Jonathan Silver's Studio, As Photographed by Michael O'Keefe

For most of his artistic life, Jonathan Silver worked in a crowded, third-floor loft space on East 4th Street in Manhattan.  "The 4th Street studio was an environment in itself when Jonathan was in it,” Marion Smit, Silver’s longtime assistant, wrote in an email.  “I spent quite a bit of time [there] in the early- to mid-eighties, sometimes helping Jonathan with various things or just sitting there listening and talking to him while drinking some of that delicious coffee/ heavy cream/ sugar concoction he used to make. Talking with Jonathan was always a pleasure. He was to the point and incredibly engaging, sometimes acerbic. He was erudite beyond belief and passionate.  His commitment to, knowledge of, and involvement with music and art was total. He lived it, he was in it. The studio was a physical manifestation of that. Literary passages, phone numbers, engagements were scrawled in pencil on the walls, chunks and shards of plaster and plaster dust covered the floor, various versions of 'Wounded Amazon', 'Eve',' Half Eve' were in the process of being worked or reworked, part clay/ part plaster, fragments scattered around, books here and there, and the piano in the middle of it all."  

After Silver died in 1992, his wife Barbara preserved the space largely as it was when he was alive.  Over the years, she has admitted visitors by request—friends, former students, and admirers.  One of these admirers was the young artist Michael O’Keefe, who, in the early 2000’s, visited the studio twice, taking the photos included here.  (See all of O’Keefe’s photos here.)  In the text below, written in 2011, O’Keefe describes his experience.

 

The first time I visited Jonathan's studio was well after his death, some time around 2001 or 2002. Barbara Silver graciously had me into her apartment above the studio. She greeted me at the door and then, as if it was the obvious thing to do (and, as far as I was concerned, it was) she began to give me a tour of the work in the house which included many paintings, drawings and sculptures made by Jonathan, but also a few works by artists that were close to Jonathan, most notably Christopher Cairns and Bruce Gagnier.  After looking at the work we sat down for tea and a little history of Jonathan. From that conversation I remember her description of Jonathan's love of classical music, the piano and for Beethoven, specifically. And I recall Barbara's comments about how at the end of his life Jonathan worked very late into the night and while doing so listened to strange talk-radio shows, what she described as "Christian radio".


Upon entering the studio I was struck by the amount of work that was still present in this space that had not been used for many years. Barbara mentioned that it was more or less just as he left it, except she had recently swept up the plaster dust that covered the floor. One could easily imagine this room with an overwhelming amount of dust and debris as there was a lot of work in a relatively small space and the work was clearly made with some degree of violence and excitement.  I imagined piles of discarded sculptures, molds, shards, etc., that Jonathan would have turned to as his stockpile of materials.  

Barbara left me to look around. I had only ever heard about Jonathan and seen just a few of his sculptures, and so this was a large dose of the artist, all at once. There was writing all over the walls, oftentimes illegible. I recall making out some things about Rodin, something to do with Rodin's use of "color", meaning light, I think.  Most of the legible writing seemed over my head or hard to piece together its relevance to the work - it was very clear that Jonathan had a massive intellect. But the work itself is more often ruled by expressionistic desires. 
Every part of the studio, including all of the work and even the lighting in the space, seemed to be perfectly aligned with the image I had in mind of what Jonathan looked like, his dark, wild hair and his serious eyes.  

After looking closely at the many sculptures in the front room I went into the small back room where I sat down with the stacks of drawing pads that were there on a table. I flipped through hundreds of drawings, most of them very small, all of them careful and precise while maintaining a remarkable sense of spontaneity. Discovering the work in these drawing pads remains one of the most exciting and inspiring art viewing experiences of my life. 


Two years later I returned to the studio to look again at the drawings and to take some photographs.  Two years later the front studio looked exactly the same, still preserving the point in time when Jonathan’s short adventure as an artist came to a relatively abrupt and maybe premature end.  By that time the drawings in the back room had been moved from the table into a closet. I shudder to think where the final resting place might be for these important and beautiful drawings.

                                      

                                         

Click on photos to enlarge.

See more of Michael O'Keefe's photos of Silver's studio on our Flickr page.

Learn more about Jonathan Silver on his profile.

