Beverly Pepper’s mid-career bid for a prominent position in the fiercely competitive arena of contemporary American sculpture defies the triple odds of her sex, European residence and stylistic independence. Her work convinces because of its high level of quality. Quite clearly, it is the result of a well-guided and single-minded drive over a considerable period of time. The question arises:  what are the artist’s origins and how do we trace her development?

During the 1950’s, Beverly Pepper was known to an intimate circle as a talented painter who exhibited in Rome and New York without being a part of a specific movement. Attuned to Italian more than to American painting, her work ran the gamut from social realism to lyric abstraction. Yet these pictures did not contain enough of a challenge. She wanted a more total involvement and found it in 1960 when thirty-six olive, elm and mimosa trees wee felled in her garden. They lay before her – twisted trunks and fallen limbs – as a massive invitation to touch, to change, to shape them still further. She accepted it with the excitement of any artist possessing a new medium he feels should have long been his own. At the same time, she also began modeling in clay and casting in bronze.

A comparison of these first sculptures with her paintings reveals a similarity of approach. The tree carvings, by themselves or in combination with the roughly textured bronze castings, relate morphologically to the thick impasto paintings and their organic abstractions. They also forecast forms that hug and enclose, rather than dissect and explode space.

The Roman critic Giovanni Carandente, who visited Beverly Pepper’s exhibition of wood and bronze sculptures at the Galleria Pogliani in the fall of 1961, asked her whether she could weld. With the frenetic energy which has always been characteristic of the artist, she picked up basic welding skills and in the following spring was offered the chance to participate in “Scultura nella Città” – the memorable open-air sculpture exhibition in the medieval town of Spoleto. David Smith and Alexander Calder were the only other Americans among the ten sculptors invited.

From April through May, Beverly Pepper working in steel and stainless at the Italsider plant in Piombino. She made 15 pieces – five large ones, three of them exhibited in Spoleto. In another steel plant at Voltri, David Smith was working on the twenty-six open-form pieces for Spoleto. Smith saw an unexpected strength in Beverly Pepper’s first works in steel and urged her to continue in this new medium. These first welded steel works were bands and loops which coil and clasp. They related her work to Abstract Expressionism. They retained, however, too much of a painterly feeling to fully qualify as a sculptural proposition. The convoluted giant loops in front of the U.S. Plywood Building on Third Avenue in New York epitomize this airy and almost weightless treatment of heavy steel. Although the work is spectacular, it has not yet fully come to terms with surrounding space and thus complete her total transition from two to three dimensional concerns.
The candelabra section of her 1964 monument to John F. Kennedy at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel, was the first instance of her joining steel bands in elongated box elements. Something else happens there:  consideration of weight and stress made the sculptor realize the impracticality of working in solid metal and drove her to explore the structural potential of hollow form.

Beverly Pepper’s present sculpture is a result of ideas first apparent in Cor-ten Viewpoint of 1965. It would seem as though an open steel box has been cut in segments to create a serial repetition or an aggregate of forms – the segments welded tangentially with narrow interstices, in precarious balance. There are three of them and they are lifted up on another box-like form which serves as the base. The outside is sandblasted and weathered Cor-ten, the inside is painted orange and white. In reality this sculpture has been made out of rolled steel plate first cut and bent, then welded and assembled. When viewed head-on, the open box or tubular units appear to be square yet become trapezoids and parallelograms when viewed from the side. Pure geometry has never been one of the sculptor’s objectives.

In the winter of 1966, Beverly Pepper worked at the Steel and Alloy Tank Company in Newark, New Jersey, to make an 18’ high sculpture in stainless steel, commissioned by the Joseph Meyerhoff Corporation of Memphis, Tennessee. In addition to this sculpture, the last of those with arc and stave forms, she made a series of twelve small works in two-inch stainless plate which were painted white, blue, or girder red on the inside and brush polished to a muted satin finish on the outside.

This series is crucial in the sculptor’s development for it leads toward boxlike enclosure of space. And for the last time, it includes the tooth and crescent forms suggestive of carnivorous plants and animal mouths. The curious, tapered and bandsawed components are so welded that the rough and jagged edges create an impression of aggressiveness.

That summer in Watermill, Long Island, while working at the local blacksmith’s, Beverly Pepper clarified her formal language:  the sequential arrangement of open bozes. She also had a few of her smaller pieces chromeplated instead of brush polishe. This led her to apply a mirror finish to all of her sculpture in stainless steel.

Since the fall of 1966, the internal logic of her own development and an increased contact with the “minimal” work around her converged into a steady production which is as integral to the American sculptural tradition as it is personal to her. The works in this current exhibition for example, were all made within the course of the last two years. They force Beverly Pepper’s esthetics into sharp focus and allow us to examine her work in the wider context of current American sculpture.

