A Red-Hot Momma Returns

By ROBERT HUGHES

Art orthodoxies fade and die. When they do, it becomes apparent how much space was left between their lines--and, occasionally, what interesting talents were excluded from the canon. At that point, artists who had been around all the time are greeted as if they were new arrivals. One of these, at present, is Beverly Pepper, 51, a sculptor who has lived in Italy for the past 24 years and has two shows of her work running in New York: indoor pieces and projects at the downtown Andre Emmerich Gallery, and "monumental" steel sculpture on the terrace of Hammarskjoeld Plaza.

In the '60s the normal channels of getting known in New York did not work in Pepper's favor. Apart from being a woman (not an advantage for sculptors), she worked at an angle from the rival modes of both minimalism and open-welded construction. Worse, she was not part of the New York scene, and did not take part in what was conventionally called its "dialogue." "People have criticized me for living abroad," Pepper recalls, "but I think isolation freed me. The idea of being part of a group still depresses me." In any case, her style was wrong. Prepotent is her adjective: a flamboyant, vulnerable mixture of dandy and red-hot momma, ensconced in an Umbrian castle.

Live Rich. Beverly Pepper has never been inconspicuous as a person. "You don't have to be rich, you just have to learn to live rich," she says. She and her husband, Author-Journalist Bill Pepper, observe that rule diligently in their 14th century castle, where they entertain spiritedly. But her present work leaves no room for doubt that after a late and faltering start as a sculptor (she began in 1960, carving up the trunks of trees that had been felled in her garden), Pepper today is one of the most serious and disciplined American artists of her generation.

Pepper's sculpture, though abstract, is not radically so. The strongest influence on her work has been the late David Smith. Just as Smith's work tended to keep the imprint of the human figure, vertical and gesturing, so the triangular shapes to which Pepper obsessively returns allude to architecture: pyramids and tents. The very shape of a pyramid comes drenched in an imagery of age, endurance, "primitive" solemnity. Being historical animals, we can no more see a pyramid as a perfectly abstract form than we can look at a cross without thinking of crucifixions.

Because of its architectural nature, Pepper's work is best when its scale is that of a small building. Her models and table-sculptures are as a rule no more interesting than ashtrays; there is not enough going on in them to hold the eye. Size is what makes them work, and when they are large, their internal structure of gusset and rib gives them a visual texture that they lack on the small scale. One needs to walk around them and clamber inside their angular crevices. The planes of steel, sliding briskly through space, need real-life perspective before they can impose themselves. Above all, there is a degree of risk implicit in large scale, and Pepper relishes it: the springing cantilever that seems about to topple but does not, the aggressive sharpness of edges (maquette the knife) and thrust of needle points.

When such conditions are present, the results can be moving. Alpha (1975), with its ribbed and sharply folding tentlike shapes of orange steel, is arguably one of the most successful pieces of monumental sculpture produced by an American in the past decade. No photograph can convey the peculiar intricacy of space that it develops from what seems a simple formula of two skewed triangular prisms, one inside the other.

No Threat. Pepper's work also speaks about the ground it sits on. "I am interested in geological shapes," she says, wryly adding that "if you're born in Brooklyn, you have to invent some kind of landscape for yourself." Her latest projects have moved into an area explored by only a few other American sculptors, like Richard Serra: neither earthwork nor freestanding construction, but midway between the two--steel plates embedded into planes and strips of earth. The first of these immense environmental pieces was her 280-ft. Land Canal and Hillside built in Dallas in 1971: a string of triangular steel forms down the dividing strip of a highway, rising and falling and tilting, meant to be seen as a changing sculpture from the windows of swiftly passing cars. The largest--not yet built--is a 1 1/2 acre project for Bedminster, N.J.: a low, subtly broken plane cutting across the center of a circular amphitheater.

Despite its size, the patterning of such a project is curiously gentle. It brings to mind the mellow quilts and terraces of the Umbrian landscape that stretches below Pepper's house at Todi. Her interest in environmental art is guided by a touching sense of good urban manners. She believes that "threatening sculpture for public places is unfair, because life is so threatening." But how to make an unthreatening sculpture without going decorative? These land pieces, ground-hugging and subtly angled, but so large as to become part of the landscape of seasonal change and human action around them, offer a promising answer.

sb Robert Hughes

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