Much like Louise Nevelson before her, Beverly Pepper dispels those outworn clichés about women’s art, which would limit its range of qualities to intimacy of scale, emotional reserve, and a fragile poetry of self-awareness.

Her work does not fit any of the once accepted stereotypes of female vulnerability or quiescence. On the contrary, it is boldly assertive, experimental, ambitious, and intensely physical in ways indistinguishable from the work of her male counterparts. In fact, her courage and energies are fast becoming legendary’ she has stripped away prejudice against women who make large-scale art by brilliantly executing complex and demanding commissions that might have daunted her rivals in the domain of public sculpture.

Challenged by these ambitious projects, Pepper pushes herself continually to more exacting standards of invention and execution. But even without the promise of patronage and following her own imperatives, she asserts her sculptural prerogatives and freely exercises her expansive talents.

The grouping of four recently produced monumental iron totems in Todi’s main square provide Pepper with yet another opportunity to demonstrate -- to a largely Italian audience this time -- her ability for unconventional formal solution in a grand manner. Here she unlocks the potential of the forged iron sculptures shown recently at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York and test their monumental capacity in the citizenry’s historic gathering place, a pedestrian mall as we know it, whose age-old architecture haughtily surrounds, yet naturally accepts these ingeniously matched intrusions.

One might imagine that the encounter between her monumental iron sculpture and Todi’s historic Piazza with its medieval palazzi and crenellated walls would generate intolerable environmental tensions. The confrontation between these industrial-age ‘obelisks’ and the graceful square is eased, however, by Pepper’s sensitive treatment of their surfaces. The pitted skin with its ocher tone and mellowed look suggests time’s passage in perfect harmony with the worn cut-stone facades of the communal buildings. Their forms echo monuments erected to celebrate military prowess, civic pride, or religious devotion from Etruscan times to the birth of the city-states.

The exhibition as a whole reaffirms the vital continuities of past and present in a dialogue of elementary sculptural forms and historic architecture, of personalized plastic presences, of the exigencies of urban spaces. Pepper’s ponderous but slender forgings touch a creative nerve in the distant past, bringing it closer to us, and – with their alternately cylindrical, squared, and conical shapes – they become paradigms of the ambient architecture’s structural clarity and rude force.

Throughout her career, the formal diversity of Beverly Pepper’s sculpture has given the impression of a boldly experimental and adventurous personality, loath to be held in check. At times, as her work has radically shifted its aesthetic ground, it might have seemed to be the product of a multiple personality. These restless changes, often in rapid sequence, were far from capricious and obeyed a strong internal logic of development. Even when their appearance differs widely, her sculptures betray a consistent mind with an identifiable clarity of thought, whether expressed in the mirror-polished stainless steel open forms of the Sixties, with their elegance and panache, or the deliberately dour and assertive Cor-Ten geometries on a monumental scale of the Seventies.

These changes in style are a measure of the artist’s alertness as she responded to the intellectual currents of her time. Her environmental sculpture in particular encourages a sense of contemporary engagement. It embraces conceptual and informational revelation as much as purely formal considerations linked to orthodox minimal art. Her preparedness to challenge the clichés of Minimalist geometries by intensifying the conceptual demands of her art, shows a capacity for personal growth unbiased by her own past achievements.

Noteworthy among Beverly Pepper’s monumental sculptures is Phaedrus, a large triangular mass the size of a small building, pierced by an off-center triangular opening, poised precariously and cantilevered out over Independence Mall before the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank. The daring extension into space of this surging but stable mass of white-enameled steel and its defiance of gravity triumphantly distract the eye from the unrelieved glass and metal anonymities of the Mall’s high-rise office buildings.

In a different and more informal environment of Dartmouth College, Beverly Pepper showed her sensitivity to the campus’s site and green area by creating a constellation of triangulated, webbed steel forms of white-enameled steel, echoing the white churches of New England and hailing its title Thel from the visionary poetry of William Blake. Extending 135 feet along the sloping lawn and at varying heights rising to eleven feet, the five-part sculpture insinuates itself into the terrain and forced a sequential reading – at once revealing yet without withholding its visual information. The experience engages the mind no less than the eye and involves the spectator in physical movement and continuous optical scanning of the sculpture from all sides. The pyramidal masses and their geometric severity gain relief from a certain randomness of disposition not unlike those outcroppings of granite in northern New England’s fields and meadows.

Pepper’s most ambitious environmental sculpture is Amphisculpture, and earthwork doubling as a meeting place comparable in size to a small theatre in antiquity, which has been carefully sited into the sloping terrain of the AT&T Long Lines Headquarters building in Bedminster, New Jersey. The concentric, circular platforms of concrete and the steeply elevated triangular central mass together create shifting vistas, fragmented perspectives, and rhythmic movement like a descent down the ramp of a swiftly traversed highway interchange. Nonetheless, the large-scale work manages to convey a classical sense of stability anchored to a system of balanced forms within a controlled circular enclosure. Like so much recent work, most notably the installation of the Todi columns, Beverly Pepper’s environmental constructions attain an even greater degree of physicality as they grow more demanding conceptually.

A dialogue continues in Beverly Pepper’s work between the brute physical object, stripped down to its barest essentials, and complete metaphors and systems of ideas calculated to heighten the visual interest of her reductive formula. An unerring sense of scale and the ability to rise to public occasions have injected fresh meaning and renewed vigor into her most recent handling of form. Her weighty columns suggest the primitive functionality of simple bronze-age tools, even as they are recognizably the product of the modern industrial process that shapes the I-beams, steel trusses, and the other mighty underpinnings of the structures of our modern world.
           
Is there an unconscious irony in the primitivism of Pepper’s new Iron Age sculpture? Though the large-scale versions are generally fused, the small columns that inspired them have been literally pounded into shape in an industrial forge, essentially a blacksmithing operation on a grand scale. This me3thod and its artistic results reflect a nostalgia for simpler times ad for the artisan’s world of tools and object-making, in a marked mistrust of both the overpriced efficiency and the sagacity of our modern industrial environment, which Beverly Pepper’s sever sculptural forms in every other way evoke.

Beverly Pepper in Todi:  Sculture nella Piazza, 1979
Sam Hunter, Princeton University