Getting to Sculpture

John Haber
in New York City

Dorothy Dehner and Alice Adams

By the Way: Material and Motion

The finest postwar sculptor after David Smith would have hated the compliment. Dorothy Dehner was tired of coming after Smith, and she put off sculpture as long as she could, until after their divorce. She made the most of it, too, and she kept getting stronger until her death in 1994. Black steel fins in loose parallel will catch anyone's eye from across the room.

So they must, because a show of just over forty works starts instead with a still life from 1936, thirty-six years before. It makes clear just how much she drew on early Modernism—and how much she owed to her love of painting and drawing. She did not so much keep changing as keep building on what she knew with each successive discovery. She was an artist of her time in changing times, and she makes a fitting prelude to the architecture of Minimalism for Alice Adams in Noho and "By the Way: Material and Motion" at the Guggenheim. Still, Dehner comes as a discovery even now. She also comes with an all too familiar story.

Adams could not have lived in Adams's House, but you can easily imagine it becoming home—a finer home than she or anyone could have known. Drawings for the project track its assembly piece by piece. Yet her work from the late 1970s could just as easily be fragments from what she lived in and lived with every day. It shows her as modern architect, designer, and Minimalist, living and working close to the ground. It also shows her refusal of the spare logic common to all three disciplines. If that sets her apart from the demands of her time, it makes for a wondrous rediscovery at age ninety-three.

Before and after

You know the tale. A woman close to the leading artist in his generation and his medium feels his influence, but feels stifled by his dark moods and mammoth work. You know it from Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock in painting, although Krasner continued to exhibit without a break. You may know it, too, from Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp—although the first and Robert Delaunay were true collaborators, while the second and Jan Arp had independent careers. Dorothy Dehner has appeared before in other acts of rediscovery, of women in abstraction and, at her gallery just this year, women who persevered. One could take for granted her status without quite knowing what she did.

Dehner was born in 1901, five years before David Smith, and long outlived him. And he himself was only hitting his stride when they divorced, in 1952, like Abstract Expressionism itself. Besides, when it comes to sculpture, pretty much everyone comes after David Smith. She said that one sculptor is plenty for a family, but one can feel her restlessness. Still, she had studied sculpture and set it aside well before their marriage, finding her education stifling as well. Apparently Dehner found a lot of things stifling, which is not to say that she was wrong.

Already she had found her own way into art and to New York. She left the Bay Area to become an actress. Not that her sculpture is narrative or theatrical. Anything but, and yet she came to painting and sculpture as part of a broader creative community. She mingled, back when artists loved to talk, and befriended Louise Nevelson—another reason to take up sculpture. Nevelson, in turn, introduced her to John Cage, who inspired assemblage from the 1970s based on the I Ching.

She gave up acting because she found that stifling, too. Who needs to follow someone else's script and direction? Still, she was always learning from others and looking back. That opening painting recalls still life in Cubism, but its soft colors and minimal disruptions suggest an interest more in composition than in the enigmas of perception and art. She was never above adding relief elements to Smith's planes.

She loved drawing as a foundation for art, just as the old school taught. Her first move after divorce was not to sculpture after all, but to drawings and prints—and they, too, look back. A fine ink line connects the dots against an atmospheric background, much like Paul Klee in paint. Her sculpture soon after includes both light bronze and carved wood, and one could mistake the I Ching series from a distance for drawing itself. She was also not above abstracting from the world about her. One work takes its rhythms from the curve of a suspension bridge arcing over the verticals of a New York skyline.

She titled her black fins Blackbirds, and they rest on the floor—just as earlier work rests comfortably on a shelf. She has pared back David Smith, with his guardians and totems, to the elegance of Constantin Brancusi. She is also less concerned for Smith's industrial welding than for the object, which must have allowed her to work with assistants. For all her backward eye, her most memorable work dates from her seventies and eighties, when many a welder is short of strength. Nevelson's nightmares and the stifling are long gone. She can finally breathe easily, in black steel on a travertine base.

Home away from home

Is Adams's House a sculpture, a house, or a stage toward both? Its slim beams rise in parallel, as what sculpture back in the day called "drawing in space." In the work's long-term installation, outdoors at the Nassau County Museum on Long Island, sunlight picks out its spruce and Douglas fir. A beam could pass for a neon tube from Dan Flavin. An arch rests there, too, waiting for a crane to hoist it into position as the roof. This really could be a work in progress, quite as much as a construction site I had passed just that afternoon—and it, too, had barely passed the ground floor.

Drawings for the project pick out arched windows with greater finish and detail. They could belong to another house entirely, one that has been around a long time. They seem as much observed as imagined. The work itself does not recycle industrial components in the manner of Donald Judd, and they do not stick flat to the ground like metal plates for Carl Andre. It takes full advantage of its place between art and the great outdoors, like earthworks for Agnes Denes, simple wood risers for Mary Miss, or stairs for Jackie Ferrara. It could serve as a rejoinder to the old macho joke about Minimalism, that these guys could not get it up.

