Richard Serra's Big Show

By Richard Lacayo

Correction Appended: May 25, 2007

Hanging a new museum show is never less than a complicated job. Getting all that art positioned just so--it's a test of nerves. But when the show is for Richard Serra, whose typical work is made from coiling steel plates that weigh 20 tons or so, complicated doesn't begin to describe it. Putting the things in place is like moving a dozen rockets to their launch pads. There's one sizable new Serra, called Sequence, that consists of 12 plates weighing a total of 243 tons. The average commercial airliner weighs 199.

This is why earlier this month Serra, 67, spent weeks in one of the second-floor galleries of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. He was there to supervise the siting of Sequence and two other massive new pieces. Along with two more that were already resting hugely in the museum's sculpture garden, those works will be the crescendo of the Serra retrospective, organized by curators Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke, that opens at MOMA on June 3. But first it was necessary to get them indoors, which required two trailer trucks, a vast sliding wall, a crane, a 40-ft.-wide rolling gantry and a team of welders.

You get the picture. We're not talking origami here. In the late 1990s, when MOMA was in the first stages of a major expansion, the late Kirk Varnedoe, then chief curator of painting and sculpture, made a point of consulting with architect Yoshio Taniguchi to make sure that the museum's new second floor would be strong enough to hold the tonnage of the typical late Serra work. He did that because by those years it was obvious that the time was coming soon for a very big Serra show. And that was because Serra, whose work had once seemed as severe and forbidding as any the 20th century had produced, had developed, indisputably, into one of the greatest living American artists.

By now he has also become one of the most popular, with major outdoor commissions around the U.S. and throughout the world. And the work itself, without ever betraying its principles or playing to the crowd, has become plainly, inescapably, pleasurable. Serra's success these days takes even him by surprise. "If at the end of the last century someone had said to me, 'You have a shot at the work being able to communicate to a broad base of people,' I would have said, 'A long shot.'"

What he means is that much of his early work was concerned with fairly recondite issues of process and materials, and with the fundamental question of what sculpture is. For a famous piece from 1968 called Splashing, Serra tossed ladles of molten lead against the wall of a warehouse provided by the dealer Leo Castelli. Around the same time, he also began a long series of works involving lead plates and pipes. Instead of welding them in the tradition of metal sculpture by Picasso or David Smith, he simply leaned them against one another in balancing acts that made gravity itself an element of the work. Not to mention the possibility of catastrophic collapse. One of the best known of those pieces, four squares of lead leaned gingerly against one another to form a cube, had a title that said it all--One Ton Prop (House of Cards).

Later Serra moved to working with massive plates of rolled steel. As it turned out, the most famous of those would be Tilted Arc, a 120-ft.-long curving steel wall that was commissioned by the U.S. government for the plaza outside a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, only to become the focus of a huge public battle in the late 1980s when some office workers complained that it had laid claim to so much of the plaza as to make the space unusable. (For the record, they had a point.) When the feds decided to remove the work, Serra sued the government and lost. "It was painful," he says. "A lot of mean-spirited nonsense came my way, but I'd do it again. I believe in artists' rights."

Meanwhile, he moved on, and spectacularly. In the mid-'90s, with a series called Torqued Ellipses, Serra arrived at the intricate configurations of space that are the great discovery at the heart of all his recent work. The ellipses were steel plates, 13-ft. high, that had been formed into twisted ovals you could enter through a gap on one side. With these Serra wasn't merely addressing space; he was creating space of a new kind. Literally new. At one point Serra and his attorney thought of having the form trademarked. "We dropped the idea," he says, "but we knew we had come upon something that hadn't been done before."

Working his way through the possibilities of the ellipses has led Serra to other forms--to spirals, bullhorn shapes and long rippling bands, each of them yielding new spatial experiences. You don't just look at or around any of them. You enter them as you would a temple and absorb them by moving through them. Though he does nothing to produce deliberate surface effects on the steel, in the course of being forged and bent at high temperature, and of being left out afterward in the rain, the plates are marked with stress patterns, splatter stains and long shallow rivulets. Then, as intended, they rust. Over time they take on an appearance that's part weathered cliffside, part color field painting.

Serra is still interested first and last in space and form, process and material, the working parameters of abstract art. But he also knows that by operating at this beckoning, intimidating scale, with this rough, forged-in-fire material, he sets loose associations--with the curves of the human body, with mineral formations and architectural space--that carry his work into complicated psychological territory. If he starts with complex solid geometry, he doesn't end there.

Which is fine with him. "If work is rich enough, then its meaning doesn't have to be tacked down to a one-liner," he says. "People can move into it in a lot of different ways." So to enter and circulate within the distorted bowl of his Torqued Ellipse IV is to find yourself inside a resolutely abstract geometric volume that is also somehow a womb, a crater, an inlet and a chamber. By its powerful address to both the body and the subconscious, it sets in motion some very deep mental reflexes, including the ones having to do with anguish, awe and desire. Yet at the end, its greatest impact is simply as an abstract form that speaks in a language that pre-exists words.

Then there's Intersection II, a piece that predates the Ellipses, which consists of four curved and tilted stretches of steel, positioned beside one another to form long, curving corridors that suggest those improbably angled streets in the paintings of De Chirico. Surrealism isn't something Serra thinks about when he sets out to work, but its image bank is something he admits may have seeped into his art. "Does the space in my work have a disorienting effect," he asks, "so that you can see in it the planar shifts of De Chirico? Possibly. It's not something I think about now, but there was a time in Italy when I thought about him a lot."

Serra lives mostly in Manhattan with his German-born wife Clara Weyergraf-Serra. (But he steers clear of the art world. "I don't go to scenes," he says. "I don't go to openings.") He's a native of San Francisco, the child of a Spanish-born shipyard worker and a Jewish mother who took an early interest in her son's talent as an artist. "To compete with my older brother for my parents' affections, I would draw all the time as a boy," he says. "After about the third grade, my mother started taking me to museums and introducing me as her son the artist. She also told my older brother he was going to become an attorney. And he became an attorney." He shrugs. "The strength of a Jewish mother."

At the University of California at Santa Barbara, Serra took a degree in literature. But from there he went on to Yale's famous graduate program in art. Eventually he settled in New York and started the work with lead that brought him to his triumphs in steel. The MOMA show will merely certify the stature he earned years ago. At the dawn of the 21st century, an era of cyberspace, reproduction and the Internet, no one is doing more to make work that stands for the ancient and mysterious power of the real.

The original version of this article contained the sentence "At one point Serra and his attorney at the German steel mill he works with thought of having the form trademarked." In fact, Serra's attorney is not connected to the steel mill.