found refuge from the city’s grim segregationist politics by spending the majority of his childhood in innercity Washington reading up on topics such as the natural sciences, Native American culture, archery and ornithology, and drawing specific birds and animal species. In addition to these interests, Puryear also pursued the arts; while still in elementary school, he attended

Jonathan Crary, “Martin Puryear’s Sculpture,” Artforum 18, no.2 (October 1979): 29.

Martin Puryear, as quoted in a letter to the author, December 14th, 2010.

INTRODUCTION the joinery techniques of which he adapted from African carpenters. In the wake of his new focus on sculpture, Puryear abandoned painting. Harnessing abstraction to construction, he would go on to build abstract forms, the linear scaffolding of which was inspired by the carpentry of Scandinavian furniture design that he encountered in Sweden.

Puryear applied to the Peace Corps after graduating college in 1963, for which he served two years in the remote village of Segbwema, in southern Sierra Leone. Of this experience, he recalled matter-of-factly I was in Sierra Leone on the West Coast. I was teaching in a small mission school, way up in the country and the isolation was very good for me. I would occasionally get the odd art magazines from home, but I dropped out of what was going on in art. I drew incessantly and I made woodcuts. It was a very simple, nontechnical way to come to grips with myself and to monitor my progress and change it.

Puryear enrolled in the printmaking program of Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Academy in 1966. He recalled of his move up north I wanted a place in Scandinavia. I had been interested for a long time in Scandinavian woodworking. I was interested in their furniture designing in the sixties, Danish and Finnish design in particular. I thought it was really innovative, respectful of the material and function, and I wanted to see what that was all about. I spent a lot of time in Denmark. In Stockholm I worked with James Krenov who had a very strong influence on my work. He was a man who had enormous respect for the material and an interesting person.

‘‘

Puryear cut graphic portraits of his immediate surroundings into the flat grounds of woodblocks, monitoring his “progress” from realism toward abstraction: “I continued to copy nature during this period, but in a more fragmentary way. Before I went to West Africa I thought of myself as a painter. I didn’t really focus on sculpture until I’d left Sierra Leone, and most of my work since then has been abstract,” he recounted in a recent interview. Parallel to his march toward abstraction, Puryear edged his way toward construction,

‘‘

Puryear, as quoted in Mary Swift and Clarissa Wittenberg, “An Interview with Martin Puryear,” Washington Review of the Arts (October / November 1978): 34.

8 +

Puryear, as quoted in Powell, “A Conversation

Elderfield [New York: Museum of Modern Art,

with Martin Puryear,” in Martin Puryear, ed. John 2007], 101.

SEAMLESS Scarpitta, and taking courses in African and pre-Columbian art with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Kampen, respectively, the newly minted sculptor learned that “what was happening” on the New York art scene largely included minimalism and postminimalist responses to it. Sympathetic to these responses which sought to recover the manual process and so-called natural materials lost to sculpture with the appearances of Duchamp’s readymade and the Constructivist model in early twentieth-century modernity, Puryear seized the material experience of physical making with aplomb. Yet, as apparent in Puryear’s sculpture, this process of making produces forms that reference the artifacts and shelters of foreign cultures, the likes of which find their sources in Puryear’s books, travels and museum visits.

Inspired by Krenov’s example, Puryear finally “put the building and art impulse together. ” Working constructively, utilizing fine woodworking techniques typically applied to furniture design, the sculptor began to cut, shape and join wood of diverse textures, into abstract forms in the late 1960s. Thus, succeeding years of experimentation with the two-dimensional media of painting and drawing, and printmaking, Puryear finally committed to sculpture. “I decided that building was a legitimate way for me to make sculpture, that it wasn’t necessary to work in the traditional sculptural methods of carving or casting, said Puryear. ” An alternative to the conventional processes of “carving,” “casting,” and modeling of industrial metals, Puryear’s construction treated cut, shaped and joined layers of wood as so many building blocks for sculpture. I0

A great deal is known about Puryear’s trips to Africa and Sweden in the early phase of his career and the various craft traditions that he learned and adapted from their local peoples to his art. However, critics have often treated such travels as the sole creative inspiration of his sculpture and thereby, its very subject. As a 1984 review reads Many artists are currently working in a style that deliberately reaches back to the archaic or primitive, but often their work is decorative, cluttered, and romantic. Puryear, on the other hand, is the real thing, an artist who has studied so-called “primitive” sources

Upon his return to the States, Puryear carried his handcraft with him to the graduate program at Yale. “I wanted to understand what was happening in (the United States) and plug into that,” he revealed. While studying with sculptor James Rosati and visiting artists Morris, and Richard Serra, and Salvatore

‘‘

INTRODUCTION The precedence given to foreign travel as the source of this “feeling for craft” in Puryear’s sculpture has not always bode well with Puryear whose practice, according to a 1991 interview, has been evolving in the States as well as abroad The time in Sierra Leone was 25 years ago, and it’s spoken about as if it were yesterday. That and my time in Sweden are the two determinants; they have become the myth behind the work. I find it’s a little unfortunate because it eclipses the fact that I’ve been working and changing for all of the time since. I mean, I have an enormous admiration for tribal art of all kinds and I had an incredible interest in African sculpture. Being in Africa made me feel how American I am. I think I always knew it but was confronted with it when there. A lot of Afro-Americans have the feeling that Africa is ‘home’ in a certain sense. But we

‘‘

and digested them to the point where they are completely integrated in his work. Puryear is a Chicago-based sculptor in mid-career whose style has been influenced more by his travels than his formal study.

