Editor’s note: Joel Shapiro died June 14, at age 83. In the final weeks of the sculptor’s life, Max Norman interviewed him for a career-spanning profile. What follows are some of Shapiro’s reflections on his storied legacy. This article will also appear in the annual “Icons” issue of Art in America, due out in late August.

Alongside the larger sculptures in what turned out to be Joel Shapiro’s last show in New York, at Pace Gallery this past fall, there were a few roughly painted, pin-studded models about the length of your forearm, perched on rectangular white plinths. They shared a room with small insectoid bronzes, so it wasn’t clear whether these wooden models were meant to be read as documents of Shapiro’s process or as its product. But the ambiguity was perhaps the point. “It’s when you’re doing the work that transformation happens,” Shapiro told me in April. “It’s actually physically working with wood, looking at it, cutting it, changing it, altering it, until it somehow satisfies some aspect of your unknown intent.” That’s what attracted him to sculpture in the first place, “It was a fact and a form,” he said.

To walk through Shapiro’s Long Island City studio—among the works in various states of undress beneath the lofty ceilings of the ground floor, up to the menagerie of smaller pieces on the third—was to be surrounded by facts and forms. In one sunny corner a branching cactus grew in a pot atop a dolly, held up with an armature of plywood and a green pole. At first glance, I thought it might be a work I’d never seen, or some caprice Shapiro threw together and then abandoned in another of his numerous experiments. It was, in fact, just a cactus.

But I wouldn’t have been too surprised, since Shapiro’s long career was sustained by constant inquiry into the most fundamental artistic questions, a kind of sculptural Manhattan Project that left no aspect of his medium unexamined. From gargantuan to Lilliputian and back again, from austerely abstract to cheekily representational, from the floor up onto the wall or onto stilts and then into the air, from senseless just across the threshold to meaning—with unashamed sincerity and unrelenting focus, Shapiro pushed sculpture to new places.

He is best known for his sculptures of the human figure, most often fashioned from long rectangles of painted wood or cast bronze, gracefully frozen in a gravitational in-between that tickles your brain and tightens your stomach. He developed not just an unmistakable style but also a signature sculptural language, a syntax of loose connections and obscurely intuitive forms, like the recognizable lines but unfamiliar harmonies of Schoenberg’s music.

Very few of his sculptures have titles, but the Pace show was something of an exception. At its heart were three large new works made of wooden volumes covered in fast-drying casein paint, which Shapiro has used on wood and paper since the 1970s. In one corner, the more than eight feet of Splay (2024) splayed back: Two narrow blue rectangles formed a kind of body, and at its base were red and black fins resembling short legs, with a yellow sprout on top joined so loosely as to seem impossibly tangential. It was mirrored, on the other side of the room, by Wave (2024), an eight-foot-tall sculpture whose broad horizontal forms gave it a winglike quality relatively rare in Shapiro’s oeuvre.

Between the two hovered the artist’s last masterpiece, which bears the weighty name ARK (2020/2023–24). At more than 18 feet long and nearly 12 feet high, the piece is Shapiro’s biggest wooden sculpture. Yet unlike Splay or Wave, ARK rests on just three tiny points of contact with the ground, as if en pointe. Two enormous rectangles the color of dried blood spelled out its core; nestled behind one was a long narrow turquoise wedge, while two longer, narrower ones extended upward, like masts or feelers. This big sculpture has lots of room for surprises—not least a shock of orange on the internal face of one rectangle, with blue on its narrowest edge.

“The work makes you more aware of your body as your body moves around it,” sculptor Rachel Harrison told me. For the young British artist Jesse Wine, Shapiro “keeps it soft in places and hard in others. It’s almost a type of pacing.”

An ark—whether Shapiro’s ARK or the Bible’s—is a vessel of preservation, a means less of conveyance than survival. It’s an uncanny note to end a career on, but a fitting one. Roberta Smith, in a 1982 essay, once suggested that Shapiro, a bit like a latter-day Noah, “helped bring sculpture back from the brink of extinction.” In the sublime but infertile desert of Minimalism, Shapiro saw a path forward for his medium: It would take repurposing sculpture’s past, and his own.

SHAPIRO’S STUDIO IS HOUSED in a surprisingly stately former ConEd substation in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The situation is apt, and not just because Shapiro, who was born in 1941, grew up just a couple of miles away, in the left-leaning working-class neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. For one, what he described to me as his “first really radical” piece was a diminutive 1973 sculpture of nothing other than a bridge. And Shapiro himself was something of a bridge artist, spanning the Minimalism of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith and the Postmodernism that followed. That’s why he is often classified as a Post-Minimalist, a term that describes artists like Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Morris, who brought the maker’s process and psychology back into sculpture.

It took time, though, for Shapiro to figure out that he could be an artist in the first place. His mother was a microbiologist, and his father a physician who once sewed up Robert G. Thompson, chairman of the New York State Communist Party, after he was stabbed. There was art around the house (African, Indian, Indigenous), and as a kid Shapiro took classes in ceramics, drawing, and painting from a local artist. But up until his graduation from NYU, where he arrived after an abortive year at the University of Colorado Boulder, and then night classes at Queen’s College, it was assumed that Shapiro would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. “The idea of being an artist didn’t seem possible,” he told art historian Lewis Kachur in 1988, in an oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Two years in India with the Peace Corps changed that. Following in the footsteps of his sister, who had married an Indian man and lived in Bombay, Shapiro spent 1965 to 1967 teaching gardening techniques in rural areas as part of an effort, begun by Gandhi, to encourage Indians to grow their own food. Stationed in Andhra Pradesh, he traveled widely and made friends with locals and like-minded expats. He was surrounded too by sacred Indian sculpture, whose dense designs and endless variations on the human form he photographed on tours across the country. The experience “heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time,” Shapiro reflected in 2007.

Back in New York, Shapiro talked his way into the MFA program at NYU and started working in earnest. He also married Amy Snider, the founder of Pratt’s Art and Design Education department; the two had a daughter, Ivy, now an art adviser. To support the family, Shapiro worked polishing silver for a then-decent $3.25 per hour at the Jewish Museum, at the time, a radical force in New York, having mounted “Primary Structures,” the first real institutional show of Minimalism, in 1966. Brice Marden and Mel Bochner worked there as guards.

In his studio, then downtown, Shapiro went through “an idea a week.” These experiments first became public when Marcia Tucker selected a piece for the Whitney’s 1969 “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Material” show: a five-foot square of dyed nylon monofilament stapled to the wall. (After the show, Tucker wrote, the piece “becomes an art corpse set to rest in a plastic bag in a corner of the artist’s studio.”) The monofilaments, which he made for about a year and a half, “had an intensity and … a sensual aspect that was peculiar,” Shapiro told me.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he created a series of drawings (one now in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection), made only of messy grids of repeated impressions of the artist’s fingers. In 1970, for his first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Shapiro installed small wooden shelves in a straight line across two adjacent walls. (Shapiro moved to Pace in 1992.) On each shelf rested an identically proportioned rectangle of different materials—steel, plaster, gum rubber, Homasote wall board, and copper. With his fingerprint works, he had isolated the most basic gesture of drawing: mark-making. The shelf works similarly isolated the most basic gesture of sculpture: the presentation of material to be read by the viewer.

For his next show, in 1972, Shapiro produced process works like One Hand Forming (1971), a stack of sausage-shaped clay cylinders formed with one hand, and Two Hands Forming (1971), balls of clay formed with both hands arranged à la Hesse in round groups on the floor. 75 lbs. (1970), in a clear nod to Andre, juxtaposed 75 pounds of magnesium and 75 pounds of lead; the latter form was, true to its material, much smaller. Looking back, Shapiro reflected that he was “basically figuring out where something, at least for me, became more than a pile and had some real intent or purpose.”

These works shared the Minimalists’ ambition to isolate what Judd called the “specific object,” devoid of reference to anything beyond itself. Yet they bore what Judd sought to banish: the literal mark of their maker. Beneath the surface, they also reflected Shapiro’s exposure to craft in India, where he had taught locals to build ovens out of clay, and once recalled observing “cow dung patties on the wall, conic displays of pigment and spice… endless rolls of fabric. All raw material.” A 1970 photograph of Shapiro’s worktable—strewn with pieces of hammered copper, balls of clay, and stacks of river-rock-like lozenges—could easily be mistaken for a disorganized display in an anthropological museum. “His works of this period [the 1970s] exude emotions as vehement as a child’s fears combined with something akin to the austere discipline of a scientist,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1993.

