Block Busting

A Century of Sculpture: The Nasher Collection

Imagine sculpture in New York's Guggenheim Museum, including more than 100 works spanning an entire century. Ready to slot it all into Frank Lloyd Wright's narrow halls and tilted alcoves? How about precarious heavy metal sheets by Richard Serra, or even the more comforting mass of Matisse? One might as well show fine etchings in the middle of Yankee Stadium.

It takes imagination to picture enough room at the museum to circulate freely and to look patiently. And somehow, Carmen Giminez has pulled it off. Working as curator with just a single private collection, he and the Guggenheim have created a history of modern sculpture. They have also raised treacherous questions about the role of a private collection and a museum in the public eye.

Is modern sculpture modern?

Freestanding works of art deserve a good, long look from all sides. Modernism distrusts a fixed displays anyway. It teaches a renewed suspicion of art standing up front to be respected, like an altarpiece or a drill sergeant. Viewers, in turn, deserve ever-changing perspectives in an ordinary, human space.

Minimalism and installations have made the suspicions more serious than ever. "Drawing someone into art" has gone far beyond just another metaphor. Works physically take over a room or blend into the sky. They become gardens and sources of light. They allow place for anything but polite examination. Art today has all but made modern sculpture itself a forgotten notion.

It even gave me a handy excuse once with a friend of mine, who works in open metal. I explained, quite truthfully, that I have a hard time with "sculpture sculpture"—you know, art that is not actually an installation. In every traditional sense, the collection of Raymond and Patsy Nasher is sculpture.

Yet this exhibition succeeds, and its secret is quiet juxtapositions. By quiet, I mean that the curator does nothing outrageous. The exhibition remains chronological if one does not look too close. The Nasher family's choices as just as quietly traditional. As one ascends the ramp, a century of modern sculpture unfolds.

Grace notes

It begins in the small garden outside, with one of the quiet breaks in chronology. The three works span different decades, all after World War II. Alan Kirili might well have set up a chessboard for the game rules of another world. Inside, too, key artists recur out of sequence. David Smith and Alberto Giacometti, in particular, act as grace notes and gently renewed perspectives.

Giacometti commands the whole first-floor alcove for his most familiar works. Upstairs, I liked even more one of his that I had forgotten. Called No More Play, it resembles a tiny marble hybrid of a sports field, a battlefield, and a graveyard.

Mostly, however, juxtapositions are quiet indeed. From Gauguin at the very turn of the century, the show moves in proper sequence through big shots like Matisse. It reaches a couple of minimalist works before giving out. There are even two bows to art after installation, Serra himself and Magdelena Abakanovich.

I noticed the show's soft voice in the pairings most of all. More are all but obvious, or at least as much as ever. Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner stretch similarly curved lines across their sculpture's heavier frames. One has only still to ask whether they both see their curves as interior space, mathematical construction, or high-tech materials.

Julio Gonzales and David Smith have also turned up before side by side. Most of the time, Gonzales gets to play the role of missing link. He stands between Picasso's first discovery of the plain welded surface and Smith's Abstract Expressionism. And then one usually moves on.

Compared to Gonzales, Smith often comes off as the real thing. At last, broad-shouldered Americans knew industrial processes. At the Guggenheim, however, one gets to ask which of the two lay inside a sculptural tradition, and the answer is not easy.

Pairings like these enrich traditional associations. They made me consider whether their similarities stood for influence, contrast, or evolution.

Juxtapositions and art history

The juxtapositions are no small matter. They do more than allow a good eye to put those alcoves to elegant use. They also help one overlook the natural gaps in a private collection. The Nashers appear to have only a mild tolerance for anti-art, based on this selection of about a third of what they own.

I saw little Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism (unless I count Giacometti), the raunchiest of Robert Rauschenberg, Minimalism, video cameras, and after. Brancusi is sculptural, but forget about a context that looks beyond his elegance. Forget about questioning the museum's role in reducing other cultures to abstraction. Forget about an older view of sculpture, one that placed art's spirituality within the comings and goings of ordinary people.

Then, too, only the Museum of Modern Art could ever fill all the gaps. A retrospective of modern sculpture would ultimately need those early Picassos. At least the Nashers know to go just as lightly on the Picasso's later years, when garbage had less literal connotations than scrap metal.

Overall, the collection has the strength to allow fairly representative selections, and that is saying a lot. It even contains models of early drafts rather than nth castings, as well as more than one work by most artists. In that way, they can acquire a character of their own. I had dismissed Medardo Rossi before as sentimental. Now, next to the generalized forms of Matisse, I learned to appreciate his portraiture. One sees individuals, not sex or art.

And the Nashers have enough to allow entertaining asides. A de Kooning bronze woman sits next to an equally lumpy Claes Oldenburg in loose plaster. Or how about George Segal not far from that Abakanovich? In both, men and women are reduced to anonymity by a society and an unnamed history.

Abakanovich comes off with an almost unearthly dignity, perhaps because her sincerity meshes better with the Nashers' sense of history than other recent artists. In her room of headless standing figures, I had to notice how she retained a coarse fabric texturing. It suggests a care for the material of mere garments, while it also reflects on her means of working with plaster. And I was startled to notice that the figures had no backs.

She has made their emptiness more shocking than the headless forms. Her bodies without faces or gestures have a specificity and yet lack of familiarity beyond anything I imagined.

Juxtapositions and the art institution

Of course, part of a curator's skill is simply to make art look good in a museum. The Nashers too talk of how much their prefer sculpture on site, to be seen from ever-changing points of view. In this case, it helps to know how to make use of the few side rooms. At the very end, with his own room, Tony Smith, had a wonderful, atypical work. The Ten Elements sit on the floor at funny angles, and anyone can wander amid them.

Segal's bronze horde of weary commuters provided entirely another sort of juxtaposition with the museum. I found them surrounded tightly by an official museum tour group. It was quite a treat. I wanted us all to leave for work right away.

There was still another kind of juxtaposition at work, however. It went beyond museum upon sculpture—or work upon work. It is about art and the museum in society. The show is a paean to private collectors and public displays.

The walls bears obsequious labels on the importance of funding, perhaps a portent of the onrush of private and corporate collections to come. The labels brag of the Nasher's match of collecting to real-estate development. I could almost hear the will benefitting the museum being notarized.

Walking up Wright's ramp, I could see every one of the thrilling juxtapositions that went into Modernism, treated safely as the past. The show was about history, but also about private tastes and public institutions, wealth and individual rebellion. Piecing out what they mean to one another is the next step. It is a step beyond what the show, perhaps even the Guggenheim, can offer.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"A Century of Sculpture: The Nasher Collection" ran through June 1, 1997, at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.