St. Louis, MO -- When the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts opens in October 2001, major new works by two American masters, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra, will be permanently on view as an integral part of this much-anticipated facility. Joe, a monumental steel sculpture by Serra, is installed in the Foundation building’s exterior courtyard, while Kelly's Blue Black—a wall sculpture of two aluminum panels, 28 feet high—hangs as a commanding work in the Foundation's main gallery.
In creating these commissioned works, Kelly and Serra entered into an unusual process of dialogue with the architect for the Foundation, Tadao Ando.
"What was particularly fortunate about this project," Tadao Ando states, "was the participation of the artists before construction began. Working collaboratively with uncompromising artists was incredibly demanding. But it has given their works a vitality and reality unique to this place—and for me, the collaboration has provided a rare and stimulating opportunity to rethink what it means to create."
Adding a dramatic new work to the outstanding sculpture in St. Louis, Serra's Joe is a tour de force. A curving, monumental sculpture made from five plates of Cor-ten steel, 13 feet high and 2 inches thick, Joe is a work that in conception, structure and installation breaks new ground. Its twisted spiral form invites viewers to enter a passage between towering, sloping walls, which culminates in a surprising central space that frames the sky.
Joe is the first of Serra’s torqued spiral series. It follows his acclaimed series of torqued ellipses. These works were inspired by the artist's visit to the baroque church of San Carlo in Rome, with its oval dome by Francesco Borromini. Joe was created specifically for this outdoor installation, where its curving, continually evolving form contrasts with the smooth vertical surfaces of the Ando building. From inside the building, through windows whose shape was adjusted by Ando in response to the Serra sculpture, visitors to the PFA may enjoy a framed view of the spiraling top edge.
Writing about Serra's torqued ellipses for the Dia Center for the Arts, critic Mark Taylor has observed that these massive works are made of heavy industrial materials, yet "have the delicacy of finely folded ribbon or even paper twisted to form a Möbius strip that never quite reaches closure. As one moves from outside to inside by passing through the gap in these works, everything shifts. Lines that appear straight on the outside bend and buckle on the inside; arcs that seem to tilt away when viewed from without bend inward..."
A second work created for the Foundation, Ellsworth Kelly's Blue Black, takes its place among his great series of radically simple, multi-panel paintings and sculptures. The two-paneled work, 28 feet tall and made of painted honeycomb aluminum, fuses form, color, material and scale into an eloquent whole. Upon descending to the lower level of the Foundation's main gallery, into a double-height top-lit space, visitors encounter Blue Black directly ahead on the south wall. Perfectly proportioned and placed on the wall, the work responds to, and highlights, Ando’s most prominent art space in the building. Echoes of the wall sculpture can be found in other parts of the building.
Kelly has long been interested in the relationship of paintings to the wall, especially in a large scale. He wrote in a letter to John Cage in 1950, "My collages are only ideas for things much larger—things to cover walls. In fact, all the things I’ve done I would like to see much larger. I am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long—to hang on the walls of houses as pictures…they should be the wall—even better—on the outside wall—of large buildings. Or stood up outside as billboards or a kind of modern icon…it should meet the eye—direct." With Blue Black, Kelly continues to explore this long-standing interest in large-scale wall pieces.
In commenting on Ellsworth Kelly's works, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman has written that they are "based on the subtlest distinctions of form and color, wherein the difference of an inch in size or the position of a panel on a wall comes to resemble a moral choice...They do not insist that we pay attention. They are simply there, holding the door open to a better world, a world washed clean and untroubled, leaving up to us the decision whether to cross the threshold."
Commenting on the installation of these two commissions, the founder and president of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, says, "It has been a stimulating experience working with Serra and Kelly on the development of these works. They share an aesthetic sensibility with Ando and reduce abstraction to its essence, yet they each work with space in entirely different ways."
Born in San Francisco in 1939, Richard Serra studied at the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara and received an MFA in painting from Yale University. To pay for his education, he worked in steel mills, an experience that helped inspire his adoption of steel as his preferred material. Since his first solo exhibition, held in Rome in 1966, he has been represented in many group and solo exhibitions, including solo exhibitions at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City (1997/98), the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles (1998) and at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1999). The Museum of Modern Art is currently planning its second solo exhibition of his sculpture. This year, Richard Serra received the Gold Medal for Sculpture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale. In St. Louis, Serra's site-specific sculpture Twain is installed in the Gateway Mall. Other works are in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum and in private collections.
Ellsworth Kelly was born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923 and studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he continued his studies at the Boston Museum School (1946-1948) and then moved to France for six years, where he began to create abstract art. Already during his seminal years in Paris, Kelly was thinking of wall sculpture. His first such commission, Sculpture for a Large Wall, was created in 1957 for the Transportation Building at Philadelphia's Penn Center, and in 2000 was the centerpiece for an exhibition of major new acquisitions by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Among his other significant recent commissions are works for the Dallas Symphony, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the Boston Federal Court House and the Bundestag in Berlin. Works by Kelly can be found in Saint Louis at the Saint Louis Art Museum, at Bank of America and in private collections.