Images from a Closed Ward: Michael Hersch on Michael Mazur

Michael Mazur, Closed Ward #3, used by permission of Michael Mazur estate

The composer George Rochberg wrote that “the face of a human being can be read as a record of his brief and painful experience of life and consciousness, the victories and defeats, the stages (and nonstages) of his inner evolution.” As an illustration, Rochberg recalled his encounter with portraits of Rembrandt and of Schoenberg, both relatively youthful, their faces emitting varying degrees of confidence, strength and good health. He then reflected upon portraits depicting these same faces which were created decades later, images recorded towards the end of both Rembrandt’s and Schoenberg’s lives. Describing Rembrandt’s face, Rochberg remarked, “The ego of the man is burnt out; what is left is a look of such sadness, such a sense of the impersonal wisdom of old age that it catches at the throat.” Of Schoenberg: “... a face so ravaged and destroyed by the passage of time and so scourged by the intensity of his inner life as to make one marvel that it is the same man. This is the image that haunts me ...”

I first came into contact with the artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009) in 2000 while I was living in Italy. I had arrived in the country not long before, the fortunate and somewhat startled recipient of a Rome Prize in composition. In the preceding years, I had applied for this award a number of times, and when I received word of my selection, I was both excited and uncertain. It had only been a few years since I had completed school, and I realized that I was just settling into a routine which suited me. The thought of beginning anew for an extended period in an unfamiliar place gave me pause. In the end, it was the the art and architecture of Rome--in particular, the small churches that seemed to beckon every hundred paces or so during my walks in the city-- that drew me most forcefully. I knew I would get good work done in those mysterious and extraordinary structures, and I wrote frequently in them, often alone. It is almost impossible to describe now the colors, the smells, the dense shadows, the infinite variations of quiet. My mind would play tricks on me. I would see faces in the darkened recesses which would seem to suddenly appear and then, just as suddenly, vanish.

Michael Mazur, Locked Ward, The Corridor, used by permission of Michael Mazur estate

In fact, since childhood I have been drawn to depictions of the human figure and the human face. Faces above all captured my attention and remain the root of my interest in the visual arts. I sometimes find myself trying to avoid hearing the voice of a given individual if I find meaning in the face, as if hearing the voice would remove the narrative the face had created for me.

Soon after my arrival in Rome I happened upon an exhibition of Mazur's The Inferno of Dante, a series of forty-one etchings with accompanying texts of Dante translated into English by Robert Pinsky. I entered the exhibition and immediately felt the commanding presence of powerful art: this is, for anyone, a rare feeling. I had experienced the musical equivalent of my reaction to Mazur’s art when I first encountered the work of certain instrumentalists and conductors: the recorded performances of Josef Hofmann, Charles Munch, David Oistrakh, the young Alexis Weissenberg, for example, and live performances of Pollini, Abbado, Jansons, Boulez, to name but a few more. In the rooms with the Mazur etchings I felt a deep familiarity: a feeling of shared sensibility, if not shared experience.

Michael Mazur, Closed Ward #6, used by permission of the Michael Mazur estate

There was a feeling in that space which I came to find in other works of Mazur to which I found myself particularly drawn, the early Locked Ward and Closed Ward series, his etchings and aquatints of trees, and his late works, including the terrifying Headless in Iraq series and Explosion of 2007/2008. The immediacy was there even if I saw a photograph of a given work at a fraction of the piece’s original scale. The faces depicted in Mazur’s Locked Ward and Closed Ward etchings, rendered from his experiences visiting a psychiatric hospital in Rhode Island in the early 1960s, tend to be obscured. They nevertheless betray the complexity and nuance of human circumstance: inner and outer suffering, absolute vulnerability, violence, compassion, humor, knowing.

Soon after attending the Dante exhibition, Michael Mazur and I met. During the remaining time Mazur spent at the Academy he would often stop by the space where I worked, and there I would play through many of my own compositions at the piano for him. Although we worked in very different mediums, I sensed that Mazur connected with what I was doing more than most. Throughout the many hours I played, I felt I knew what he was thinking and feeling in real time, even with my attention on the music at hand. When my first recording was released in 2003, Mazur wrote a program note for it. While ostensibly discussing my music, he provided insight into himself and his art: “I am struck by what might constitute an analogy with painting and with my own work in particular. There is, of course, the overwhelming sense of ʻsadness,ʼ which is better than ʻdoom.ʼ In fact, the ʻabyssʼ in its finality is easy to portray: a rich black says it all ... Dante looked into the abyss but primarily found sadness there. Sadness is a much more complicated and, therefore, interesting human condition.”

