Richard Serra died last Tuesday. In the last 50 years, he had become a giant in American and world art.
Southern Californians have plenty of opportunities to see a wide variety of his work because of his long relationship with regional arts institutions and philanthropists.
But first …
He was proud to say that before he was an artist he’d worked at Bethlehem Steel while he was a freshman playing football at UC Berkeley.
“I came from a generation of artists that were blue collar,” Serra told me in 2006, during the unveiling of a sculpture in Costa Mesa.
“One of my closest friends is [composer] Phil Glass, he also worked steel mills. Another close friend of mine — a great sculptor named Carl Andre — he worked the railroad, Bob Morris worked the stockyard,” Serra said.
Serra wanted to be a painter during the time of abstract art and minimalism, the Western art movement that broke from depicting people, landscapes, or other natural images and sought a purification of the material used to make the art. “What you see is what you see,” minimalist artist Frank Stella said.
Serra worked a lot with various kinds of metal. In an early work, Serra made a list of dozens of verbs such as to roll, to crease, to fold and began doing that to metal, sometimes melting it and splashing it on gallery walls.
In the last several decades, Serra mostly created pieces with 2-inch thick plates of COR-TEN steel, often 15 feet tall and 40 feet or longer. He preferred this kind of steel because over time it developed a patina of various shades of amber depending on the location of the piece.
His sculptures were muscular — and took a lot of muscle to move.
In 1981 Serra unveiled a piece called "Tilted Arc," installed in the public plaza of a federal building in New York City. The national controversy that ensued in the next decade entangled office workers ticked off that their lunch walks were interrupted, as well as a federal judge and political conservatives who said Serra’s art was a waste of public money.
In the end, the piece was ripped out. Serra said he did not know where it ended up.
The public can see Serra’s work across Southern California, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA, Pasadena, and Costa Mesa.
If we could look through the knot-hole in the fence of the late billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad’s home in Los Angeles, we could see "No Problem," four 15-foot-tall conical sheets and predecessors to Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. The Broad has this nice picture of it.
In 1991 Serra installed a slope sculpture at the Gilbert Friesen residence in Los Angeles. It’s part of a series of work that used natural slopes in the land and juxtaposed slabs of steel with the drops in elevation some slight, some steep. It’s unclear if the Friesen sculpture is still there.
And if you see Disney Hall and have a Serra-déjà vu moment — there’s a connection. In the 1990s, Serra was trying to figure out how to bend his sheets of metal around two parallel ellipses while torquing those ellipses 90 degrees or more from each other. It was hard. He didn’t see it occur in nature. At the time, L.A. architect Frank Gehry was trying to solve a similar problem to create sheets of steel to cover buildings. A former aerospace engineer working for Gehry’s showed Serra a French computer program that allowed visualization of these kinds of shapes in 3-D. Gehry used the technology to design Disney Hall. Serra used it to create his most famous series, Torqued Ellipses.
Serra's work — sculpture and also print — is on display in many places across the Greater Los Angeles area.
Band| Los Angeles County Museum of Art
LACMA boasts that the 2006 sculpture that’s on display now at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA could be Serra’s greatest work. What do you think?
T.E.U.C.L.A.| UCLA
The title stands for Torqued Ellipse UCLA. It’s outdoors at the Broad Art Center at UCLA. It’s a smaller torqued ellipse and gives the viewer an opportunity to walk in and around and see that amber patina out in the real world and how it responds to drizzle, rain, and people leaving their marks on it.
Base Plate Deflection: In It, On It | Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
One of the things that makes this piece interesting is that it’s from 1970, early in Serra’s career and the same year Serra had a solo show at the storied but now defunct Pasadena Art Museum. While so much of Serra’s work is vertical, this piece is horizontal but hints at a relationship with the monumentality of the Earth’s arc.
It’s located in the front part of the museum, to the right of the accessible ramp leading to the Norton Simon’s main entrance.
Connector | Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa
Remember the controversy when Serra created a commissioned sculpture for a plaza? Well, philanthropist Henry Segerstrom commissioned Serra to do the same. Serra took a different approach than Tilted Arc.
“I think what was needed here was not something horizontal, but something vertical that would collect people much like a Campanile in an Italian plaza,” Serra told LAist in 2006 at the unveiling.
Santa Fe Depot | Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
The 2004 sculpture is an example of Serra’s massive forged steel cubes. The train station’s arcs provide a nice allusion to arcs at a monastery where Serra installed similar pieces in 1985. It is unclear what’s going to happen to the San Diego pieces as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is selling the property the pieces sit on.
Notebook Drawings | Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles
Gemini G.E.L. has a series of eight etchings. They're only on view until April 5. If you miss that one, the Getty Center has a Serra drawing on display through July. The piece is part of a larger show of photographs and prints related to Gemini G.E.L. and its impact on the art world in L.A. and beyond.