It was these vehement emotions and a child’s fears that seem to have pushed Shapiro away from conceptual questions and toward an intensely personal figuration. The pieces in Shapiro’s 1973 show at Alanna Heiss’s Clocktower Gallery in New York are viscerally affecting, coming just after the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Snider the year before. The centerpiece was Bridge (1973), a simple milled cast-iron structure just 3½ inches tall. (It superseded a balsa wood version shown earlier that year in a group show at Paula Cooper.) The bridge was displayed by itself, marooned on the vast floor beneath a high ceiling. In the same show, an 11-inch-tall ladder leaned against the wall and two rough birdlike shapes, formed in clay by Shapiro’s right and left hands and then cast in bronze, rested on a shelf at waist height. The following year, again at the Clocktower, a mangled drawing mannequin splayed in one corner, right by the scuffed baseboard—a disturbing work critics immediately linked to Giacometti’s chilling bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). Around the same time, Shapiro produced a three-inch-tall chair in bronze (it “looks as if it were conceived by Gerrit Rietveld for a dollhouse designed by Plato,” Robert Pincus-Witten, who coined the term “Post-Minimalism,” once quipped) and, perhaps most iconic of all, a five-inch-tall cast-iron polygon that resembled a house.

“There were all these prohibitions about representation and anything that had reference,” Shapiro said of the art world’s attitude at the time. He didn’t care. These figures “were a record of my emotion, of my anxiety.” Indirectly, they may have reflected his sense of powerlessness; directly, of course, they represented home, and his role as creator of more than just art. “I was also building doll furniture for my daughter,” the artist remembered. “All of a sudden I’m looking at this three-inch chair on the floor and it does something spatially on the floor that I hadn’t seen. That really engaged me. It seemed like a real place to go.”

The simple fact of these sculptures’ smallness—the opposite of the maximalist scale favored by the likes of Morris, Serra, and Tony Smith—was profound. Had they been larger, they would have lost their power. “It was dragging you into this interior, almost ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stuff,” Shapiro observed. “I wanted them in your space.” These works were intimate but nonetheless impersonal, imbued with equal parts pathos and irony. “If these sculptures locate the contents of memory within a public space,” Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1976, “it is in order to show that the privacy of our memories is what is most trivial about them.”

Beginning in the mid-’70s, forms like chairs, stools, boxes, houses, birds, horses, and even coffins were rendered so elementally as to hover between figuration and abstraction. Teasing the plinth—considered, like cast iron, retrograde at the time—Shapiro mounted houses on small shelves or on tabletops. In one of the most famous iterations, from 1974, he mounted a small rectangular house, cast in bronze (and with a gently sloped roof whose angle he lifted from the helmet of Donatello’s David), on a narrow bronze shelf that protruded about two and a half feet and then dropped down at 90 degrees, a physical embodiment of the sightline—and the out-of-sightline. These pieces still exert a mysterious force, like Etruscan funerary objects or Cycladic figurines, evoking the near past of our own childhood and, somehow, childhood itself. Our desire to read these stubbornly suggestive shapes is as innate and reflexive as the desire to make sense of our inchoate feelings, to love the family that wounds us.

Some of the forms were themselves wounded: Shapiro made a series of small, hollow rectangular volumes with apertures of various sizes; most were orthogonal, but some were organic, more abrasions than openings. It was one of these that Antony Gormley saw in 1980, on a formative visit to the Panza collection in Varese, Italy. “Here was something that immediately by inference engaged your body,” he recalled to me. “They referred to shelter, the human need for habitat, but without overplaying it.” Gormley—who also spent time in India, and who made his debut at London’s Whitechapel Gallery a year after Shapiro made his in 1980—views this early work of Shapiro’s as “playing with Minimalism while making one very aware of what Minimalism has declined to engage with.” It was a “really useful irritant.”

SHAPIRO HAD FLIRTED with the human form from the beginning, with the mannequins strewn in corners. But his now instantly recognizable manner of representing bodies took root in the second half of the 1970s. In 1976 Shapiro cast in bronze what looks like a fallen bough, with a pair of limbs stemming from a slightly thicker rectangular trunk; one was bent into a kind of knee, the other extended straight. Both divide, like wishbones, into two smaller branches. That was the same year his sister died by suicide. “I was looking at trees, trying to find some image that might convey that,” he told me. The bronze tree “was very much about her.”

Around the same time, he cast in bronze a nine-inch-tall running man and, defying another Minimalist taboo, painted it in stripes of black and red—a color here reminiscent of Rodchenko’s Constructivism, which the body’s rectangular figure evokes. Experiments ensued, with mannequins posed like caryatids and with sitting, lying, and crouching figures. But he found his stride—or his balance—in 1980, with a figure made of four-by-fours straight from the lumber yard leaning forward on one “leg,” as if frozen on its way to a yoga pose, or halted mid-trip. On one “arm,” a sawmill’s stamp is still visible, like a tattoo.

In the decade that followed, Shapiro’s work was “figurative with a vengeance,” as Schjeldahl put it. Crucially, almost all of it stood vertically in space instead of lying on the floor. “Somehow the ground, the wall, the table, they became a frame,” he remembered.After working beneath the weight of so much grief in the ’70s, Shapiro’s work was literally elevated by “a kind of enthusiasm,” tending increasingly vertical. Even the floor works from the decade, which include fragmentary figures (a rectangular “torso” sometimes with just a “head”) cast in iron, or made from wood or plaster, reach up into space, or lift themselves up as far as they can. Around 1980, he began mounting small, brightly colored reliefs on the wall. By the end of the decade, he was elevating volumes on long dowels, like spider crabs, and hoisting forms on poles.

These sculptures, whatever their form, are decidedly off-kilter, “sidestepping all of the hubris that has marked all of sculpture in the Western canon,” as Gormley observed. Shapiro tapped back into sculpture’s tradition of figuration, but slantwise, making light of what might otherwise have been monumental. He drew inspiration from Degas, whose sculpture, he once said, “is so refined and elegant in his projection of form into space, whereas Rodin builds from the ground up.” And while he employed materials—beams in bronze or wood or aluminum—evocative of industrial modernity, he made all the heaviness seem light. His bronze and iron casts often preserve the grain of their wooden molds, even the traces of the saw. Metal makes for permanence, but not always perfection.

By the 1990s, Shapiro was experimenting regularly with doubling bodies, seeing how, in combination, they come even closer to abstraction. And his work scaled up with time, as he received ever more public commissions. Among the most important was Loss and Regeneration (1993), a monumental installation on the steps of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., comprising a 25-foot-tall figure that seems to plunge earthward, its head down and a long arm extended into the air, and, some 40 feet away, a nine-foot-tall house poised, like a dreidel, on one corner of its roof.

Catastrophe worked strange magic on Shapiro. Divorce, grief, a world-historical tragedy that haunted his secular Jewish upbringing—all stimulated his art. And so it was one morning as he was in a cab on his way to the Newark airport, when his second wife, painter Ellen Phelan, called to tell him that a plane had collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In the years following 9/11, Shapiro’s geometric compositions became increasingly complex and contingently joined. He began breaking up models and recombining them into dynamic and unstable forms, strung together and suspended with metal wire that had all the jumbled eloquence of rubble. (It figures that a sculptor would see the collapse of the Twin Towers a bit differently from the average New Yorker.) In the wake of that event, Shapiro “recognized—it’s a harsh thing to say—the limitation of what I was doing previously,” he said. The trauma worked to “push my work beyond a kind of representation,” to study “collapse and joining.”

His fragile, mobile-like assemblages begun in the 2000s look back to two of Shapiro’s long-standing influences, Calder and Miró, whose lightness is often subtended by darkness. But they also point to where Shapiro would go in the coming decades.

IF SHAPIRO’S FIGURES linger in the rich limbo of balance, in the 2000s, he burrowed into the density of contraction and collapse. A high point came in 20 Elements (2004–05), an 11-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide, 10-foot-long cluster of 20 brightly painted wooden rectangles, commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, that responds to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Dance (1865–69), a virtuosic academic relief originally intended to adorn the facade of the Paris Opera. (A study for the piece was on one of the models on display at Pace.) Mirroring the central, leaping figure in Dance, the heart of Shapiro’s composition is a large yellow rectangle, which he characteristically lofted at a diagonal. Responding to the dynamism of Carpeaux’s sculpture, none of the 20 elements is joined along an edge but instead seem to be magnetized to some core. This refusal to let the shape of the volume dictate its mode of connection to other shapes—a hallmark of Shapiro’s later style—is of a piece with his desire to resist the ways architecture could wind up framing, even constituting, so much of Minimalist sculpture.

Shapiro then “overwhelmed the architecture” altogether in his 2010 show at Pace, which included works like Was Blue (2010), composed of six painted rectangles of various dimensions, suspended with taut fishing wire as if in antigravity. “Of course they were dependent on the wall and floor,” Shapiro said, “but they weren’t organized around it.” In a 2016 show at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Shapiro suspended irregular polygons, including two in crimson that resembled houses, echoing a volume in a dark-blue sculpture that sat on the floor below. This work represented a “real sense of abandon,” he said. If his sculptures had always insisted on being viewed in the round, these new installations compelled the to move through them, within them—what Andre called “sculpture as place.”

“I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO DRAW,” Shapiro told me. But that’s not exactly true: He often sketched forms that eventually turned into sculptures, and even scribbled a series of unsettling etchings in the mid-’70s of couples dancing, or fighting, or both. Shapiro produced numerous drawings in charcoal and pastels, plus gouaches and woodblock prints, many of which reflect his sculptural preoccupations.

