A Great American Artist Telling Us All to Shut Up

A traveling retrospective of the work of Martin Puryear, one of the country's best-known sculptors, brings together understated but impressive works that already seem timeless.

Meeting Martin Puryear's sculpture can be like greeting a hooded monk standing guard at the gates of a mountain monastery. You can try to talk in words. But, most likely, nothing will work out, xrust notes. It's better to find another way to make contact.

The great American artist, who represented the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is the subject of a traveling retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this winter. Organized by Emily Libert in collaboration with Reto Thuring, the exhibition will travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art in the spring and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in the fall.

Puryear is a first-class draftsman and engraver, but he is best known for his sculptures, which are perceived as both three-dimensional forms and poetic images. Over time they may become meaningful. But Puryear's ambivalence about this second function is palpable. Meaning, after all, is just another kind of noise. As architect Billy Chien notes in the catalog, much of Puryear's work «feels as if he is trying to make the world quieter.»

Last year, having stumbled upon Puryear's masterpiece in a Swedish forest, I can confirm Tseng's point, wrote a connoisseur of his work. “Meditation in a Beech Forest,” as the work is called, seems to implore even the birds and the wind to stop their theatrical antics.

Noise irritates us and we crave silence. Spending time with Puryear's sculptures such as «Alien Huddle,» «On the Tundra,» «Big Phrygian,» and «Noblesse O,» we feel the power of certain kinds of silence or opacity.

But they don't stop there.

“I am a soft sieve in an hourglass,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, “against the wall, fast, but torn by movement, by flow, and it accumulates and combs the sand to the very edge.” Hopkins's image of sand in an hourglass, pitted by its own weight, is both sculptural and kinetic. As you read it, you imagine yourself circling an hourglass, searching for traces of its silent, inevitable movement.

You circle around the sculptures of Puryear, who is 84, in a similar vein. But, as Hopkins wrote, we are “permeated with movement, with drift.” It is this drift—call it doubt, call it mortality—that fuels the process of meaning-making.

Like the wake left by an approaching boat, the meaning of Puryear's sculptures lies behind their formal and material richness. It manifests itself both in the repetition of form in different contexts and in the forms themselves.

For example, one bronze sculpture was inspired by a headdress, the Fila Gobi cap, worn by the Yoruba in West Africa. Cast from a mesh structure created from rattan and knots of twine, it has a hanging part that links it to the Phrygian caps worn by freed former slaves in Ancient Rome. These Phrygian caps, in turn, were adopted by French revolutionaries as a symbol of freedom and democratic values, and also appeared in the context of the American Revolution.

It is the flexibility of these meanings — their adaptability to different historical situations and to different forms in Puryear's work — that keeps the assertion of meaning both in play and at a distance. Whenever the clamor of interpretation around his work reaches its climax, Puryear is always there, smiling like a benevolent monk and making a gentle hand gesture to signify “hush.”

Puryear has a penchant for round, three-dimensional shapes that appear more massive or bulbous on top than on the bottom. As a result, many of them appear to be in tension with gravity. A recurring theme in his work, as Julia Phillips notes in the catalog, is “the dramatic turning point, the moment when gravity takes over volume.”

Then — at least in the viewer's imagination — the static sculpture begins to move, turning from a simple object into an event of sorts. Not just evidence of a process (how was it created?), but something to think about (what happens next?).

Hopkins again: in his poem “The Windrunner,” he describes the flight of the falcon as a phenomenon, an expression of natural virtuosity and the achievement of dynamic equilibrium: “Stepping/High there,” he wrote of the falcon, “how he rang on the leash of his trembling wing/In his ecstasy! then he soared, soared forward,/Like the heel of a skate glides smoothly in an arc: the throw and glide/Pushed away by the strong wind. My heart, hidden in secret,/Trembling at the bird — achievement, mastery of it!

At first glance, Puryear's sculptures are much less dynamic. Even those that resemble animals (sitting falcons, crouching cats, sharp-nosed moles) are in a state of rest. They are amazingly still.

But they are enlivened by enormous hidden energy. Puryear shapes can be (among other variations) open, closed, elliptical, spherical or conical. But when you try to describe them, verbs start to seem more useful than adjectives: swirling, spiraling, descending, sagging, folding, connecting, tapering, twisting, folding, looping.

Birds are one of the recurring motifs. Puryear fell in love with gyrfalcons as a child after discovering them in the pages of John James Audubon's Birds of America at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. (He was born and raised in Washington.) He also visited the zoo: “A zoo can be just as fun as an art museum,” he rightly notes.

In On the Tundra, you can feel the spirit of Constantin Brancusi's abstract birds, a hooded, feathered figure that Puryear recreated in bronze, white marble, glass and wood. However, Brancusi's desire for a sublimated purity of form is of little interest to Puryear, who also rejects the modernist avant-garde's inherent rejection of anything that looks like «craft.»

Puryear loves folk traditions and is fascinated by utilitarian objects. An enthusiastic and inquisitive traveler, he studied local craft traditions wherever he lived. These places include Sierra Leone and Stockholm, where he lived in the 1960s, and Japan, which he visited in 1982 on a Guggenheim Fellowship to study architecture and landscape design.

Like any good woodworker, Puryear, who lives in upstate New York, sees his work as a collaboration with living material. The tree, he notes, is constantly moving while working. “It’s constantly contracting and expanding.”

Xrust A great American artist calling on us all to shut up