An early forged steel suite exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York during March 1979 rose a mere 11 ½” to 32”; though small in size, they have an inscrutable monumentality. During the summer of 1979, in Todi, where the 56-year-old, Brooklyn-born artist is domiciled, four immense, 28’5” - 35’ 10” steel columns are both fused (via tig-welding) and cast iron were arrayed in the town’s medieval piazza’ though totally modern, they looked as if they had guarded their site for centuries.

Installed in greenswards or enclosed spaces, in private apartments or public museums, this wondrous enclave of images fuses technological advances in fabrication with a spirit of ages gone by. They break the time-honored rules of verticality since they are wholly abstract, not figurative at all. Nevertheless, none sacrifice qualities associated with heroic modes of sculptural history. Each communicates a particular Anima from within its core and seems to embody as well notions of virtù. Some are intimate; some, stoic. A few suggest they are stalwart and mute; others feel noble and proud. Several have a serene character; a lot have a robust mien. Whether a Thebes Column, a Tarquinia Spiral, a Normanno Wedge, or a more recent Spirit of Place, these are structures which seem to function as beacons, sentinels, or totems. All realize a quest which challenges Pepper. “I wish to make an object,” she wrote six years ago in the Art Journal, “ that has a powerful presence, but is at the same time inwardly turned, seeming capable of intense self-absorption.”

The Moline Markers are the most slender species in this branch of Pepper’s metal family. The shafts, for the most part, taper and knife. The ones with splits practically quiver as if they were resonant tuning forks (since they do not shake or sway, they seem even more silent-tongued). The Moline Markers, unlike the other two monumental Deere works fabricated at the same time, feel as if they are about to evaporate or fade away. Their inner strength and outer durability, however, keep them from disappearing, and also, thwart the viewer from immediately grasping their illusionary natures. For while thin and reedy, these uprights experienced on site are stout enough to practically hide a person stationed behind them.

A geometry of prestidigitation governs this recent group of sculptres. Initially, the forms look a if the artist had happened upon them in some ancient tool shop. They have a ready-made quality. At first glance, regularized cones, crisp planes, hexagons, and even clubs seem to have been stacked together. But, theese are hardly stock elements. Removed slices fasion prisms. Edges actually segue into complex configurations at melded intersections. Truncations abound. Close-up, a viewer realizes how parts have been flattened and exaggerated. The Moline Markers appear civilized when they are really sauvage.

Working with ductile iron made it possible to fashion “hidden” contradictions. This relatively new metal is not as strong as steel, but it is eminently more castable. Shapes can be modeled which could never be achieved in steel. Though the mark, the hand of the artist seems absent from the finished product, touch, not torch, devised countless inches in preparatory stages. In January 1968, Pepper noted: “But, it’s necessary to remember that technology offers us the tools, not art. The confusion begins there.” To realize the rimless-flavored Moline Markers, the sculptor availed herself of the finest opportunities to integrate advanced fabrication processes with her projected program. She had compared producing these wonderous vertical to the process of cutting a record.

Detailing has been meticulously fashioned. Etched lines and pitted passages offer textural variations reminiscent of African sculptures. Animation is one result. Each gouge, every lively spot contributes a sense of personality and color as well. Strategic slits not only lighten loads, they engagingly interact with space and light.

If one were to categorize these structures, one would dub them a type of Archeological Minimalism. Each looks faired and true, hard-edged and sleek upon initial inspection. Once approached, the finishing reveals yet again Pepper’s tactile concerns. Indeed, part of the joy of being with these works is the discovery of how illusions crop up time and again. The hard, rock bottom facts of High Minimalism are not present here, though at first they seemed to be. According to the artist, in the Moline Markers, she wanted, “The past to participate in their presentness.” And, it is that goal which helps generate their ancient cast, without severing ties with contemporary principles.

Seen as a group, power, point, and presence are collectively asserted. The self-conscious selection of forms becomes evident. Joined together, the nature of their individuality is particularly appreciated. Exhibited as a body of work, rather than a viewed separately, the experience can be akin to visiting a retrospective of the sculptures of Aristide Maillol. Why a particular element is placed where it is in terms of other choices announces itself. Pepper, however, believes that her work has a unity of diversity and that the Early Modern master sought a unity of similarity. Yet, it can be argued that the two artists do intersect and in other ways as well. Maillol achieved a degree of abstraction with his figures, which was unprecedented; Pepper, in turn, has restored to abstraction, spiritual elements commonly associated only with representational bodies of work.