In the ’80s, he drew geometric forms in smudgy black charcoal on white paper—like blueprints for his houses, or X-rays of his stick men. (These bracing monochromatic pieces clearly left a mark on Christopher Wool, who served as Shapiro’s assistant for several years in the early ’80s. “His work is something I still think about all the time,” Wool told me.) Shapiro made blobby gouaches in bright colors around the time he started putting small, bright sculptures on the walls. He also started making collages, and collage-like geometric patterns, just as his sculptures themselves began to work more through juxtaposition than straightforward joining.

In his final years, Shapiro rapidly assembled pieces of wood using epoxy resin and one-inch pins shot out of a chunky, green-enameled pneumatic gun, made by the Italian company Omer. It was a kind of drawing in three dimensions, not so far removed from playing with blocks. “Even if it’s miserable, it’s playful,” Shapiro told me. To make ARK, for example, “I remember jamming pieces of wood into the vice, and compressing them,” he said. “I wanted layers of compression.” At some point, Shapiro’s longtime collaborator and woodworker, Ichiro Kato—who got his start crafting Donald Judd’s furniture—might translate a model into a finer maquette, which would then be translated once again when Shapiro chose to produce a piece at scale. In this iterative process, which sometimes unfolded over years, composition and contingency blended together. A sculpture might be transformed when a model got knocked over or fell apart; scrap snatched up from the floor might look like an invitation.

At the end of our meandering conversation, Shapiro and I spoke about two of his most towering predecessors, the totemic David Smith and the somewhat more puckish Anthony Caro. “I think David Smith really had to prove he was an artist in some way,” Shapiro said. “Caro not quite as much.”

I asked him if he still felt that he had something to prove. “I still think I do,” he replied. “But I think at this point I can be light-handed,” he added. “I think that’s a privilege of years.”

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The Headlines

IN MEMORIAM. Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics heir and billionaire art collector, died on Saturday at the age of 92, reports Harrison Jacobs for ARTnews. His mother was Estée Lauder, of the eponymous, multi-billion-dollar beauty company that he joined in 1958. Lauder was also passionate about art and gave several major gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, including 81 Cubist paintings, sculptures, and collages by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. His collection was estimated to be worth over $1 billion. At the time of the donation, he told the New York Times, “You can’t put together a good collection unless you are focused, disciplined, tenacious, and willing to pay more than you can possibly afford.”

IN MEMORIAM. Also in this weekend’s news, we learned of the passing of artist Joel Shapiro at the age of 83. He was acclaimed Post-Minimalist sculptor whose work explored shifts in scale and perception, while challenging Minimalism, reports Alex Greenberger for ARTnews. He had been battling acute myeloid leukemia, according to his daughter, Ivy Shapiro. Shapiro’s widely exhibited works include figural sculptures made from bronze and aluminum elements. “Though steeped in the haughty concepts that guided art-making during the 1960s and ‘70s, these sculptures are also quirky and whimsical, with limbs that appear to leap and flail,” writes Greenberger. The artist also took a different approach to the dominant Minimalism of his time by painting his wood and metal pieces in vibrant colors, gaining the attention of critics. In one memorable 2009 interview with Bomb magazine, the artist said “I’ve made big things … they’re not colossal. They could be monumental. I’d like to think that they’re not too bloated.” Asked for clarification, he said, “Bloat is a disease of sculpture.”

The Digest

The Palazzo Maffei museum in the Italian city of Verona has called on people to “respect art” after a visitor was filmed on CCTV breaking a chair covered in shimmering Swarovski crystals. The footage shows a man taking a photo of a woman pretending to sit on the artwork by Italian artist Nicola Bolla, which is known as the “Van Gogh” chair, before the man sits on it himself. The chair folds under his weight, causing him to stagger backward against a wall. The couple, who remain unidentified, then dash out of the room. [ARTnews]

The city of Osh in Kyrgyzstan has removed a 23-meter (75-foot) statue of Vladimir Lenin first erected in 1975, and thought to be the tallest of the former Soviet leader in Central Asia. In a statement, the local city hall said the decision was “common practice” intended to improve the area’s “architectural and aesthetic appearance.” The explanation has been portrayed by some media as a means of placating Russia, the country’s ally. [The Associated Press and Le Figaro]

Security guards at three London museums have won a pay raise after months of strikes. The guards employed by subcontractors will get pay raises ranging from 13 to 23 percent at the National History, Science and Victoria & Albert Museums, considered better aligned with living wages in London. [The Art Newspaper]

About 50 leaders of cultural and scientific institutions have signed a petition in Le Monde warning against the closing and/or reduction in scope of the Palais de la Découverte science museum, located alongside the Grand Palais in Paris. The institution has been closed for renovations, and its reopening repeatedly delayed amid reports of disagreements over its future. In a sign of those tensions, the president of Universcience, which oversees the Palais de la Découverte, and the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Bruno Maquart, was fired. [Le Monde and Journal des Arts]

The Kicker

REAL RUBENS OR DUD? An old debate about the authenticity of a long-lost, and believed to have been found Rubens, has just been reignited. The Guardian reports that London’s National Gallery acquired the £2.5 million ($3.4 million) Samson and Delilah in 1980, considered to have been painted by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens in 1609. But was it all a big mistake? At the time of its purchase, the painting had been lost for centuries, so its rediscovery came as a shock, and critics were quick to doubt its authenticity because of inconsistencies in style, use of pigment, and lack of signs of aging. Now, a petition has been launched to have a public debate about it, in light of a new, controversial statement made and then withdrawn by former National Gallery curator Christopher Brown. The former head of the Dutch and Flemish collections at the museum told the Guardian the painting was authentic, but he also said the National Gallery had attached a modern blockboard to the back of the painting. This would have covered important information about its authenticity. To complicate matters, earlier catalogues state the painting’s back had been glued to a blockboard sheet, “probably during the [20th] century,” and that the painting was “planed down to thickness of about 3mm and set into a new blockboard panel before it was acquired by the National Gallery … so no trace of a panel maker’s mark can be found.”  This strangely contradicts the condition report of the painting by the auction house that sold it to the museum. So who “planed down the panel,” erasing critical evidence, and why? After the Guardian asked the National Gallery for comment, Brown also changed his statement. “The National Gallery says that the backboard was applied before its acquisition. I have no reason to disbelieve them,” he said.

Joel Shapiro, an acclaimed Post-Minimalist sculptor whose work explored shifts in scale and perception, died on Saturday at 83. His death was announced on Sunday by Pace Gallery. The New York Times reported that he had been battling acute myeloid leukemia.

Shapiro’s work has been seen widely, in particular his figural sculptures made from bronze and aluminum elements, which have been seen everywhere from the United States Holocaust Museum to the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though steeped in the haughty concepts that guided art-making during the 1960s and ’70s, these sculptures are also quirky and whimsical, with limbs that appear to leap and flail.

Often, these sculptures were made first in wood and then translated to metal. Some of them were painted in vibrant colors—something that would have been anathema to Minimalism, the movement that was dominant in New York during the early 1970s, when Shapiro’s work gained the attention of critics and dealers.

Shapiro’s earliest works relied on the language of Minimalism, then subverted it. He made a series of drawings made by inking his finger and pressing the tip to a piece of paper, resulting in marks arranged to recall a Minimalist grid, except that Shapiro’s rows were irregular and unruly.

He also relied on industrial materials, another Minimalist hallmark, but his were utilized in ways that appeared to undermine conventional logic. Untitled: 75 lbs. (1970) comprises a bar of magnesium and a bar of lead, both exhibited on the floor. Though the two bars each weigh exactly 75 pounds, the one metal is far more dense than the other, so their relative sizes differ greatly, and they appear unlike.

During the ’70s, at Paula Cooper Gallery, the New York space that showed Shapiro for almost the entirety of this career, the artist exhibited objects that further surprised the eye—tiny houses in cast iron and bronze, itty-bitty chairs easily tipped over with a little kick.

“I think they insisted on their own obdurate sense of self, in spite of the space surrounding but at the same time they’re a part of it,” Shapiro told the Brooklyn Rail in 2007. Their smallness was a reaction to the monumentality of Minimalism, and their recognizable forms differentiated them from the abstract sculpture seen widely in New York at the time.

By the ’80s, Shapiro’s work had started to appear more figural, putting him on the path to creating his oversize sculptures resembling figures whose limbs are made from beams of metal. “I am interested in those moments when it appears that it is a figure and other moments when it looks like a bunch of wood stuck together,” he said.

Although Shapiro’s art expanded greatly in height, with works in a recent show at Pace Gallery in New York towering high above viewers, he seemed squeamish about the notion that he had finally made art on a monumental scale. “Yes, I’ve made big things,” Shapiro told a Bomb magazine interviewer in 2009. “They’re not colossal. They could be monumental. I’d like to think that they’re not too bloated.” Asked for clarification, he said, “bloat is a disease of sculpture.”

Joel Shapiro was born September 27, 1941, in New York. His father was an internist, and his mother a microbiologist; they raised Shapiro and his sister, Joan, in the Queens neighborhood of Sunnyside after World War II.