Michael Mazur, Locked Ward #11, used by permission of the Michael Mazur estate

Some years after we met, I came across a number of etchings from the Locked Ward and Closed Ward series. In mid-2009, for the first time in almost 20 years, I began work on a string quartet. The catalysts for this work were the recent deaths of my closest friend and of my principal teacher, and the inability to shake some of the Closed Ward images from my mind. The fact that visual art became something of an ignition point for my own work was a very new experience for me. As the summer of 2009 wound down, I had formulated the broad outlines of the work enough that I decided it would be a good time to reconnect with Mazur. I was extremely excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and I suspected that he would be surprised and pleased that something he had created had a hand in the shaping of this new work. Less than 24 hours before I planned to contact him, I read of his untimely death in a Sunday newspaper. I completed the new piece, Images From a Closed Ward, in 2010.

Michael Mazur was a remarkable artist. He left us unflinching visual essays which continue to speak powerfully to me. Over my desk hangs Mazurʼs Closed Ward #3, so I am reminded of Mazur and his subjects every day. There is a brutal realism in much of Mazurʼs output. He gives us an individualʼs unfiltered reaction to parts of our reality which so many choose to either ignore, hide from, or conceal. This approach is not, however, an either/or proposition: what makes Mazurʼs work effective and potent is that the difficult, even horrifying, is often nestled up against the beautiful and the tender. Mazur embraced all of the life around us, in whatever condition he found it. He did so mostly without judgement, and through the haunted faces of his subjects we are able to see and learn something of ourselves.

Michael Hersch (b.1971), is a composer and pianist.

Michael Mazur, Closed Ward #1, used by permission of the Michael Mazur estate

Jonathan Shahn in Two Short Videos

“I believe the hardest part of learning to make sculpture is learning how to look, trying to understand what is seen, and how these perceptions are influenced by what we know (or think we know) and by our memory. This perception and knowledge and memory of the observed world, and of the art of the past and present, all come together in the making of each sculpture.”

In wood and in clay, Jonathan Shahn makes heads and figures whose influences span ancient to modern art, Egyptian reserve heads to Marino Marini and beyond.  In this four-minute video, Shahn, who shows often and widely, talks about his work at a 2011 exhibition at Drew University's Korn Gallery.

Just 38 seconds long, this video offers a brief glimpse into Shahn's weekday morning sculpture class at the Art Students League of New York.  Shahn, who has also taught at the Tyler School of Art in Rome, Boston University and the Maryland Institute, has been teaching at the Art Students League for over 20 years.



Photo from logosjournal.com
Quote from artstudentsleague.org

Mike Price at Work

I came across these images while organizing the complete slides of the late sculptor Michael Price for his wife, Susan Davis Price. Price was a figurative sculptor who was influenced by Marino Marini and Giacomo Manzu and whose work was often inspired by scripture. He worked in clay, and like every sculptor written about on this blog, he knew how to cast his original clay pieces into plaster and bronze, and he did it himself (in a foundry he built by hand), often with the help of the students he taught at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he lived.

Shot in October and November of 1971 with beautiful Ektachrome slide film, these images show Price in nearly every stage of the 6,500-year-old process know as lost wax investment casting. Inevitably, they also show Mike's characteristic good humor and sweet personality.

Click on photos to enlarge.

Early in the process, Price melts the wax, applies it to the inside of a rubber mold, and inserts pins into the cast wax head.

Here, Price encases the wax in an investment mold, made of plaster, silica and sand, and wraps it tightly with chicken wire.

At this point, the investment mold is placed in a kiln for several days and heated ("burnt out"). This stage melts the wax and burns out the carbon, creating a void that will filled by the molten bronze.

The bronze, heated to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit, is poured into the investment mold.

When the bronze has cooled and has been broken out of its investment mold, we see Price chasing, welding, and grinding to prepare the piece for its final state. 

Lastly, Price applies a chemically-induced color, called a patina, to the near-finished bronze.

See more images from this collection on our Flickr page. 

Learn more about lost wax investment casting here. 