‘‘

Echoing these sentiments, New York Times writer Michael Brenson extended further priority to Puryear’s foreign travels as an influence on his art. “Throughout the work, there is a strong feeling for craft and link with tribal sculpture, which reflect the two crucial years Puryear, who is 43 years old spent, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone,” he wrote.. Seconding this remark, he later said: “The importance of Puryear’s two years in Sierra Leone as Peace Corps volunteer, from 1964 to 1966, can hardly be overemphasized…The years in Sierra Leone provided him with a rich source of imagery, shaping his feeling for wood, for crafts, and for a particular approach to craftsmanship – that of the carpenter, not the carver. ” I4

sations with Martin Puryear,” in Martin Puryear (Amherst: University Gallery, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1984), 30. 12

Puryear, quoted in Swift and Wittenberg, “An Interview with Martin Puryear,” 34.

Temin, “Puryear’s Primitive Sophistication,” The Boston Globe (July 7th, 1984), page unknown.

Puryear, quoted in Davies and Posner, “Conver-

Michael Brenson, “Sculpture: Puryear Postmin-

Puryear, quoted in Davies and Posner, “Conver-

imalism,” The New York Times (August 10th,

sations with Martin Puryear,” in Martin Puryear

1984), C24.

(Amherst: University Gallery, University of Mas-

sachusetts at Amherst, 1984), 30.

Brenson, “Maverick Sculptor Makes Good,” New York Times (November 1st, 1987), 90.

SEAMLESS United States in the 1989 São Paolo Bienal, where he was awarded the grand prize. “Though a personal language that is at once poetic and allusive as well as formally complex, Martin Puryear explores not only exterior physical but also interior psychological space, and reflects a new sense of wholeness and balance, a contemporary American sculpture that benefits from pluralism and internationalism,” she continued. Synthesizing minimalism’s reductive forms and earthwork’s natural materials with global sources, Puryear thus achieves a thoroughly integrated sculpture whose capacity for containing difference within itself is more characteristically American than commonly believed. Ω I7

‘‘

really are a hybrid people. We have a complicated and convoluted identity. The Western legacy is ours too. I6

Drawing up an analogous relationship between his African American identity and his sculpture, Puryear argues that both are inherently “hybrid,” cross-bred between the “complicated and convoluted” influences of western and non-western geography. As Puryear’s biography narrates, his commitment to handcraft actually originated in his childhood experiments making guitars in America and has grown along with his travels, domestic and abroad, ever since. As critics rightly point out, Puryear certainly has drawn upon ethnographic material, artifacts and collections as artistic sources for his sculpture. However, these foreign sources are distilled and mixed with contemporary trends in American sculpture as well.

Puryear, as quoted in Alan G. Artner, “On Form and Function: The Finely Sculpted Thoughts of Martin Puryear,” Chicago Tribune, November 3rd, 1991, section 13, 10.

17 +

Jones, curator, “Martin Puryear,” in Martin Pur-

exh. cat. Jamaica, New York: Jamaica Arts Cen-

year: 29th International Sao Paolo Bienal 1989. ter, 1989; reprinted in Kellie Jones, “Eye-Minded: Martin Puryear,” in Eye-Minded (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011).

“In their materials, technique, and presence, the works of Martin Puryear epitomize current ideas and directions in American sculpture,” so wrote curator and critic Kellie Jones in the wake of Puryear’s sole representation of the

INTRODUCTION

Martin Puryear ↑

Puryear working on one of two prints in collabo ration with Renee Bott, taken about a year after their meeting at the

opening of the Anderson Print Collection. (2001) Image credit to The Bott Collection.

Exhibition red cedar, stainless steel cable, aluminum, muslin → This Mortal Coil (1998-1999)

SEAMLESS ↑ pine Hominid (2007–2011)

EXHIBITION

painted and unpainted → pine, found wheelbarrow C.F.A.O. (2006–2007)

SEAMLESS ↑ bronze Aso Oke (2019)

GALLERY

maple, ash Ladder for Brooker T. Washington (1996)

SEAMLESS basswood, cypress Thicket (1990)

↑ basswood, cypress Thicket (1990), detail

EXHIBITION eastern white pine, mesh, tar Vessel (1997–2002)

SEAMLESS Sharp and Flat (1986) ↓ pine

EXHIBITION

pressure-treated laminated ↑ timbers, plywood, fiberglass, gold leaf

Big Bling (2016)

Bibliography

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basswood, cypress Thicket (1990), detail

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