Those women, too, often lack for attention in a time of maximalism and anything goes. Still, they had their place in the sun, and they may yet again. The present show's works exhibited back then at the Museum of Modern Art. And all three continue the interplay between the observed past and a future under construction. Alice Adams could be disassembling tradition or Minimalism—and then reassembling it on her own terms, in wood. In each work, too, she builds on arches.

Like the dream house, Large Vault raises soaring architecture just off the floor. Title notwithstanding, it amounts to half a dozen or more vaults, depending on who is counting. Three vaulted ceilings rest side by side, each with three vaulted sides below. Arched beams stabilize and divide the top. One vault has a single curving beam, one has two beams that create three sections, and one has two crossing beams creating four. They could be alternative drafts of the whole or a single numerical progression. Windows are nowhere in sight.

Three Arches takes another view of the alternatives. Its arches reach to human heights, each in its own style. One is rounded and solid like Romanesque architecture, one pointed like Gothic, and one just halfway complete. One rests awkwardly on a small riser, while the other two seem determined to go it alone. Museum-goers can walk on work by Carl Andre or squeeze between tilted arcs from Richard Serra, but there is no passing above or beneath these ceilings. They earn the title sculpture after all.

One can pass through Proscenium, but beware. Its point of entry has a rectangular outline, like an ordinary door, and one must stoop to enter. It means interacting with a whole cast of characters, in a succession of cut wood panels to either side. A well-known critic, Michael Fried, dismissed all of Minimalism as theater, and Adams supplies the proscenium arch. Is this a play in progress, or has the curtain already descended? For her, there is always enough stability and always another possibility.

Moving away from materials

Exactly halfway through a show subtitled "Material and Motion" is a near empty room. A table set for a frugal meal nestles into a corner as if abandoned long ago. Do not, though, not try to sit down. Mona Hatoum has left the sole chair empty, but its occupant's unseen presence is not going anywhere, and her veins and flesh stare back from the center of the empty plate. The video recalls Hatoum's actual colonoscopy, but that, too, has passed. So much for materials and motion.

The title proper, "By the Way," sounds like a mere aside or a means to an end, and it returns often to assemblage, as object and act. Selections in 2021 from the museum's holdings, as "Knotted, Torn, Scattered," featured Senga Nengudi, her stockings and ropes sagging under their own weight. She is back now, and again the Guggenheim relies solely on its collection and largely on mixed-media constructions. (The museum rounded out its picture of collecting abstraction in 2022.) Materials and motion call for large work, and the present show has not two but three tower galleries. Hatoum's table is small enough for a doll's tea party, but the room itself looms larger and larger.

Still, it defies materials or motion. So does the poverty of Arte Povera in Italy. Gilberto Zorio leaves a scrap of PVC by the ceiling, while fiberglass from Piero Manzoni might have dissolved in a cloud. A motorcycle high on the wall from Mario Merz is going nowhere fast, too. Jannis Kounellis leaves a steel plate at an angle, casting its weight on sacks of coal. If you mistook them for coffee beans, you are reaching too hard for meaning.

The Guggenheim is as well. Each floor has its own theme—"On the Move," "Gargantuan Appetites," and "Material as Meaning." Yet motion and meaning are hard to articulate, leaving only the gargantuan. Xaviera Simmons sets her snapshots beneath a strange black bundle, but her faces withhold their story. Kevin Beasley cakes sneakers, mics, and speakers in resin that both hints at a lost glamour and refuses it. When Mildred Thompson assembles wood into a flat picture, she might have slammed the door in your face.

As with these three, the show does not lack for talented African American artists—but not as you might expect. David Hammons, too, questions the material presence of the artist and his work. He has used such materials as shoe polish, a flag, and a hoodie—and all appear in a larger show of "Going Dark" on the museum ramp. Here, though, he leaves only the elusive traces of his "body prints." Shinique Smith and Rashid Johnson are a closer match to the themes, with her bulging black fabric and his painting in black soap. It looks just right near the thick surfaces of a white artist, Mark Bradford.

So does the mass of leather torn from the chairs of a Cold War secretary of state, by Danh Vo, or of a rug by Mike Kelley, draped over stainless steel pots. So, too, does the more modest mass of blue jeans from Joseph Beuys or a light sail from Robert Rauschenberg, in memory of India and his home on the Gulf Coast. The first thing one sees may be the most massive of all, coarse red mountains by Maro Michalakakos. They might have erupted that very moment, covering themselves in lava. As Dehner and Adams know so well, scale alone is mass. It just may not be going anywhere fast.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Dorothy Dehner ran at Berry Campbell through June 22, 2024, Alice Adams at Zürcher through June 20. "By the Way: Material and Motion" ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through January 11, 2025.