Shapiro attended New York University, his parents’ alma mater, with the intention of becoming a doctor himself, but, as he put it in the Brooklyn Rail interview, “the only thing I was any good at was making art.” He said that he had confirmed as much in therapy. After graduating in 1964 with a BA in liberal arts, he served in the Peace Corps from 1965 to 1967 in southern India. In the Rail Interview, Shapiro credited the experience with having “heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also, the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time.”

He then returned to NYU, this time in the graduate art program—which accepted him despite his lacking an undergraduate degree in the subject. Shapiro was at the time married to Amy Snider; they had one daughter, Ivy, and divorced in 1972. He also took work at the Jewish Museum, where he helped install exhibitions and polish silver objects in the institution’s collection.

Shapiro’s big break came in 1969 with “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” a Whitney Museum exhibition curated by Marcia Tucker that helped formalize the Post-Minimalist art movement, with a checklist that also included Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and Rafael Ferrer. Shows with Paula Cooper followed, and Shapiro featured in the inaugural 1973 exhibition of the Clocktower Gallery, which ultimately became the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, now known as MoMA PS1. In 1978 he married Ellen Phelan.

His work has been seen in some of the world’s biggest museums and galleries, among them Pace, which has represented Shapiro since 1992.

“For over 30 years, it has been my honor to represent Joel Shapiro and to count him as a close friend,” Arne Glimcher, Pace’s founder, said in a statement on Sunday. “His early sculptures expanded the possibilities of scale, and in his mature figurative sculptures, he harnessed the forces of nature themselves. With endless invention, the precariousness of balance expressed pure energy—as did Joel. I will miss him dearly.”

Save for just a few of his pieces, Shapiro never titled his art. Asked why by the Rail, he said, “I’m not much of a poet. Form is its own language.”

A host of top tier New York-based artists are opening the doors to their studios to benefit the International Fine Print Dealers Association Foundation this November.

Eleven artists, including Katherine Bradford, Leonardo Drew, Jeffrey Gibson, Rashid Johnson, Jeff Koons, Vera Lutter, Joel Mesler, Marilyn Minter, Tschabalala Self, Joel Shapiro and Mickalene Thomas, are taking part in the STUDIO VISIT benefit sale, which runs live on the IFPDA Foundation’s website from November 9 thought 19. 

In a world increasingly driven by events and experiences, selling visits to the studio of an artist that most people know only by articles and internet searches is a novel idea for a fundraiser. 

Jenny Gibbs, the executive director of the IFPDA and IFPDA Print Fair told ARTnews via email that she reached out to independent curator and publisher Sharon Coplan, who curated the selection of participating artists, because “because she has such a great track record developing projects for nonprofits like the suite of prints she produced to benefit The Metropolitan Museum of Art for their 150th anniversary. When we started talking about the benefit for the IFPDA Foundation, instead of asking galleries and artists to donate works for auction, we began brainstorming about asking them for studio visits to sell—something completely new.”

According to Coplan, once the idea came, the rest unfolded organically “since each of these artists has created prints which have been shown at the IFPDA Print Fair which is the main fundraiser for the IFPDA Foundation.”

Five spots will be available for each studio tour, with each spot priced at $1,000 per person. 

The proceeds from the sale will benefit the IFPDA Foundation’s grants programs which support curatorial internships, research, and exhibitions to promote awareness and understanding of printmaking as an artistic medium as well as gallery and printmaking internships for students from historically Black colleges and universities.

The “buy now” STUDIO VISIT sale opens on November 9.

A open letter against the mining of artistic works for training artificial intelligence (AI) tools has garnered the public support of artists Joel Shapiro, Gregory Edwards, Amoako Boafo, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Tishan Hsu, as well as photographer and painter Lynn Goldsmith.

“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” said the petition, which was released on October 22.

The artists join more than 13,000 creative professionals and dozens of organizations from various creative industries in several countries, including Björn Ulvaeus of Swedish supergroup ABBA, Nobel-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and actors Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, and Sean Astin.

The executives and organizations include Mary Engel, Founder and Executive Director, American Photography Archives Group; Isabelle Doran, CEO, The Association of Photographers; David Trust, CEO, Professional Photographers of America; and Christian Zimmermann, CEO of the Design and Artists Copyright Society.

Leonora Carrington’s son Harold Gabriel Weisz Carrington, art historian Susie Hodge, art advisor Susan Blackman and Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design professor of philosophy and aesthetics Daniel M. Feige were also signatories of the letter.

Earlier this year in April, more than 200 musicians, composers, songwriters and other artists signed an open letter penned by the Artists Rights Alliance demanding the responsible use of AI in music. “We must protect against the predatory use of AI to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights, and destroy the music ecosystem.”

And last July, more than 15,000 writers—including Jennifer Egan, Michael Pollan, Min Jin Lee, and Margaret Atwood—endorsed an open letter from the Authors Guild to prominent AI companies urging them to obtain consent, credit, and fairly compensate authors before incorporating copyrighted work into datasets used to train generative AI technologies.

The 2018 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach opened yesterday to invited guests. The day’s action saw robust sales, and there were all sorts of talked-about artworks on view, most notably a $50 million Rothko. Below a look around some of the booths at the fair and a reception for the Bass museum.

Lots of familiar names pop up in “Jew York,” the exuberant summer group show that opened at Zach Feuer and Untitled galleries last week.

Alex Katz, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Diane Arbus, Jon Kessler, Orly Genger, David Altmejd, Dustin Yellin, Mika Rottenberg, Arlene Shechet, Nicolás Guagnini, Joel Shapiro, Aura Rosenberg, Greg Goldberg, Dan Colen, and Roy Lichtenstein are just some of the 87 Members of the Tribe whose works appear in the two gallery spaces.

But there’s one that even “Jewish geography” experts won’t know:
Juston Guston.

The checklist says he’s dead, but the real fake Juston Guston is very much alive.

It’s the alias of a contemporary artist whose surname resembles the original surname of Philip Guston, the artist formerly known as Philip Goldstein. (The real Guston, meanwhile, is here with one of his sublime “Poor Richard” Nixon drawings from 1971.)

The new Guston appropriated his name from one Jewish master, the base for his mixed-media work from another. His contribution to the show, The Disquieting Duck, is a reproduction of The Birthday, a 1915 Chagall in MoMA’s collection that’s one of the romantic touchstones of early modernism. The floating, kissing lovers are still here, but they’re overpainted with a large cartoonish yellow duck.

Why a duck?

The title, the method, and the duck were taken from a series that Danish artist Asger Jorn made with thrift-store paintings in the ‘60s, Juston Guston explained in an email.

There’s no Groucho in “Jew York,” but his famous comment about not wanting to join a club that would have people like him as a member comes to mind, because five or so artists, according to Feuer, declined to be in the show.

Luis Camnitzer, who was born in Germany and raised in Uruguay, was among the unbelievers. He thought a show of artists with nothing in common except their Judaism was “tinged by an aroma of weird fundamentalism.” But he worried that if he rejected the invitation, he was rejecting his Jewish identity.

So he sent a letter explaining his reasons, and that’s his piece in “Jew York.”

“Jew York” doesn’t pretend to offer a common thread uniting the artists besides their ethnicity. Part of the fun is teasing out the interconnections—that’s what Jewish Geography is all about.

Anyway, its random diversity is kind of the point, along with the Yiddishe humor of its press release and its title’s brash pun. In the past this whole enterprise would have been considered “Too Jewish”—say around 1996, when Norman Kleeblatt staged “Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities” at New York’s Jewish Museum. Cary Leibowitz, represented here by a little text piece titled Hi Jewboy Hi, is one of the stereotype-busting “Too Jewish” artists who turn up in “Jew York,” along with Deborah Kass, Elaine Reichek, Hannah Wilke, and Ilene Segalove.

They share the space with other mini-schools of Jewish artists: the haimische feminists (Eleanor Antin, Joyce Kozloff), classic Conceptualists (Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner), identity-politics tricksters (Tamy Ben-Tor, Jamie Sneider, with her naughty/nice Jewish-pinup-girl calendar), to name a few. Also present is Jennifer Rubell, who installed a large brown leather sofa in the middle of the small, white-box space.

It’s called My Shrink’s Couch, and no, you can’t lie down on it.

Unexpectedly, the figure who is lying down here is the fiddler from Vitebsk, who has finally climbed down from the roof in Chagall’s 1979 painting Le Peintre au Chevalet à Saint-Paul. (Neither this nor the other “Chagall” in “Jew York,” Juston Guston’s, have anything to do with the artist’s actual New York period, a dark era after he fled the Nazis that is the subject of a Jewish Museum show this fall.)

A young Anne Frank is here, reimagined in a modern-day setting by Keith Mayerson, and so is Albert Speer, in Matthew Weinstein’s Thomas Kinkade Inside the Third Reich, from the series of rectified library catalogue cards he’ll show at Carolina Nitsch this fall.
There’s Sandy Koufax, the Dodger who became a Jewish hero by sitting out the World Series when it fell on Yom Kippur, in a Warholesque rendering by Kass.

