The Iron Age Of Sculpture

By ROBERT HUGHES

Radical changes in art come less often than we like to think, but some have been utterly fundamental. One of these was the arrival of iron as a material of sculpture. This happened in the 20th century -- about 75 years ago -- at the hands of Pablo Picasso and his older friend, the Catalan sculptor Julio Gonzalez. It signaled the first basic change in not only the materials but also the nature of the art since the invention of bronze casting, which occurred so long ago that it belongs to the domain of myth, not history.

The advent of iron is the subject of an extremely beautiful show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, curated by Carmen Gimenez, with excellent catalog essays by Dore Ashton and Francisco Calvo Serraller. "Picasso and the Age of Iron" involves three European artists -- Alberto Giacometti, Gonzalez and Picasso -- and two American ones, David Smith and Alexander Calder. Its time span is from 1928, when Picasso made an open frame of iron rods with a pinhead and two tiny startled hands and called it Figure, to Smith's maturity in the early 1960s. But its core is the '30s.

Though the show doesn't pretend to be encyclopedic, it is chosen with fine visual intelligence and, not incidentally, is very well installed. Above all, it conveys with exhilarating clarity the sense of discovery that went with the development of iron as a medium of sculpture. We are used to it now: half the corporate plazas of America are cluttered with large and often otiose welded objects. Now and again a real masterpiece is produced in iron -- most recently, the astonishing work by Richard Serra, Intersection II, that was on view until last week at the Gagosian Gallery in SoHo. But the Guggenheim's exhibition rewinds the tape of art history to the time when iron was not an expected material, and makes the rusty stuff seem marvelous again.

Why did iron matter? Partly for symbolic reasons: it was the common material of industry, old as the smith-god Hephaistos but new as the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge -- "ignoble," vernacular material that, set up beside the "noble" marble and bronze of traditional sculpture, could not but detonate new trains of imagery.

But mainly, as it turned out, it mattered for formal reasons. Iron is quintessentially structure, not mass. Inside every figure produced by the academies had been a leaner, more abstract presence -- the wire armature on which the clay or plaster was built, hidden by the later work of representation. Just as Michelangelo had imagined the figure latent in the raw marble block, hidden by the superfluities of stone, so it fell to Picasso, Gonzalez and others to imagine a second structure within the conventionally sculpted figure: a kind of iron essence, expressed in line and plane rather than continuous surface, in openness rather than solidity.

The move to iron forging originated with craft and folk art; it was "primitive," something apart from academic atelier practice, and it fitted perfectly into the general move among artists at the end of the 19th century to refresh art from hitherto unused sources. One of the first artists to imagine a link between iron forging and formal sculpture was a minor Spanish painter, Santiago Rusinyol, an impassioned collector of the ironwork in which the smiths of his native Barcelona had always excelled. "I think of those forges of old Barcelona," he wrote in 1893, "where instinct was set free. There, in the darkness . . . I think I see springing from the fire an art without aesthetic rules or absurd restrictions, an art as free as smoke, born from fire and wrought in fire."

What such an art might look like, though, was not immediately apparent. With some foresight, it might have been glimpsed in Picasso's famous rusty tin Cubist Guitar of 1912 -- all planes and interstitial spaces. But it wasn't realized until 1928, when Picasso, who had spent much of that year making diagrammatic drawings for sculptures that would be executed in nothing but wire, sought out the help of Gonzalez, who taught him to weld iron. Picasso's energies, in turn, seem to have inspired in Gonzalez the daring to become an inventive sculptor in his own right. The Picasso-Gonzalez link was as important for sculpture, in the end, as the earlier Picasso-Braque partnership had been for painting.

Both men realized how things already made of iron could be brought into sculpture, thus extending the aesthetics of assemblage and the found object. To see Picasso's joining two tin half-spheres -- kitchen colanders -- to form the cranium of Head of a Woman, 1929-30, or Gonzalez's recycling what appears to be a pair of scythe blades as the wings of a creature midway between angel and praying mantis, is to witness plays of the dreaming, free-associating, punning mind that seem fundamental to modernism. Iron, in the form of objects that could be almost randomly brought together, favored wit and invention. Gonzalez, though he could make small sculptures with the finesse of jewelry, loved the contrast between the harsh and the delicate -- rough-cut slabs and hammered plates from which, unexpectedly, a tuft of metal hair would spring with an insouciance worthy of Miro.

Giacometti, by contrast, did not work in iron at all; every object by him in this show is cast bronze. He is included, presumably, because of his relations to Picasso through the Surrealist figure, because of his influence on Smith and because of the linearity of his style -- an obsessive thinning out of sculptural mass that is nevertheless modeled in a wholly traditional way on an armature, and never welded. It's true that Giacometti tended increasingly to think of sculpture as a means of connecting points in space, rather than of setting volume imposingly before the eye, but the effort to import him into the story of linear iron sculpture is unconvincing.

The Calders in this show will do more to rehabilitate Calder -- by showing what first raised enthusiasm for his work -- than almost anything that has been put on view in the past quarter-century. In his later years (he died in 1976) Calder seemed dull and overexposed. Nobody could love and only a hurricane could budge the red mobile that hangs, like a glider beefed up to the size of a DC-3, from the roof of the East Building of Washington's National Gallery of Art. Calder's genius in the '20s and '30s was for making extraordinarily delicate and literally "wiry" sculptures that danced at a breath. However close you got to them, they still seemed distant in their fragility; in extreme cases, like the wonderful Tightrope, 1937, with its wire personages balancing on a string between two balks of wood, they are so fine as to be almost unphotographable. Real as the pleasures of early Calder are, however, they don't have the imaginative force of Picasso, Gonzalez -- or Smith.

Smith remains the true primary heir of Picasso and Gonzalez -- and, to some extent, of Giacometti, whose space constructions like The Palace at 4 A.M. inspired the young American artist in the '30s to make a series of small iron precincts and even a miniature iron house, complete with iron paintings on the walls. Curator Gimenez's choice of his work is an exemplary condensation. Beginning with those initial Surrealist images, it picks up on the early sculptures that clearly indicate the bent of his talent, such as Amusement Park, 1938, a small work that both remembers Picasso's iron woman figures and conflates their shapes with roller coaster and Ferris wheel.

By 1951, with such works as Hudson River Landscape, Smith's pre-eminence in American sculpture was complete: he could draw with steel in space with as much fluency as with pencil on paper, creating metaphors that mingle the organic and the mechanical in an unstoppable lyric eloquence. He imagined his work connected to the heroic tradition of American technology. "My aim," he wrote in 1952, "is the same as in locomotive building: to arrive at a given functional form in the most efficient manner." Sculpture's iron age, in such hands, was also a golden one.