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Beverly Pepper has the same interest in formal clarity as David Smith – yet her work has a spirit of playfulness which contrasts with the severity and ruggedness of Smith’s. The tectonic quality of her sculpture can be sensed in the proud assertion of feeling that permeates the work – a heroic bearing in abstract form. There is a yearning for the monumental, the large statement, which has its logical culmination in a scale approximating our architectural environment. It is more than coincidental that Beverly Pepper’s sculpture works best in a landscape and is often photographed near the Via Appia Antica. She is determined not to give up artistic intervention and personal decision making. She does not believe in the computer programming of form. In a time of conceptualization and detachment, she insists on being involved in the whole process of making sculpture from beginning to end. She removes materials and techniques from their industrial context and puts them to her own esthetic use.

By digesting rather than borrowing his ideas, Beverly Pepper extends David Smith’s esthetic – yet she stops short of the Minimal sculptors. Similarly, most of the practitioners of Post-Painterly Abstraction have never become Systematic. If we want to situate Beverly Pepper’s work in terms of the current art scene, then we could not recognize it as a sculptural parallel to Post-Painterly Abstraction. It is not surprising that there is a mutual professional interest between her and painters like Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland. Beverly Pepper puts a structural emphasis on color which is typical of the practitioners of Post-Painterly Abstraction:  “I think in terms of color-color – not in a pop sense, but colors that emphasize the strength of the material.”

She does more – using color in a unifying and sculptural, rather than in a differentiating, painterly manner. The colors most frequently employed are black, ultramarine, orange, and white; they are baked enamel providing a surface similarity with the polished steel in which they are embedded. The mirror polish comes far closer to a negation of color than the earlier rusty surface which had an almost romantic color value of its own. The analogy, in painting, is that of a color set against the unprimed canvas or an overall atmospheric background. Finally, interior color of Beverly Pepper’s sculptures is suspended by a liquid and almost self-dissolving structure which isolates it from its environment. Openness and clarity of form and high-keying and lucidity of color, Clement Greenberg’s Post-Painterly Abstraction criteria, are certainly pertinent to her sculpture of the last two years.

Many sculptors make scale model versions of ideas they hope to execute when the opporturnity arises. Some sculptors make table top objects and jewelry. The latter, even when blown up to monumental size, cannot do other than resemble oversized ornaments. The former, even before being executed, will impress us as intrinsically monumental.

This is how we are struck by Beverly Pepper’s small or inter-mediate size sculpture. It always comes through bigger than it is in reality. When a model is photographed with a landscape background, for example, it quickly suggests its ultimate realization. In one of his reflections on sculpture, Robert Morris notes that “the size of usless three-dimensional things is a continuum between the monument and the ornament.”  Beverly Pepper is quite clearly on the side of the monument. In contrast to those sculptors who aer costume jewelers at heart, she visualizes her sculpture on a scale which allows viewers to ascend within their interiors, in elevators, enjoying the view from the top.

A couple of observations can be made about Beverly Pepper’s approach to form. In the true Constructivist tradition, she abhors volume, mass, weight and monoliths. Her volumes are empty; the idea of mass is contradicted by an emphasis on precarious ingineering (outward projections and cantilevering) which belies the observance of structural realities such as gravity and stress. With static forms the sculptor creates a dynamic arrangement; she presents the viewer and aggregate or cluster of box-like units that are hinged or linked, stack or sliding – always suggesting change and permutation. The base for these sculptures is either a box element, integral to the composition, or a simple steel plate. Although the work is non-representational, its associations vary from chain-belt to bridge segments, from caterpillar to accordion.

While surface and structure exist simultaneously in Beverly Pepper’s sculptures, the surface makes the structure seem immaterial – an allusion rather than a reality. The mirror polish creates a trompe l’oeil effect which operates in two distinctly different ways. Most obviously, individual components appear extended or multiplied through reflection. Perhaps even more compelling, the end-pieces of any given form sequence are subject to a mirage in reverse. Under certain light conditions, since so much of the environment is reflected, they seem to cancel themselves out of the context of the total sculpture. The mirror polish belies what we know about steel and makes a heavy and assertive material look weightless and self-effacing to the point of disappearance.

Beverly Pepper must have speculated about this aspect of her work when she observes that the voids seem filled while the solids seem empty. Actually, the voids absorb while the solids reflect the environment. The voids are filled with the reality of color and space. The solids are filled with the illusion of an environment – our environment of today – which can never be captured or assimilated. In this area the sculptor sets herself an impossible, yet no less beautiful task:  “My aim is to invest space with a solidity by filling it with the world around it.”

                                                                                                Jan van der Marck

                                                                                                Chicago
                                                                                                December 1, 1968