Thanks to Susan Davis Price for the use of these images. 

Jonathan Silver

J.Silver in studio, 1983

“Silver’s sculpture is steeped in classical and religious myth.  It is assembled, however, with a keen sense of modernist history, in particular, of the formal and psychological implications of Cubism and Surrealism.  In Silver’s work, myth is not quiet and controllable, but something that grows and evolves on its own and obliges mere mortals to flail away in its wake.” (Michael Brenson, 1984, The New York Times)

Barbarian killing his wife, 1985

Jonathan Silver was born in New York City in 1937.  He decided not to go to high school, preferring to be educated by tutors at home.  He received a B.S. degree in general studies from Columbia University and later enrolled in the Art History Ph.D. program under the famed historian, Meyer Schapiro.  Schapiro was impressed by Silver’s intellectual prowess and supported his dissertation on Giacometti.  Silver, however, started making sculpture seriously in the late 1960’s and never completed his doctorate.  As a Columbia student, he drew in Peter Agostini’s class between 1960 and 1966, where he met future colleagues Christopher Cairns and Bruce Gagnier in 1965.

head, 1974, plaster

head, 1975, plaster

During the 1970’s Silver worked alongside Cairns, collaborating on ideas for heads and figures.  The two approached their work with the ambition and stamina of scientists tackling big questions, in it for the long haul; it was clear they neither expected, nor were interested in, quick or dramatically “personalized” solutions.  Cairns and Silver developed a common method of assembling and reassembling, or embedding fragments of one head or figure into another, thus creating new works.  The sculpture produced during this period was shown by Silver and Cairns at the 4x10 Gallery in New York in 1976.  The same year they showed at Haverford College’s Comfort Gallery with their fellow alumnus from Agostini’s class, Bruce Gagnier.  Cairns and Silver also exhibited together at the Weatherspoon Gallery in Greensboro, NC, in 1978, and at the New York Studio School in 1979.

Agamemnon, 1977, mixed media

Silver began working on larger figures in the early 80’s.  Abounding with classical, mythical and art historical references, these ambitious works further developed the method of combining and recombining elements from several different pieces.  Elaborately constructed, they often included found objects or sections of the plaster molds themselves. Wounded Amazon, which is in the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, dates from this period.  Silver liked to say his work “tended towards the Greco-Oriental.”

Wounded Amazon, 1984, plaster

A visit to the Medici Chapel while traveling in Italy with Cairns in 1982 was formative.  Silver began experimenting with placing groups of figures together in a room, leading to his Room Dedicated to Septimius Severus, exhibited with other large pieces at the Gruenbaum Gallery in Soho in 1985.  Shows at the Victoria Munroe Gallery followed in the early 1990’s.

Chapel of Septimius Severus, 1985-86

During the last seven years of his life, Silver worked on rooms of sculpture, including the Lower Room installed at the Sculpture Center in 1990.  Consisting of a dramatic ensemble of figures evoking the disabling effects of memory and aging, the room was filled with figures seized by uncontrollable and incomprehensible forces.  Silver’s late works were often scenes of torment or rage, where the expressionistic surface treatment contributed to their high emotional pitch.

The Lower Room, 1989, mixed media

“Silver’s figures are survivors.  They are vulnerable, yet unalterable, sacrificial, yet in command.  Violence has been done to them, but through their statuesque power, or through the force of their will or rage, they retain the ability to avenge or punish, and to impose themselves on their situations.”  (Michael Brenson, 1995)

Birth of Venus, 1985-86

Chance, 1987-1990, plaster

Silver spent his entire life drawing from the model.  He would stand at an easel, drawing with a number 2 pencil, making small, exquisitely constructed figure drawings.  He also drew incessantly while watching television.

head, 1977, mixed media

To support himself, Silver taught Art History at Montclair State College in Montclair, NJ.  Noreen Sanders, a student of his in the late 70’s, wrote in an email, "In class, he would walk up on the stage, in front of the screen and directly into the paintings he put in the slide projector… talking passionately about the piece (good or bad) – smoking Kool cigarettes with his saggy-ass jeans and bits of plaster stuck in his hair.  He would assign novels from the same time period.  Before class, you could catch him playing piano – some Schubert piece or other.  Or he’d recite poetry.  For me, the work came alive." 

