The Art Craftsman
Martin Puryear Came Late to Abstraction But Carved a Niche for Himself Nonetheless

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2008

Some of the most enjoyable creations have come at the tail ends of great artistic movements, in a winning manner we might want to dub "late."

It's not just in the art world. There are wonderful composers of the very late baroque, such as Michel Corrette, who are still riffing on Vivaldi in the age of Mozart.

You can even spot late style in the hard-boiled detective fiction of John D. MacDonald. Written decades after the first stories about private eyes, MacDonald's tales became urbane and knowing.

In that same way, the sculptor Martin Puryear can be thought of as a past master of late abstraction. For more than 30 years, he's been making work that is gracious, persuasive and attractive -- if not completely of its time.

The full-scale Puryear survey that opened today at the National Gallery, where it's on tour from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, reveals an artist who came along too . . . tardily, let's say, to cause a sea change in how art was being made. But it also shows us an artist who, despite all that, found surprising room to move within abstract sculpture's settled traditions.

The 46 pieces at the National Gallery are mostly carved or carpentered from wood, and are usually between the size of a pony and an elephant, with a couple reaching brontosaurian scale. Six are in the East Building, where they look of a piece with the late-modern architecture around them: Puryear's elegant lines are a good match for I.M. Pei's building. The other 40 are in the neoclassical galleries of the West Building -- under whose bright skylights they look equally good, if not better. That may be because these pieces aren't meant to astound, but to please, and so they work in any pleasing setting. Puryear's sculptures take a few overlooked issues in abstract art and work them through to their conclusions. This artist may be dotting i's and crossing t's, but along the way he's also adding a full complement of serifs and flourishes.

Puryear was born in Washington in 1941 and discovered early on that he had a talent for making realistic pictures. Abstraction won him over in the early 1960s, he says, when he was studying in the art department at Catholic University. (That department was briefly home to the great abstract painter Kenneth Noland, though he never taught Puryear.) But by the time the newly converted -- and therefore extra devout -- abstractionist got to the famous graduate program at Yale in the early '70s, abstraction's moments of heroic innovation had come and gone. Puryear's peers were moving on to video and installation and conceptual art. He didn't follow them. Instead, he looked back at what might still be missing from abstraction and settled down to fill the gap.

He found that what was especially lacking was a connection to woodcraft and carpentry. Puryear had seen some of that during a two-year Peace Corps stint outside a small town in Sierra Leone, where he witnessed the living traditions of African craft. And again while studying art in Sweden right afterward, from 1966 to 1968. There, he'd made contact with the great woodworker James Krenov and got caught up on the wood- and nature-based designs of Scandinavian modern.

Both of those influences are very much on view in this Puryear survey. There are sculptures that are built around spare carpentry, of the kind you would imagine village builders using when it's time to erect another grain store or drying shed. "Thicket," one of the boldest pieces in the show, is a sail-like shape that is absurdly overbuilt. Coarse lumber has been superbly jointed to form a tangle of heavy beams with barely enough space left over to let through a bit of light and air. There's a kind of distillation of heavy-duty function here, without the object actually being able to do anything.

The first in a series of "Ring" sculptures, which Puryear launched in 1978, is just a length of thumb-thick, bark-stripped sapling, bent around to form a five-foot circle or garrote of wood, with handles at both ends. Short of strangling a giant, there's not much you could actually use it for. But if someone told you that it had some practical point, you wouldn't be surprised.

Other Puryears are very finely finished, from better wood, leaving hints of Alvar Aalto's bentwood stools or Isamu Noguchi's biomorphic table bases. Various black blobs, including the early "Self" from 1978 and its untitled brother from 1997, are beautifully joined, smoothed and stained. They don't read as practical objects so much as sculptural and statuesque forms -- as though the human "selves" they represent, however inchoate, demand the utmost care in their crafting.

And still other pieces in the show -- maybe the majority -- are about fine craftsmanship that doesn't quite reach fetishistic levels. "Bower," from 1980 and normally on show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is a wing-shaped framework made of lath that looks as though it's waiting to receive some kind of skin. The beaky, five-foot-tall form called "Old Mole" and the seven-foot flask shape titled "The Charm of Subsistence" (sometimes Puryear's names can get away from him) come closer to classic basketwork, though enlarged to a scale that handicrafts don't usually reach.

Many of Puryear's sculptures have links to the gorgeous handmade objects from the past -- old propellers, scythe handles, moldboards -- that people find in barns, beeswax up and then display as stylish modern decoration. His sculptures are like found art that has been custom-crafted to be even more cryptic, poetic and potent than your average discarded artifact. And they've often got a hint of art-historical nostalgia in them: In looking back to obsolete objects, Puryear also seems to be casting his glance back at earlier abstractionists, like Brancusi, who first discovered them as art.

Stylish, poetic, nostalgic -- Puryear's works are all of those. But very rarely challenging. That puts them right in line with most late-style art.

By the time that Puryear came along, abstraction had won its biggest battles: the battle to exist at all; the battle to have pure form considered with the care of figuration; the battle to have abstraction count as a carrier of meanings of all kinds. That left the remaining fights -- Puryear's fights -- barely more than skirmishes.

Puryear's art can end up seeming more like a quadrille: a dance that had military origins, but went on to be cherished for its well-ordered graces.

Or maybe the problem is with where we're seeing this art, rather than with the art itself. Could it be that this Puryear show has ended up in the wrong Washington museum? Alongside the Titians and Rembrandts of the National Gallery, Puryear can sometimes seem tasteful to a fault. Set in the context of the craft collections at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, on the other hand, his works would light a fire.

If Puryear's art represents a kind of tapering off for abstract sculpture, for craft it comes close to an apotheosis.

At some point in the not-too-distant past, art and craft diverged, leaving gorgeous baskets and rockers on one side of the divide and painting and sculpture on the other. Yet within that separate world of basketry and woodworking, few works hold the promise of Puryear's. Puryear takes the traditional concerns of craft and magnifies and concentrates them in his art: "Thicket" is joinery taken to the nth degree; "Old Mole" shows the quantity of meaning that basketry can carry. Those works mean more when looked at in terms of those traditions than they do as part of the history of officially "fine" art.

The problem, of course, is that the two traditions have yet to achieve the equal status they deserve. Puryear may be better off -- in terms of income, reputation and legacy -- as a lesser sculptor than as a giant in the world of craft.