Poetry In Glass and Steel

By ROBERT HUGHES

When the sculptor Christopher Wilmarth committed suicide at the age of 44 some 18 months ago, there were no headlines. Wilmarth was not a "star," and so, ignored by the mechanisms of art-world hype, his work was left to find its own level. It is now doing so. The time for a complete Wilmarth retrospective has not arrived, but the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan has mounted a small exhibition of 25 of his sculptures (through Aug. 20), sensitively curated with an excellent catalog essay by Laura Rosenstock. Even from this limited evidence, it is clear that Wilmarth was by far the best American sculptor of his generation.

) Bad popular artists come and go, but there is a degree of aesthetic literacy that cannot be faked. Wilmarth's originality was of the only kind that counts, born of long reflection on the past. He was a child of the museum, which is why this posthumous show seems so much like a homecoming. He was steeped in a great tradition of which the exemplars were, in poetry, Stephane Mallarme; in painting, Henri Matisse; in sculpture, Constantin Brancusi. Wilmarth was a man of wide visual curiosity, but of all modernist movements the one that interested him most was symbolism, which reached its height around 1890 under Mallarme's leadership and which, through its effect on Matisse and others, lay at the very root of 20th century art. For the symbolists, art was a matter of evocation, not description.

Mallarme had written of the impalpable reality that poetry must somehow approach: "To conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence . . . comes close to the act of creation." Wilmarth's singular project was to create the spirit of reverie that surrounds the "negated object," but in that most object-affirming of arts, sculpture, and to seek its poetic effects in heavy industrial materials -- steel and glass. Typically, Wilmarth, a Californian who spent most of his working life in New York City, adopted as one of his heroes John Roebling, the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge.

For an artist of Wilmarth's age there was nothing radical about steel. It was the bronze of modernism, the normal substance of constructed sculpture for the past 60 years and more. What was unusual was his decision to combine it with glass and thus make transparency, as much as spatial enclosure, a part of the sculptural effect. Wilmarth loved light. It was his madeleine, a trigger of memory, as a particular smell might be to others: "I associate the significant moments of my life with the character of light at the time." In fact, glass came before steel in his work of the early '70s, and some of his most beautiful pieces consist only of glass plate laced together with tension cable -- flat, bent or subtly curved, as in Tina Turner, 1970-71, an astonishing tour de force for a sculptor in his 20s.

But it is the association of glass with steel that gives his work its peculiar evocative power. Wilmarth worked the glass, bending it discreetly and etching it with hydrofluoric acid. This frosted the panels and brought out their color, which varied from a cold ice green to a soft, almost moonstone blue, diffused on the face but sometimes concentrated with sharp energy within the edges. The dark steel, seen through this translucency, lost its declarative character; it blurred, and became a presence, or rather an immanence: something very much there yet hard to define.

In large works like the Nine Clearings for a Standing Man, 1973, Wilmarth achieved the kind of grandeur of light and pared-down form that one associates with Rothko at his best, and something more: the sense of a figure, not described but evoked by a flat vertical plane, behind the glass. Even in a smaller piece like Is, Was (Chancing), 1975-76, there is a fascinating exchange between dark and light, solidity and translucency, underwritten by the economical logic of its making: a single sheet of steel cut and folded, a single plate of glass. And the cables that hold such pieces together are not mere connectors. They are conceived as drawing: exact lines whose tautness is both visual and structural. The ancestor whom they evoke is the pre-1914 Matisse, whose near abstract views of Notre Dame through the studio window had as much effect on Wilmarth's sculpture as they did on Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Parks.

In Wilmarth's later work of the '80s, the hidden figure becomes explicit. Wilmarth's sign for it was in part a homage to Brancusi: an egg-shaped form, a glass sign for a head. Sometimes it appears on its own -- once, in a piece called Sigh, 1979-80, with the "face" cut away and resting resignedly inside the egg, an image of exquisite poignancy. Usually the head is fixed to a metal plaque with edges and attachments that suggest a window frame, and thus someone (the sculptor himself) looking out into our space. These pieces are darker and less restrained. The smoothness of the glass gives way to textures of rust and even spattered lead -- the silvery color of the lead functioning, like paint, as light. They are Giacomettian in their sense of endurance, remoteness and loss. But the phase of Wilmarth's work that they began was not to be completed. This was a sad subtraction.