Silver was a frequent lecturer and visiting critic at the New York Studio School and at Haverford College, where he had a profound influence on students for over twenty years, inspiring those who worked closely with him by his penetrating intelligence, erudition and aesthetic probity and his willingness to share his perceptions.  Silver wrote and published extensively on art historical topics.  His articles on Giacometti and David Smith were published by ArtNews.

The New Gretchen, 1991

Jonathan Silver died in New York in 1992 at the age of 54.  There was a posthumous show of his heads at the Sculpture Center in 1996 and one of heads and figures at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in 2008, co-curated by Cairns’ son Nicholas.

figure, 1983

Text adapted with permission from an essay in the exhibition catalog for the 2006 show Five Sculptors.

Additional photos of Jonathan Silver's work can be viewed on our Flickr page.

Photo of Silver is from the announcement card of the 2008 exhibition of his work at Lori Bookstein Fine Art.

See also:
Jonathan Silver: Drawings
Jonathan Silver's Studio, As Photographed by Michael O'Keefe

Agostini in Soho (a story by Scott Sherk)

One day, sometime in the 70’s when I was attending Haverford College, I was invited by my teacher, Chris Cairns, to go to New York to do something with Peter Agostini.  Chris had organized a retrospective exhibition of Agostini’s sculpture at the college, and we were returning the work to Agostini’s Greene Street building.  I seem to recall that we had some difficulty locating Agostini—the buzzer at the building was either non-existent or broken.  There was waiting around.

Soho in those days was a very different place.  Large trucks were parked along the loading docks and the area looked rough.  The sidewalks were mostly empty with an occasional worker passing.  Trash was present.  Greene Street was barren— no boutiques, no bars, no cappuccino, no tourists.  I was left on the street to guard the van.  Sometime later I was sent out to find coffee, which I bought from a window somewhere, maybe on Broome Street.  There were no restaurants.  Sometime later, I helped load things into Agostini’s elevator and into the basement.  Upstairs his loft was raw, filled with stuff, and very dark.  He was still living in the East Village.  I vaguely remember a washing machine.

Eventually Chris, Agostini, and I walked over to West Broadway. Chris and Agostini were deep in conversation with me following a step behind when we were hailed from across the street, “Peter!  Pete! Great to see you!”  Agostini stopped in his tracks and turned to face a dapper young man who was rapidly crossing Spring Street.  The guy was really happy to see Agostini and gushed about him and his work.  This short conversation reached its climax when he said something like, “Let’s do something, Peter.   I really want to show your work.  Let’s do a show.”  Agostini looked alarmed and said, “Can’t you see I’m talking to my friend Chris?” and we walked away.  

“Jeez”, I thought, ”so this is how it works”.

Scott Sherk is an artist living in Pennsylvania with his wife, artist Pat Badt.  He is a professor of art at Muhlenberg College and his work is exhibited regularly at the Kim Foster Gallery in New York.  His work can be viewed at thethirdbarn.org.

Learn more about Peter Agostini on his profile.

Photos from WiredNY.com

Michael O'Keefe on Christopher Cairns

Cairns, in studio 1985
©Joan Fairman Kanes

Teacher is a title that I, as an artist, reserve for a handful of people.  Of course, I learn lessons from many people, in some cases from idiots on the street or children at the park.  And indeed I have learned enormous amounts of invaluable information from dead artists via their works.  However, in spite of being an artist whose resume lists five different undergraduate and postgraduate educational institutions, I would tell you that I have only had a few teachers.  Christopher Cairns is one of my teachers.

Between 2000 and 2002 I worked at Haverford College as the Departmental Assistant to the Art Department where Cairns, at the age of 60, was wrapping up a 35-year teaching career.  Following this time at Haverford I lived in New York City for two years.  During these two years I would often see Cairns, both in the city and at Haverford where I spent many weekends working in the foundry, helping to cast his sculptures.  It is during this four-year period that I was deeply affected by Chris Cairns, his work, and my proximity to his world.  And it is from the vantage point that I had during these four years that I will try and make a portrait of Chris Cairns, not as a teacher, but as an artist.