Of course Barbra is present—in some of Kass’s “Jewish Jackies,” and in an Erica Baum photo, and Woody Allen, via Sara Greenberg Rafferty, and Bob Dylan, a shape-shifter in the religion department whose original name (like Guston’s) was too Jewish.

Jason Fox copied Milton Glaser’s famous portrait of the former Robert Zimmerman (itself inspired by Duchamp), and put the head on a stick.

There are abstractions, too, including a luminous, mystical Peter Halley titled Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. Rochelle Feinstein sent in a sensuous white blob on linen that looks like it’s trying to resolve itself into language. Dated 1994, it used to be called Geography. For this show, she popped the word Jewish in front. So now it’s called (jewish) Geography (2013). That sums it up.

Image on home page: Deborah Kass, Four Barbras (detail), 1992, silkscreen on canvas. Photo: Kendall Mills. Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York.

It can be seen and felt in New York galleries, on the walls of major art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, watching a Trisha Brown performance on Chelsea’s High Line, and even viewed on TV—take the HBO production Cinema Verite, about the world’s first reality show, An American Family. There’s a notable nostalgia in the air for ’70s art.

From Jennifer Bartlett’s multiplate, 153-foot-long Rhapsody (1976), shown at MoMA this past summer, to a traveling Lynda Benglis retrospective to the increasing pervasiveness of performance art (the term itself came of age in the ’70s), the pluralist decade is having a major moment. New York’s Forum Gallery even mounted a summer exhibition called “That Seventies Show,” with works by artists ranging from Richard Anuszkiewicz to Robert Cottingham, Tom Wesselmann, and Robert Motherwell. And at Dia Beacon, “Circa 1971,” a collection of 20 moving-image pieces made in the ’70s, is being presented through 2012.

The ’70s fest extends well beyond New York. In Los Angeles, the Getty Foundation has launched “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980,” which runs through April. It’s a massive West Coast cultural program involving museums, educational institutions, and galleries that examines the L.A. art scene, including work from the ’70s, in all its permutations. At the same time the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is focusing on the countercultural movement in “West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977,” opening November 10.

What is it about the era that seems so appealing to contemporary curators and their audiences? After all, New York was in the middle of a major recession—who can forget the Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”? The urban landscape was not only pregentrified but was also downright dangerous. And the explosion of unruly art virtually defied categorization.

Think of Vito Acconci’s 1971 Seedbed, performed at the Sonnabend Gallery, then in SoHo, where the artist masturbated under a wooden platform, or West Coast artist Chris Burden’s arrangement to have himself shot in the arm; Benglis’s 1974 advertisement in Artforum, in which she is naked except for a giant, strategically placed dildo, or her dramatic, vibrantly pigmented urethane pours on gallery floors; Martha Rosler’s famous performance video Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975); and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79).

It is exactly that exuberance and gravitas-defying diversity that still resonates and inspires. Pace Gallery in New York recently showed “Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the ’70s”; Bartlett’s newly wrought throwback to her ’70s work, Recitative (2009–10); the sculpture of Joel Shapiro; and a group exhibition, “Soft Machines,” that perfectly illustrated the pluralist point. Says Douglas Baxter, a president of Pace, “I think people are very nostalgic for the lack of cynicism in ’70s art, not that it didn’t deal in strategies. There weren’t even art movements—or it was so open-ended it didn’t look like movements. I think younger artists are admiring and even jealous of that generation.”

It was a generation that thumbed its nose at the art establishment, from the materials the artists utilized to the parameters they pushed. “Painting was still the bête noire and Minimalism the dying behemoth,” as Dave Hickey puts it in a catalogue essay for the traveling Benglis retrospective, which originated at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism had their day. It was time for something new. Something conceptual, something post-minimalist, something fearlessly feminist—or all of the above, as long as it couldn’t be easily labeled or commodified. If anything unified this crucible of multimedia multitasking, it seemed to be an overarching idea, as Roberta Smith put it in her New York Times review of the Benglis show, of “making art that didn’t look like art.” Or at least like any of the art that had preceded it.

Artists from all over the country flocked to New York in the ’70s to live in its cheap lofts and to show in its new breed of art spaces—from the Kitchen to the Clocktower Gallery to Artists Space to A.I.R., the first feminist art gallery. In 1977, Marcia Tucker even founded a new museum—appropriately enough called the New Museum—whose mission, as idealistic as the time itself, was to show the kind of work excluded from the rest of the art world.

Recalls Bartlett, “I think that time was sort of like the music in the ’60s and ’50s, where there was just a huge personal aspect and singular vision of what art was on the part of each artist. You had Barry Le Va and Dennis Oppenheim and Vito Acconci. There was just absolutely a huge number of people doing incredibly mad things that were very unbusinesslike. Nothing was about art business, because there wasn’t much,” Bartlett continues. “It was the era of what I call push-pin art, where you made work on graph paper and then pinned it up with push pins. So many people blended all different things together. I think of Joan Jonas in that light, and certainly Bob Wilson. I think it was a very heady time. There were so many alternatives.”

Whether it’s the work of Keith Sonnier and Joe Zucker (both of whom had shows in 2010 at Mary Boone Gallery in New York) or the prototypes of “Rowing Needles” (1970) by Buckminster Fuller, on view at Meulensteen in a recent show that paired Fuller’s streamlined pieces with the lumpy “Floor Cushions” of the 33-year-old artist-designer Eli Levenstein, or the new crop of alternative spaces (like the intimate and racy Honey Space for site-specific art, on 11th Avenue), a ’70s esthetic rules. Crowds gathered to take in Trisha Brown’s pioneering Roof Piece (1971), a chain of improvised movements that spreads from one dancer—and rooftop—to another, when it was performed this past June at the southern end of the High Line, the reclaimed railroad track turned park in Chelsea.

“The ’70s was a big bang,” says RoseLee Goldberg, the performance-art visionary and former Kitchen curator who in 2005 launched the highly successful performance-art biennial Performa, now beginning its fourth iteration. “Everything went flying. I think there is an enormous interest among the younger generation today in conceptual art—and its tangible flip side, performance. I think it’s intriguing because it’s a kind of conceptual art without the moral imperatives of the conceptual artists—the whole anti-commodity idea. Younger artists are interested in the intellectual poetry of conceptualism,” she explains. “It’s more about the elegance of ideas; it doesn’t have the political or confrontational edge.”

Not surprisingly, the classic figures of the ’70s are enjoying a kind of renaissance. At Paula Cooper Gallery, this past summer, there was an installation of Sol LeWitt’s meticulously rendered Wall Drawing #122 (1972). The piece looks a bit like a Minimalist blueprint run amok and consists of 150 permutations of two lines crossing. According to the wall text (which is part of the full title) the work contains “all combinations of lines placed at random, using arcs from corners and sides, straight, not straight and broken lines.” Meanwhile, down at City Hall Park, through December 2, there’s a retrospective of LeWitt’s sculptural work from 1965 to 2006.

At MoMA, visitors wandered through the recent exhibition “Contemporary Art from the Collections,” which included works from 1970 to the 2000s. Its two and a half rooms devoted to the ’70s were startling for their range, beginning with Robert Rauschenberg’s prescient Currents (1970), which consists of 60 feet of press clippings, including headlines about corruption, war, gay rights, and other issues. Gilbert & George’s To Be With Art is All We Ask . . . (1970) provided a wall-size, handwritten manifesto of the artists’ love affair with beauty, while Gordon Matta-Clark’s deconstructed building, Bingo (1974), and George Maciunas’s cabinet full of consumer packaging represented another part of the spectrum. There was also Acconci’s Seedbed video, and some photographic self-portraits made by a young Robert Mapplethorpe. MoMA lately added to its conceptual-art holdings works from the Daled Collection of American and European Conceptual Art and the Seth Siegelaub Collection, including pieces by Acconci and Daniel Buren.

At the Venice Biennale the exhibition “Venice in Venice,” curated by Tim Nye and Jacqueline Miro of the Nyehaus gallery in New York, included 71 objects from the ’60s to the present. They were installed on two floors of a palazzo and included, in the chapel, a 1974 coffin-inspired mixed-media piece by West Coast artists Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz.

Last year the Whitney mounted “Off the Wall,” a series that included 30 performative actions—works by Acconci, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, and Yoko Ono—and a second installment, “Seven Works by Trisha Brown.” For Donna De Salvo, the museum’s chief curator, the ’70s was a time of “the city as a stage: Trisha Brown doing rooftops, Richard Serra doing pieces in the street, Joan Jonas filming in the streets. The city was on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy. People were making a lot of work that had no market value. There was a kind of freedom because there was nothing to lose. I think it continues to exert a fascination amongst younger artists. You could see it when we did our Dan Graham and Robert Smithson shows. And the classical figures of importance are finally in many ways being recognized.”

As Judy Chicago, whose work has received much recent attention, sees it, “I think perhaps there is currently a looking back, because art has been taken over by commodification. So much contemporary work is a rehash of earlier work—without either the substance or the content. Maybe people are looking back to a time when art had more substance. In the intervening years,” she adds, “disillusionment, irony, and money have crept in. And that was not there in the ’70s. It wasn’t about making money; it wasn’t about careerism. It was about making art that mattered. We believed we could actually impact the world.”

