Frugal Elegance

In the past couple of decades, many weird objects have been produced by the welding torch and palmed off as sculpture; but heat and metal and modern art do not always have to create monstrosities. One man who has proved this is 56-year-old Jose de Rivera, 15 of whose sculptures went on display last week at Manhattan's Whitney Museum. De Rivera's scoops and swoops of polished or painted metal are liquid geometry produced with such skill that neither hammer blow nor welded seam is ever visible.

De Rivera is the kind of man who can repair a tractor, shoe a horse or fit a pipe, and he did all those things as a youth on his family's Louisiana sugar plantation, where his Spanish-descended father was an engineer in the mill. But the last thing he wanted to do was to spend the rest of his life on a plantation. He went to Chicago, where he happened to pay a visit to the Art Institute and to what is now the Museum of Natural History. There he was so beguiled by a collection of Egyptian sculpture that he decided to sign up for art classes at night.

His first sculptures were busts and birds of carved metal, but he soon found figurative art too restricting. "If you have a figure with two hands," says he, "and you find that the spatial relationships cry out for a third, you will distort too much. With free form there is no such confinement." Having worked with metal from his youth, De Rivera not only felt at home with the material, but also found that it gave him more freedom than any other. "I don't use wood because it has a grain, and the grain can be too strong. Stainless steel gives me the complete control that I want."

His smaller pieces are made of tubing that can be heated and bent like silvery glass. The larger pieces begin as metal sheets, painstakingly cut and hammered into shape. When De Rivera is satisfied with a sculpture, he files and polishes it until its surface, made as sensitive to light as possible, dances with reflections that make it seem to flow with life. The works are often shown on slowly revolving turntables.

The sculptures are not symbols or borrowings from nature. "What I make." says De Rivera, "represents nothing but itself. My work is really an attempt to describe the maximum space with the minimum of material." Directed toward that goal, at once so simple and so difficult, his sculptures become triumphs of frugal elegance. Each curve, each line, each swirl follows every other so naturally that of the unlimited possibilities that confronted him, it seems, almost invariably, that the artist has picked the only one that is just right.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.