Sprezzatura in Steel

By ROBERT HUGHES

Although most of the best large-scale sculpture produced in the past 15 years has been made in and around New York, the city provides few spaces where it can be viewed in proper perspective. Now private initiative is making up for public failure. In front of Hammarskjold Plaza, its new office block on Second Avenue at 47th Street, Wolf & Macklowe, a New York real estate firm, has created a sculpture garden for rotating displays of sculptures too large to be exhibited elsewhere. "I told the city," says Harry Macklowe, 33, "that I'd bear all the expenses for installing it, maintenance, and the rest. It's a gift to New York. It may tend to break down the walls of the museum-- I hope." Four weeks ago, the first show at Hammarskjold Plaza opened with seven giant constructions by Alexander Liberman. It was an intelligent choice: Liberman's buoyant sculptures, with their red-lacquered steel surfaces laid like skin over space, changed the street into a visual event.

"Of all the birds in the flock," Art Critic Thomas B. Hess recently observed, "Liberman is the rarest." It is a rare bird indeed that he resembles: the eye's moist, inquisitive glitter; the sharp ruffle of conversational feathers; the exact poise.

Peculiar Touch. Considering the scale and bulk of his work, it is a trifle startling to see Liberman in his studio among the woods of Warren, Conn.; by what power does this wrenlike Russian contrive to lug about and assemble immense steel objects, which run to 25 ft. in height and several tons in weight? The prosaic answer is that he has an assistant, hoists and a crane; but the preservation of Liberman's peculiar touch on such a scale is impressive. Where, for instance, did he get the great squashed cylinder that went into Ascent, 1970 (opposite)! "Well," says Liberman in the tone of a watercolorist explaining a wash, "we got two bulldozers and ran the boiler against a tree until it looked right." And if it had looked wrong? "Then another boiler, I suppose .. ."

At 59, Alexander Liberman is one of America's leading sculptors. His work has a stringency and a humanistic resonance that have seldom met in a sculptor's work since David Smith died. Yet his name is not always on the list of instant preferences that a curator might reel off. "I have always been plagued," Liberman sighs, "by suspicions that in some indefinable way I am not quite serious. And that's because I have a job." The job is as editorial director of Conde Nast; he has been there in one position or another since 1941, when he escaped from Paris to New York and was hired by Lucien Vogel, on whose illustrated magazine Vu he had worked in the '30s. Some Liberman critics claim that his art exists mainly on a level of Parnassian chic, that he is "uncommitted," a designer of objects rather than a maker of acts and images. Indeed, Liberman is the antitype of "the American artist," for he has always disdained to specialize. "The type I admire," he says, "is the ancient Chinese administrator who as a matter of course painted fine scrolls and wrote excellent verse too. It's nonsense to say you are spread thin if you do many things. It gives you the chance to live more lives." As a result, Liberman's efforts over the past 20 years have restored some lost dignity to the idea of amateurism. Master of several trades but jack of none, he has been student of philosophy, mathematics and architecture, painter, photographer, editor, writer and sculptor, and done it all with a degree of sprezzatura, that peculiar term by which the 15th century Florentines conveyed their praise of a natural and serious grace of action. What Baudelaire wrote on dandyism a century ago is almost exactly true of the virtues of Liberman's art and its expressive limitations: "The distinguishing characteristic of the dandy's beauty consists above all in an air of coldness. You might call it a latent fire which hints at itself, and which could--but chooses not to--burst into flame."

Kinetic Metaphor. Control is the dandy's key, and Liberman's control is of a peculiar and highly tuned kind: it consists of letting two creative systems play with each other. On one hand, designed accident; on the other, a strictly organized language of geometrical form --circle, cylinder, triangle. "I like the steel to lie around in my yard, fallow," says Liberman. "Eventually some combination imprints itself on me: this sheet belongs to this rod; it attracts that tank end. It's very much a gamble." (His interest in chance as a provoker of form has existed for years. Back in 1955, he used dice and readings from a Chinese oracular book, the / Ching, to determine the color for paintings.)

But just as the chance is impure --being edited by Liberman's preferences--so too his shapes are not wholly abstract. A disk may allude to the sun, to a breast or to an altar; a triangle to a pyramid or a bird's spread wings. With its vertical masts and calm progression of red, sail-like forms, Odyssey, one of the monumental sculptures at Hammarskjold Plaza, suggests an archaic flotilla dipping through the Aegean. Sometimes a sculpture will work not as an object but as a kinetic metaphor of force. Ascent includes a blade of red steel that surges from the ground and appears to crush a cylinder until it is halted and returned to balance by the serene oblong that blocks its path. Even in the most abstract of Liberman's new works like Above, 1970, there is a buoyancy that invites physical response: the interlocking red cylinders, with their infoldings of metal skin and turning space, demand to be navigated by the eye as imperiously as a peach demands fondling. Robert Hughes

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