There is also the natural cycle of art history, as MoMA curator Laura Hoptman (who co-organized the Benglis retrospective at the New Museum) points out. “Every generation looks back on the generation that is approximately 30 years their senior. It’s the generation that they can’t remember. Joan Semmel is now being understood in reference to the feminist movement. The Alice Neel estate is at the same gallery [David Zwirner in New York] as Chris Ofili. The contemporary collectors who cut their teeth on younger artists are going back to wonderful figurative painters like Neel. And then there’s Benglis. If you look at the work of these artists, the resonance for today comes alive and catches fire. It becomes a living, breathing, relevant thing, because we have the tools to understand it.” Adds John Cheim, whose gallery, Cheim & Read, represents Benglis, “When something becomes solid history it becomes desirable to both the market and the museum.”

With her retrospective at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art recently ended, Benglis reflects, “You know, the reason things are coming back is that they never left. The ’70s was a kind of rich time, where individuals seemed to come forth and develop ideas that were not only personal to themselves, but they were always also considering some aspect of what was the classic mainstream, which was basically abstraction. So there were many kinds of comments on various ideas that occurred in the ’70s. Now people are kind of looking back at the last century at things that were handmade, but also looking toward something that is totally digital, looking at a different form of communication. What we have today,” she concludes, “is also this same type of multiplicity.”

Phoebe Hoban is a New York­–based writer who covers art and culture for a variety of publications. Her biography: Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty was published by St. Martin’s Press last December.

Sculptor Joel Shapiro has collaborated with hundreds of curators, worked with dozens of gallerists, and shaken hands with thousands of collectors in his 35-year career. But he cites Mr. Henriques of Bayside High School in Queens, New York, as one of his greatest influences.

In “my first high school art class, I got a D,” confesses Shapiro, who now has works in over 80 public collections. “The next class I took, I got an A+.” It was Mr. Henriques who awarded him that coveted grade and, more important, allowed him to make sculpture in what was officially a painting class. Mr. Henriques communicated to the young artist that it was his passion for what he was making that counted, not satisfying the official curriculum. As with many talented teachers who have helped students find their vocations, Mr. Henriques taught Shapiro to see himself as an artist.

Though the teaching of art has changed dramatically over the centuries, relationships between young artists and their masters and mentors have retained their power to transform. The right guidance along the way—whether in grade school or graduate school—can make all the difference in an artist’s self-confidence, his professional development, and in the contacts and opportunities that await him.

For centuries, novice artists worked alongside masters, learning such techniques as heating rabbit-skin glue, preparing painting supports, and mixing paint by hand from ingredients like colored clay or stones. By the 19th century, the art academy had supplanted the apprentice system with a formal curriculum, and individual artists had begun capitalizing on their reputations to establish their own schools. Just as students today aspire to situate themselves in the orbits of renowned artist-professors, young 19th-century hopefuls like Mary Cassatt, who studied in Paris under Jean-Louis Gérôme, vied to secure spots in the ateliers of artists they admired.<br.
This period also saw the birth of the art academy in the United States. At the Art Students League, founded in 1875, and, later, at the New York School of Art (founded as the Chase School in 1896; now Parsons The New School for Design), charismatic teachers like William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri trained a roster of students that included George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent.

But by the late 20th century, most American artists were studying within the university system. As art education was retrofitted onto an existing structure of course requirements, accredited liberal-arts programs, and rigid time schedules, the focus changed from teaching technical proficiency to creating professional artists who would understand the conceptual, the contextual, and the commercial aspects of a career in art. Under this new system, critiques—referred to as “crits”—have supplanted detailed technical instruction in many classrooms, and artist-teachers are encouraged to develop students’ imaginations rather than their skills. “I’m here to teach you to think—and to see,” explained Josef Albers to his Yale University pupils, including Eva Hesse, in the 1950s.

Frederick Horowitz, a student of Albers’s and a longtime instructor himself, remembers how the legendary German Bauhaus painter would troll his Yale classroom—always in jacket and tie—“pocketing all the erasers he could find.” Albers urged students to capitalize on their mistakes, reworking them and coming up with new—if imperfect—solutions to visual problems. Horowitz, whose book with Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes: The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale comes out this month from Phaidon, still recalls—with pride and wonder—the day his professor snatched up a drawing he had done so forcefully that he had torn the paper. “I thought he’d be upset, but he pinned it to the bulletin board. ‘This boy’s really getting into it,’” he remembers Albers saying.

And like many of Albers’s former students, Horowitz has used the fabled imagination-building Yale exercises—such as drawing the spaces between bottles in a still life or making a composition by arranging matchsticks on a sheet of paper—in his own classes at Washtenaw Community College and at the University of Michigan, both in Ann Arbor. In doing so, he had to warn students about the ambiguity of the assignments, the need to search for multiple answers. “In evaluations, my students would say, ‘He doesn’t tell us what to do.’ So I decided I needed to prepare them, to say that this is a class in which they need to think for themselves.” As in so many art curriculums today, the central part of this approach is the crit—in which the students’ exercises are posted and discussed by the class as a whole—a technique Albers used to convey the notion that “there could be many answers to any one question.”

Many artists adopt their favorite instructor’s concepts or teaching techniques when they later lead their own classes. At age 14, sculptor Jessica Stockholder took drawing lessons from Mowry Baden, a family friend who taught at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. During her college years, she transferred there to study painting with Baden; now she classifies him as “one of the great teachers. He had a great way of articulating how things visual functioned,” she says, noting that he could describe precisely what he responded to in a painting. Today, as head of Yale’s sculpture department, Stockholder attempts to do the same with her own pupils: “What I try to do for students is to find words for what they’re doing.”

As an undergraduate at Wayne State University in Detroit in the late 1960s, Ellen Phelan studied with realist painter Robert Wilbert, who, like Albers, roamed the studio, often stopping behind her to observe what she was making. He helped her “figure out how the spatial relationships worked, why one painting was better than others,” she says. Phelan also remembers him showing slides and talking “about paintings as paintings, rather than in an art-historical way.” This practice of “opening kids up to learning from physical objects” is one she introduced into her own classrooms at Harvard University, where she chaired the visual and environmental studies department from 1995 to 2001. She encouraged students to analyze what pigments an artist might have used, or how a certain color was mixed. “I had a student of art history who was working at the university’s Fogg Art Museum, who thanked me,” she says. “He told me, ‘I will never look at painting the same way again.’”

Especially appreciated by many artists is a teacher’s ability to see students as individuals and to tailor their teaching to different needs. As James Elkins, chair of the art history, theory, and criticism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has observed, “In art instruction, no two people need the same thing.” Painter Will Barnet has taught at Yale and in New York at the Birch Wathen School, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Art Students League. He sees personalized instruction as his central challenge in teaching students ranging from children to “highly developed” artists like Robert Motherwell, who studied with him at the League. At Cooper Union in the 1950s, Barnet recalls being impressed by a young student who was “very modest and had her own ideas. She was a very devoted student.” For her, Barnet explained, “My teaching was more about respecting those ideas.” Her name? Eva Hesse.

Many artists insist that a teacher’s modeling of a life in art was as important to their development as formal instruction. Legendary anatomy instructor Robert Beverly Hale explained the principles of chiaroscuro, preached observation, and taught his students at the League to reduce forms in nature to cylinders, cubes, or spheres—but he also loved to recount his experiences as a practicing artist. “Coming from a prominent Boston family, and with a mother who was very into art, he always had very interesting stories about his early years in Europe,” recalls Richard Tsao, who was a student of his in the late 1970s. “He would recall fondly that he played chess with Duchamp or met Matisse, or that he was a neighbor of Pollock’s out in the Springs” in East Hampton, New York. Students likened this storytelling time from the gracious older man to a fireside chat.

When painter James Siena opted to move to New York rather than attend graduate school after finishing his B.F.A. at Cornell University, he found plenty of mentors in the local art community. He was impressed by the “very independent, visionary spirit” of Alan Saret, who took him to the scrap yard and taught him about working with metal. Chuck Close helped him understand “very obvious stuff” like how to approach a relationship with a gallery (Close likened it to a “conversation”) and how to maximize earnings from day jobs to spend more time painting.

The legendary Yale graduate classes of 1963 and 1964, which included Close, Rackstraw Downes, Janet Fish, Nancy Graves, and Richard Serra, were not only influenced by full-time faculty like Bernard Chaet, Louis Finkelstein, and Neil Welliver, but also by visiting professors, says Irving Sandler, author of the recently published From Avant Garde to Pluralism: An On-The-Spot History (Hard Press Editions). Fairfield Porter, for example, had an enormous impact on the work of Downes, who in 1993 published a collection of his former professor’s critical reviews and art writings. Such visiting teachers as Al Held and Philip Pearlstein “brought news of New York, news of the profession,” says Sandler. “They became role models because they were successful artists.”