It is worth noting that during the four years I have mentioned, Cairns only visited my studio twice to give any formal critique of my work.  Cairns believes in the development of the individual through working.  Hard work was regularly noted as a virtue in Cairns’ classroom.  In fact, he often made the point that hard work was a much more essential ingredient for artistic success than talent.  I also believe that Cairns made few official visits to my studio because he was quite confident that I was receiving a strong dose of influence by simply being around him and all that that entailed. 

I was often invited to have dinner with the Cairns family, where I got to examine the collection of art in the Cairns home.  As good as the meals always were, the real thrill for me was discovering the works of art there, works that, underneath the distinctive elements, shared a kinship.  In seeing the way Cairns lives, surrounded by these works of art, it was apparent that he does not see himself as a purely self-contained artist whose work has no precedence or influential context. In this modest home in Haverford, Pennsylvania one finds a few works by Cairns himself, but other artists made most of the works of art displayed there.  On a number of occasions I sat in this home and heard stories of how these various artists fit into a puzzle of influence and commonality.  These artists include: Peter Agostini, Francoise Andre, Alexis Cairns, Nicholas Cairns, Bruce Gagnier, Joseph Goto, Walter Hall, Fritz Janschka, Earl Kerkam, Marko Krsmanovic, Michael Lekakis, Mike Price, Scott Sherk, Jonathan Silver, Lance Solaroli, George Spaventa, Charles Stegeman and Kevin Tuttle.  These are the artists that begin to give a context for the life and work of Christopher Cairns.

The context for Cairns’ sculpture is not limited to the 20th century.   In fact, in various ways his work is in dialogue with much of the entire history of sculpture, excluding many of the fashions since the 1960’s.  Cairns would often present slide shows of various works of art to his students.  These were not formal presentations but rather impromptu commentary on works of art that he finds powerful.   More often than not the content of these presentations would span huge periods of time and would skip across cultures and continents:  An image of a Tilman Riemenschneider sculpture from the early 16th century would be followed by an image of an Ife sculpture from west Africa, then followed by a Giacometti sculpture from the early 20th century, all the while Cairns would be talking in ways that expressed much more concern for what these works shared rather than how they were different.   This was a shocking contrast to a college professor of mine who told me the best thing I could do as a young artist would be to hunker down in the library and read every review in Art Journal starting with the year 1960.  The prescription that Cairns would give to a young artist would be regular trips to the art museums, drawing from the drawings, paintings and sculptures housed there.  On a bookshelf in Cairns’ home is a stack of drawing pads filled with drawings that show Cairns’ commitment to this practice.  These are beautiful drawings that show a careful study of great works of art.  These drawings also reveal a personal experience, a solitary sifting through the sea of great art.

In many of these same drawing pads one finds drawings made in front of a live model.  Cairns based a lot of his teaching on the convention of working in clay or with drawing materials in front of a nude model.   It was in the classroom of Peter Agostini at Columbia University during the academic year of 1965-66 that Cairns was first introduced to this way of working.  Cairns has since continued to work in front of a model off and on, resulting in a deep understanding of human forms and how they relate, an understanding that underpins all of his work.  Working from observation has rarely been an end in itself for Cairns.  Instead it is a means to understand essential aspects of the language of sculpture, a means of becoming highly sensitive to proportion, balance, form, tension, etc.   It is also a way to commune with his subject, the figure.  Cairns has made a few sculptures that successfully render a rather straightforward figure through a process of observation, but most of his work is a departure from naturalistic or literalistic figuration.

The large figures that Cairns made in the 1980’s have a dynamic and beautifully realized combination of naturalistic, modeled forms and bare formal elements turned inside out.  These female figures reveal Cairns’ interest in literature, history and religion.  They are narrative, allegorical figures that embody aspects of the human condition, referring to ideas of sacrifice, suffering, love and death.   

Black Madonna 1984, bronze, 6' high

When talking about sculpture, even sculpture that is made from direct observation of a still, live model, Cairns will use words such as movement, velocity, compression, torque, extension and tension: Cairns’ sculpture relies heavily on gesture as an animating element.  This is most apparent in the large figures from the late 90’s through 2004, such as the large group installations Wieviel Stucke and Recognition / Remembrance.   The “body language” of these figures contributes to their narrative but the gesture of the figures also serves to create dynamic movement between the primary expressive parts, most often being the head and the hands (and in some cases the feet).  A few times I heard Cairns attribute this idea of heads and hands to Medieval Sculpture, and for good reason, but it is an idea that one can see throughout the history of sculpture.   It is an idea that is rooted in essential human interaction: we find meaning in body language, but we rely most on hands and heads for critical expression and communication.

