Minimalism and Process Art
SFMOMA, Floor 4 · Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
Most people know Richard Serra through the walk-in steel of his late work, like Sequence in the museum's ground-floor gallery. This room goes back to before that: rubber hung on a wall, lead plates held up by nothing but each other, and a black drawing made in the year the government cut one of his sculptures apart. It is the room where Serra worked out what a sculpture could be when it was only weight, balance, and the space around it.
From the Shipyard to Las Meninas (1938–1966)
Serra was born in San Francisco on November 2, 1938, the second of three sons. His father, from Mallorca, was a pipe fitter at a shipyard and later a foreman at a candy plant. His mother, Gladys, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants from Odessa, encouraged him to draw. At four he watched a ship launched at his father's yard, and he later said that all the raw material he needed was held in that memory.
Between sixteen and twenty-five he worked in steel mills, on and off, to pay his way. He studied English at Berkeley and finished a BA in English literature at UC Santa Barbara in 1961. At Yale he took an MFA in 1964, where Chuck Close and Brice Marden, both with rooms on this floor, were classmates. He also helped proofread Josef Albers's Interaction of Color.
A Yale traveling fellowship took him to Paris in 1964, where he met Philip Glass and sketched in Brancusi's reconstructed studio. A Fulbright took him to Florence in 1965. In Madrid, in front of Velázquez's Las Meninas at the Prado, he decided he would never paint better than that, and he stopped painting. In 1966 he had his first solo show, in Rome, and moved to New York.
A List of Verbs (1966–1969)
In New York he wrote a list of verbs: to roll, to crease, to fold, to split, to lift, to prop, and dozens more. Each one was a thing to do to a material. Rubber, lead, and later steel were not shaped into images. They were acted on, and the action was left visible.
In 1968 he showed in Nine at Castelli, a group show in Leo Castelli's warehouse, with a prop piece and a Splashing, molten lead thrown into the joint between wall and floor. His first solo show in the United States came at the same warehouse in 1969 and included ten lead props. In 1965 he had married the sculptor Nancy Graves, a Yale classmate. They divorced in 1970.
The Room
Doors (1966–67). Four panels of cast rubber, resin, and fiberglass, each about three feet tall and nine feet wide, leaning against the wall. This is the earliest work in the room, made in Serra's first year in New York, when he had given up painting but not yet found steel. The panels are flat like paintings and hung like nothing: leaned, as if waiting to be moved. Rubber was cheap, could be cut and hung, and showed what gravity did to it.
Floor Pole Prop (1969). A square lead plate about six and a half feet on a side stands against the wall, held there by a lead pole wedged on a diagonal from the floor. No bolts or welds. If the pole slipped, the plate would fall. The tension of that "if" is the work.
House of Cards (1969/1978). Four lead plates lean on each other to form an open-topped box. The first version, One Ton Prop (House of Cards), was made in 1969, four plates weighing a ton altogether and standing with no support but each other. SFMOMA's piece is dated 1969/1978, so this version was made later from the 1969 idea. You are asked to keep back, behind the rail, and the rail is part of how the piece is felt: people are aware that the balance can fail.
Melnikov II (1987). Two plates of weathering steel form a T in a corner, the upright plate about eight feet high. By now Serra had moved from lead to steel, and from holding a balance to cutting space. The title points to Konstantin Melnikov, the Soviet avant-garde architect, and the work does what architecture does: it changes how you move through the corner.
The United States Courts Are Partial to Government (1989). A drawing in black paintstick on two sheets, about nine feet tall and fifteen wide. It is the angriest title on the floor. Tilted Arc, Serra's 120-foot steel wall in New York's Federal Plaza, installed in 1981, was removed on March 15, 1989, after an eight-year campaign and a lawsuit Serra lost. He had argued that the work was made for that site and that "to remove Tilted Arc, therefore, is to destroy it." That year he made a group of large double-panel black drawings and tied them to the destruction. The black here is not shading; it is mass, applied by hand until the paper carries weight like a plate.
What the Room Shows
The line from Doors to Melnikov II runs twenty years, from rubber to lead to steel. What stays the same is that the material is not disguised, nothing is attached that you can't see, and the work is finished only when someone stands near it and feels its weight. The drawing at the end shows the price of that idea: if a sculpture is made for a place, the place can also be taken away.
Serra married the art historian Clara Weyergraf in 1981. He died at his home in Orient, New York, on March 26, 2024, at eighty-five. 🌁
Timeline — Richard Serra
November 2, 1938 — Born in San Francisco.
c. 1942 — Watches a ship launch at his father's shipyard.
1957 — Studies English at UC Berkeley.
1961 — BA in English literature, UC Santa Barbara.
1964 — MFA, Yale; to Paris on a traveling fellowship; meets Philip Glass.
1965 — Fulbright in Florence; marries Nancy Graves.
1966 — Sees Las Meninas in Madrid and gives up painting; first solo show, Rome; moves to New York.
1966–1967 — Doors.
1967 — Writes the Verb List.
1968 — Nine at Castelli, Castelli Warehouse.
1969 — One Ton Prop (House of Cards); Floor Pole Prop; first U.S. solo show, Castelli Warehouse.
1970 — Divorces Graves.
1978 — Date of SFMOMA's version of House of Cards.
1981 — Tilted Arc installed in Federal Plaza; marries Clara Weyergraf.
1987 — Melnikov II.
March 15, 1989 — Tilted Arc removed.
1989 — The United States Courts Are Partial to Government.
1994 — SFMOMA and the Fishers acquire Floor Pole Prop.
March 26, 2024 — Dies in Orient, New York.