New York–based painter Kathryn McAuliffe, who grew up in Seattle and attended the University of Washington in the early 1970s, says that studying with the late Jacob Lawrence “was an epiphany for me.” Lawrence, the first African American artist to be shown at a major commercial gallery, “was a dignified and authentic messenger from the larger world. He painted not out of choice, but because he had to.” She still remembers his directive to his students: “You must never pick up your paintbrush unless your heart is fully attached to it.”

Asked to name the teacher who most influenced him, Siena quickly cites Mary Croston, an after-school art instructor who taught him as a teenager. Croston treated her young students as “real” artists, says Siena, introducing them to such tools as charcoal and graphite and coaching them in figure drawing. “She just taught the basics; that was very influential,” he says of those classes in the “art hut” behind Croston’s house in Stanford, California. Siena also remembers being “very moved” by the late Peter Kahn, who taught the history of techniques at Cornell. According to Siena, “He was a marvelous Renaissance man” who taught his students such skills as determining whether paper is archival quality and making ink out of toast crumbs and saliva.

Whether the artist-mentor relationship is formed in the backyard, scrap yard, or schoolyard, very often it can turn into a lifelong friendship. To Barnet, Stuart Davis—his instructor at the Art Students League in the early 1930s—was “more a philosopher than a teacher; he became a close friend.” So did many of Barnet’s own students: James Rosenquist “just sent me flowers for my birthday,” says the 95-year-old artist, and “students I had 50 years ago still write to me.”

Sometimes it is not years but a mere moment that can make all the difference. Portland, Oregon–based printmaker and painter Martha Pfanschmidt’s life in art was launched by a junior high school teacher whose name she can’t remember—a “laid-back, quiet man,” she says. She vividly recalls the day he showed her a tiny red spider climbing a wall in drawing class. “I had never stopped long enough to observe such tiny things, and I saw the benefit of that,” says Pfanschmidt. “At that moment I understood that to be an artist involved looking closely and spending time observing. He inspired me to slow down.”

Growing up in Manhattan, conceptual artist, designer, and author Edwin Schlossberg was lucky enough to have Barnet as a junior high school teacher. “One day the assignment was to draw the schoolyard,” Schlossberg remembers. At that time Birch Wathen School was housed in “five brownstones on the Upper West Side, so I drew them, and I mixed up all the locations of things to make an image that I liked. He came over to my table and looked at it for a long time and then said, ‘How did you decide to mix up the parts and put them back together?’ I said that I had not decided—that was how they looked to me. This huge smile crawled across his face, and he said, ‘Don’t ever stop looking your way.’”

Gail Gregg is an artist and writer based in New York City.

There isn’t much in contemporary life to encourage anyone to think small. This is the era of the Hummer, the McMansion, and the 10,000-square-foot apartment. Even the bagel has been affected, swelling from a hard, palm-sized ring to a puffed-out, chewy blob. What can artists do but reflect and respond in kind?

In recent years, photography has distinguished itself partly by gigantism, and drawings have consumed entire walls. By assuming the scale of museums, commercial galleries effectively equate the intimate with the insignificant, motivating artists to grow their work to suit and compelling institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty, and Tate Modern to build ever larger, whatever the cost.

Sculpture has not merely kept pace with this growth but has led the way—at least since the 1960s, which brought us such macro-minded Minimalists as Donald Judd and Tony Smith; massive Earthworks like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah (1970) and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) in the Nevada desert; and Christo’s 1976 California project, Running Fence. Mary Ceruti, director of the SculptureCenter in New York’s Long Island City, puts it most succinctly: “In sculpture,” she says, “the whole idea of small is anti-modern.” All the same, a variety of sculptors are devoting some portion of their creative lives to working in the land of the wee.

Take the process-oriented Tom Friedman. His materials are not just small—they’re trifling. He has coaxed beautiful sculpture out of such things as eraser shavings, pillow stuffing, and plastic cups; once he carved his portrait into an aspirin tablet. Recently he made a Styrofoam figure that is 12 feet tall, but he paired it with another that topped out at only four inches.

Friedman describes his largest work as “a wall piece covered with tiny white Styrofoam balls that you don’t really see. You only see the dots, but you look for the edges and it broadens your sense of space.” That quality is not peculiar to Friedman’s art. It is the nature of much small-scale sculpture to disorient the viewer, inducing a Gulliver-like self-consciousness and a sense of having lost one’s way. In other words, by focusing the viewer’s attention on the space around it, an artwork’s diminution of scale can actually give the piece greater resonance.

George Stoll, a Los Angeles artist, works small partly because it gives him more control over the process. In the past, he has made uncanny replicas of floral-printed toilet paper in hand-embossed silk, richly colored Tupperware vessels in beeswax, and trompe l’oeil painted balsa-wood kitchen sponges. “I’m attracted to the sensuality of the handmade object,” he says. “I’m not interested so much in the craft as the presence.” Nevertheless, Stoll also wants the evidence of his hand to show. “When something is really refined in its manufacture,” he says, “it kind of loses its spirit.”

Stoll works solidly in the camp of Pop conceptualism, best exemplified by his “Holiday” series, on view in a show opening on the 27th of this month at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado. It includes embroidered organza “porch flags,” streamers made of plaster, pearls, and nail polish, and encaustic versions of dime-store Halloween masks. Taken together they serve as both a commentary on, and amused appreciation of, the way Americans celebrate holidays. “If any of my works were bigger, they would look the same from far away,” Stoll admits. “But they wouldn’t be the same.”

Stoll’s sculpture may be small next to most artists’, but it’s actually life-size. Richard Pettibone, on the other hand, has spent decades making minuscule reproductions of works by Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. If made to scale, his sculptures would be no more than clones.

Several recent group exhibitions have helped to focus attention on work of human scale or smaller. A magnifying glass certainly would have come in handy for a 1999 show at the Laguna Art Museum titled “At the Threshold of the Visible: Minuscule and Small-Scale Art, 1964–1996.” A historical survey organized by Ralph Rugoff, it included an image of Mount Ararat carved on a grain of rice by Hagop Sandaldjian (creator of microminiatures for the Jurassic Museum of Technology in Los Angeles), chewing-gum sculptures by Hannah Wilke, and Michael Ross’s thimbleful of dust. Rugoff says, “It intrigued me that you could walk in a room and think there was nothing there, unless you got more involved. It’s art that exists only in relation to everything else around it.”

Curator Jessica Hough’s “Model World,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2002, focused on miniature environments, such as Rob de Mar’s minuscule alpine waterfall and Charles Simonds’s interlacing towers constructed out of impossibly tiny “smears” of handmade bricks. Viewers definitely needed a guide at “None of the Above,” curated by the artist John Armleder at Manhattan’s Swiss Institute last year. The gallery appeared to be empty; hidden in plain sight were nearly 50 artworks, from a blip of rubberized horsehair to a few lone polyurethane peanuts.

Historically, sculpture has tended to be heroic: think of Michelangelo and Rodin, of Maillol and Moore, or even of Jeff Koons and his flowering Puppy. Richard Serra, Nancy Rubins, Claes Oldenburg, and Mark di Suvero are among this country’s best-known contemporary sculptors, and all of them are known for work of outsize proportions. Other artists, however, have built big careers on very small art, with distinct consequences for sculpture today.

In the early 1970s, when sculpture was ruled by modernist monuments and Minimalist hulks, Joel Shapiro caused a sensation when he placed three-inch-high bronze or cast-iron domestic objects—a chair, a dollhouse, a coffin, a bird—on the floor of Paula Cooper’s SoHo gallery. “Shapiro is the patron saint of small,” says Tom Finkelpearl, director of the Queens Museum of Art, home to a 1:1200 scale model of the entire city of New York. “He was the anti-Oldenburg, taking big things and making them little.”

Better known today for tall, blocky, figural bronzes, Shapiro was only doing what most sculptors do: exploring the effect of form on space. And, he says, “I didn’t think it had to be big to do that.” His child-size chairs and houses were recognizable archetypes that projected both vulnerability and authority. They were at once seductive and impregnable. While they could almost disappear within a space, they could dominate it as well.

Shapiro explains, “If I made a table large, it would just be a table. If I put it on a base, that would remove it from the actual world, so it wouldn’t have to function in the space around it. It would be another precious object. But by putting it on the floor or extending it from the wall in an architectural setting, it became a discourse on space or scale. If a sculpture isn’t doing anything to alter the space around it,” he concludes, “it isn’t interesting.”

In his extremely modest, nearly invisible art, Richard Tuttle tackles the same issue head-on. By cutting what he calls “crummy materials” such as wire, plywood, and cloth into small, sad, irregular shapes and insinuating them into walls or attaching them just above the floor or below the ceiling, he creates works of great deliberation but negligible craft, impossible to apprehend apart from their surrounding environments.

“I was interested in the image as a reference to another world,” says Shapiro. “Richard’s work never had any such reference. It was more about discovery.” Tuttle’s 3rd Rope Piece (1974), for example, is a three-inch bit of cord nailed to a wall three feet above the floor, in the manner of an insect specimen. The work involves not just the rope, the nail, and the shadow it casts, but also the volume of space around it, thus immersing a willing viewer in the very act of seeing. As Madeline Grynsztejn, curator of the retrospective “Richard Tuttle: The Presence of Simple Things,” currently at the Whitney Museum (through February 5), has said, “He really does flirt with nothingness.”