Wieviel stucke? 2000 plaster

The expression of Cairns’ work tends to be severe and grave.  Consider Cairns’ Rack of Heads, a 12’ tall group of shelves that support about 35 different heads made over the span of fifteen years prior to 1996 when the piece was assembled.  In this ensemble one can find heads that have a severe facial expression, that of agony or anguish, desperation or despair.  But it is not simply the facial expressions that create the severity of the work.  The overall scale of the piece is demanding; one is consumed when standing in front of this wall of sculptures.  And when one approaches a single head they are not only confronted by the psychology of that sculpture but also by a lively surface.  The urgency of Cairns’ expression is felt in every element of his sculpture, from the largest compositional element to the smallest evidence of how the work was touched by its maker.

Rack of Heads, 1996, bronze

The initial and most profound impact of Cairns' sculpture has little to do with surfaces.  However, when one examines any of the work closely one is consistently seduced by the rich and wonderful surfaces of the work.  The surfaces themselves are gestural and stirring.  These surfaces offer insight into a process of making that is impulsive and technical, improvisational and precise. 

Last head, 1976 plaster 30"h

In the 1970’s Cairns emerged from the heyday of Minimalism making sculptures that reinvigorated the figure as a vital subject.  While many artists were beginning to use the figure in a Duchampian way, Cairns was making sculptures that expressed a full spectrum of human psychology.  These sculptures were not made to be part of the spectacle of contemporary art.  It was during this time that Cairns was working in dialog with Jonathan Silver.  The two artists developed a way of working that, in a very fresh way, picked up where artists such as Rodin, Rosso, Giacometti, Picasso and Braque left off.   In the early 70’s Cairns and Silver were focused on composing within the modernist motif of the isolated head.   These heads from the 70’s have the complexity of analytical cubism and the austerity of Egyptian reserve heads.  It was in the mid to late 70’s that Cairns began to apply the same concerns to the full figure.  This work from the 70’s was made with a construction mentality, working variably in plaster and clay.  Many of the full figures exploited the total range of possibilities that plaster offers as a sculpture material, a material that Cairns was introduced to while working as an assistant to Peter Agostini.  With these sculptures conventional mold-making techniques were used not for the sake of reproducing a finished work but as a means to deconstruct and reconstruct the sculpture throughout the making process.  Partial casts, plaster shards and discarded mold pieces were joined together to make new compositions.   This making process had built into it conditions that inevitably led to new possibilities. The figures and heads that Cairns made in the 1970’s are some of the most exciting sculptures made in the past 50 years.  These works of art pursued traditional sculptural language and contemporary concerns to their edge, unfolding beyond that edge in striking revelation.

Powell figure,1976, 40"h

I had the valuable experience of watching Cairns plan, prepare and execute the installation of two large exhibits of his work, once at The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery on the campus of Haverford College in 2004 and once at The Erickson Gallery in Philadelphia in 2001.  In both cases, the entire group of work being shown, sometimes varying in scale and aesthetic concerns, was always thought of as a dramatic ensemble.  Cairns understands the long-established power of sculpture when placed strategically within an architectural space, considering the narrative of how people approach that space, enter and move through it.   The most intense presentation of Cairns’ sculpture can be found at his studio in Havertown, Pennsylvania, a 9,000 square foot former fire station that houses hundreds of sculptures and works in progress.  This space displays many of the individual sculptures Cairns has made over the years, but more than that it displays Cairns deep love of sculpture and his unyielding and committed pursuit of a very distinct experience.

An old student and long-time friend of Cairns, Walter Hall, said it well when he wrote of Cairns, “I saw him (and still do) as an indefatigable, relentless spirit, unwavering in its conviction, driven to ends not defined by trends or fame or the marketplace, principled and uncompromising in the extreme.” 

Michael O'Keefe is an artist living and working in Dallas, Texas.  His work has been shown extensively in Dallas, where he is currently represented by the Valley House Gallery, as well as in New York City and Pennsylvania.  O'Keefe teaches drawing and sculpture at various colleges as well as non-academic institutes in the Dallas area.  Learn more at www.michaelokeefestudio.com.