Finkelpearl, a former director of New York City’s Percent for Art program, points to a similar trend toward unobtrusiveness in public art. For that, he credits the debacle over Serra’s Tilted Arc, which was removed from Manhattan’s Federal Plaza in 1989 after a ten-year lawsuit. “There was a reaction against the monumentalism of the Serra,” which led to “a more integrated approach,” says Finkelpearl. He mentions the goofy, money-grubbing bronze dwarves by Tom Otterness installed in a park near the World Financial Center in New York. “They’re whimsical,” Finkelpearl admits, “but they’re also a fairly readable critique of capitalist enterprise.”

Simonds, master of the unfired clay miniature, may have made the most invisible public art in the most visible locations, placing the architectural “remains” of an invented civilization of “little people” on the windowsills of buildings all over the world. His three-part Dwelling has been on view at the Whitney Museum since 1981, permanently installed in the museum’s stairwell, and on the second-story windowsill and the chimney of a building across the street.

Some of Simonds’s tableaux are situated on pedestals or in holes that the artist has cut into walls. In 1983, one of his pieces grew large enough for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum. For the most part, however, his sculptures have stayed within the scale of his own body. Yet the size of his work is more a byproduct of his creative process than its starting point. “When I’m making these dwellings,” he says, “I don’t actually think in terms of scale. I’m more in its space than the one around it, so in a way, to me it seems full scale: it’s a fantasy place and I’m walking around in it.”

In fact, there are many reasons for a sculptor today to favor the domestic scale over the monumental. One is real estate: artists who cannot afford studios outside their apartments, or who simply prefer to work at home, only have room to do so much. Cynics may also point to the influence of a market that prizes the collectible over the colossal—few collectors can accommodate a Serra-size work—though bigger sculpture generally commands bigger prices. Technology can also exert an influence; the digital revolution and the invention of new materials have made not just small but infinitesimal sculpture possible.

Karin Sander, a contemporary German conceptualist, has produced eerily realistic, Thumbelina-size versions of actual people with the help of a laser scanner, a machine used for making industrial prototypes, and an airbrush. Chris Caccamise makes painted-cardboard models of used consumer products (a squeezed tube of toothpaste is one) as well as happy rainbows, clouds, and other items more usually associated with nursery decor. He also seeks out subject matter in the history of art. For an exhibition last month at Brooklyn’s Sixtyseven Gallery, Caccamise made a tiny replica of a Tony Smith L-shape work, adding bright color. “It’s an exact-scale copy,” he says, “but it looks more like a house.” Caccamise, who works for Matthew Marks Gallery, is not the least bit interested in graduating to large-scale sculpture. “I like the idea that I’m making something perfectly collectible that is small and precious,” he says. “It’s kind of an ideal commodity.”

Of course, many artists create or assemble small objects as components of large sculptural installations, another kind of endeavor. Evan Holloway, based in Los Angeles, works somewhere in between, skewering sickly pink or yellow synthetic-plaster heads the size of lollipops on steel rods or incorporating them into small mechanized sculptures. His work is a wry, anarchic, and often unsettling reflection of a society with a self-destructive gene.

Overall, Ceruti has observed a move away from the Minimalists’ rigid formalism to a more fragile or ephemeral conceptualism. “The younger generation is definitely looking more toward Richard Tuttle than Donald Judd,” she notes.

“Perfectionism makes my hair stand on end,” says Nancy Shaver, who has a predilection for the small, the cheap, and the accessible. Working out of her antiques shop in Hudson, New York, she refashions decrepit wooden boxes into wall reliefs that measure less than 6 by 12 inches and enlivens them with roughly geometric, abstract paintings. For Shaver, this small, unassuming form has proved limitless. “I like the idea that these pieces exist somewhere between sculpture, painting, and drawing,” she says. “They also command space disproportionate to their size, with room enough for all the things I’m interested in.”

For Kiki Smith, who is known for sculpture that evokes the conditions of the human body (particularly the female body), “small things are what last. Big things tend to be taken apart or recycled, as in war, when bronze and metal is melted down.” She points out that we relate to the world more readily through small objects we handle than large ones we can’t pick up. Smith, whose work is the subject of a traveling retrospective now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January, does not limit herself to any particular material, scale, or even medium. “Most of nature exists in things we don’t see,” she says, “and I make decisions based on the real world. Essentially, I work at my kitchen table.”

John Newman, too, prefers to work at a table. Until the late 1980s, when he started traveling in Africa, India, and Asia and meeting local craftsmen, Newman made large metal sculpture and masklike wall reliefs. “I realized that intimacy was something we hadn’t seen in New York in a long time,” he says. “So I started working at my desk. I wanted to make things without trucks and cranes—that were lightweight and not toxic. That was the practical side of things.”

Newman defines a small-scale object as “an imaginative idea about space.” He mixes materials like glass and string or paper and stone, achieving a balance of volume, weight, and form that allows his lyrical abstractions to stand alone, but would be impossible to achieve at any larger scale.

For other artists, the table is both workbench and pedestal. Vincent Fecteau, based in San Francisco, exhibits his foamcore-and-papier-mí¢ché collage works on the same kind of tables he keeps in his studio. “That way they can interact with each other,” he says. “I’m not that interested in installation, but you have to show them somehow, and people have a real resistance to pedestal sculpture.” He adds, “I’m almost envious of painters who can just hang their work. A discrete object somehow has to have a relationship to space to have any content.”

Using model trees, wire, and flocking, de Mar creates entire ecosystems on lily pad–like platforms. He suspends them well above the heads of most viewers, essentially affording them the panorama of a distant landscape. “It’s an imaginary journey,” he says, “a mental leap.” Growing up in Maine, de Mar, who is 6 feet tall, says, “I was always looking out across a valley, fascinated that I could store this huge environment in my brain. I can’t work at the scale of nature, so I make it human scale.”

The living space as repository of family history is what interests Adia Millett, a New York artist still in her 20s. Her tabletop dollhouses, just large enough to allow viewers to peer inside, are melancholy interiors in which the class and religious beliefs of the imaginary occupants are evident. Her rooms feature working lights, furniture, and much decorative detail, but they’re missing certain functional items, like doors. “I want people to remember they’re just miniatures,” Millett says, “so they can never really get inside, except in imagination.”

One danger of small-scale sculpture is its appeal to sentiment. Its often lonesome or neglected appearance can induce a powerful sense of longing for things lost or never realized. It is the sort of nostalgia that most artists take pains to avoid, but Jeanne Silverthorne welcomes it with open arms. “I’m interested in nostalgia as a subject,” she says, “partly because it’s a forbidden area. Anything that everyone else is dead set against seems to me a good place to investigate.”

In the past, Silverthorne has replicated full-scale items in her studio in sculptures of miniature proportion and enlarged the most transitory matter of all—sweat, tears, and ulcerous bacteria—into cast-rubber pieces. For a recent show at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, Silverthorne made phosphorescent, cast-rubber portraits three or four inches high of elderly people—real people from whom she took DNA samples and hair. “They have this up-to-the-minute scientific reference,” she says of these works. “But they are also like voodoo figures that seem magical.”

If this appears ghoulish, consider the work of Charles LeDray, who makes exquisite—and very tiny—versions of everyday objects (a chair, a ladder, a shaft of wheat) out of hand-carved human bone. (He doesn’t reveal its source.) It is one way to keep viewers from regarding his work as cute.

LeDray started out in the early 1990s, making tiny men’s suits stuffed with even smaller suits, hand-sewn and strung along a clothesline above the viewer’s head, or stitched together to form a rope that dangled from the ceiling. “I’ve been called a teddy-bear artist, a craft artist, a boy who sews, a man who does women’s work, a clothing artist,” he says. “But I think I’m an artist who makes art, at whatever scale it needs to be.” For LeDray, “Scale is a bouillon cube that can condense and hopefully enrich a concept.”

“Charles does not think he makes small art,” says Claudia Gould, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the organizer of LeDray’s 2002 midcareer retrospective. The show included Oasis (similar to his Untitled, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York), 1996–2003, a large glass case containing six glass shelves supporting no less than 2,000 tiny, glazed ceramic vessels that LeDray had made one by one. “I don’t work in small scale,” LeDray insists. “Everything is the scale it needs to be within my esthetic or conceptual judgment. It’s more about how things find their gravity.” As Gould says, “We think we’re all giants or that we’re all very tiny. Whatever the perception is, it’s not the truth. That’s what Charles calls into question.”

Ultimately, of course, one experiences art in the space of one’s own mind. It can expand to the breadth of the universe or narrow to focus on a single idea, object, or view. Where large pieces can be read at a distance, small ones, like Fabergé eggs, demand slow, close-up examination, and hold the promise of surprise. In this fast-paced world of what Rugoff calls “the drive-by art experience,” that can be a virtue.