Beverly Pepper started out as a painter during the forties. She studied at both the Art Students League and Pratt Institute. In 1948, she has recalled, “I was an abstract painter,” Then, in 1949, for a short duration, she was based in Paris, working at the Grande Chaumiere with L’Hôte and Zadkine and with the Leger in his atelier. It is possible that her experiences with Leger still color her endeavors. Most artists of Pepper’s generation were taught cubism as if it was invented by Picasso and Braque. But, it was Leger who took Cubism into the realm of abstraction without sacrificing the humanistic values which spice the American’s vertical configuration.

During the fifties, living in Italy, the artist was so disturbed by the poverty and squalor rampant after World War II, she abandoned abstraction and painted canvases with socially committed subjects. When she was 29, Lionello Venturi was quoted in Time as predicting a rosy future for Pepper. “I think she will become a notable painter,” he said. Qualities which would later reappear in her sculptures were discussed in Art News reviews of her New York shows during the fifties. Lawrence Campbell in December 1954 singled out how she put black forms into lighter setting and he noticed, too, how people were seen from windows above, just as she would eventually design abstract sculptures occupied with plays of perspective. In December 1956, Eleanor Munro noted Pepper’s use of repetition.

In the late fifties, Beverly Pepper started to sculpt for the first time when, most fortunately, she moved into a house with 39 trees felled in its garden. She had an abundant supply of wood at her disposal. These initial carvings were quasi-figurative/abstract works. She continued to paint.

In 1960, a trip to Ankor Wat had a great affect on the artist. She has said, “I left a painter and came back as a sculptor.” The incredible trees in Cambodia which had overgrown the statuary, she recalls, filled her with a sense of “the incredible dimensions of life and lifeless filled with life.” She perceived near at hand the “struggle of growth.”

One other chance event influenced her early development as a sculptor. When Giovanni Carandente was inviting sculptors like David Smith and Alexander Calder to make works for the “Sculpture in the City” Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto in 1962, he asked Pepper if she could weld. “Why?” she asked. Told that she would be the third American to be mated with a factory that would assist her fabrication need, Pepper immediately apprenticed herself to a local iron monger.
Upon the completion of her projects, including the 222” x 235” x 44” Gift of Icarus, a steel and iron work consisting of strands of metal atop a high shaft, Pepper alternated work on public commissions with more private, studio essays. She became comfortable working in factories. She realized pieces for public sites before government buildings, office towers, parks, and such. She recognized, though, that there were times to withdraw into the quiet of her studio as well. To date, more than sculptures have been executed for public spaces ranging from Manhattan to San Diego, Seattle to Dallas. At one pint, Pepper was involved with devising work in which “the voids seem filled and the solids seem empty.” In 1978, she told a Dartmouth student her aim was “To sculpt a space.” Throughout this period, Pepper used a vocabulary of triangles, circles, and squares.

By the late sixties, there were sculptures with highly polished stainless steel wall which reflected their observers. As one ambled about them, the metal seemed to dissolve, and only colored interiors and ample spaces were in view. Perspective devices made one form seem to become a new configuration when experienced from another angle. These were then superseded by larger, often painted, triangular sculptures, heavier and more massive. Later on, the ribs which had secured various walls together were severed from planes to stand on their own. Far from seeming stable, they looked as if they had been tossed together and then, welded. Now, a stiff-backed linear network characterized Pepper’s endeavors. The artist had come full circle from the initial cascading ribbons of metal she had produced when she began to weld in 1962.

When the current type of works first began to be made in late 1977, she was back where she had truly begun in the orbit of the trees felled on her property. The spirituality she had sensed in Ankor War, and the experience of learning to weld among factory workers while also coming into contact with David Smith and his Voltri series in Spoleto in 1962.

The tripartite division of the Moline Markers does not call to mind figures with legs, trunks, and heads. With their elongations and stuntings, they resemble much more lean trees consisting of strong roots, lithesome shafts, and commanding presence.

These are works which are cloaked in mystery, which bespeak the cycles of nature. At first, they seem direct and forthright. In this way, they are like a superficial reading among Jonathan Swift’s worlds of Lilliput and Brobdingnag with their equivalent changes in size, but – where there is actually much more than meets the eye; commentary on government, religion, and the interaction of people. Pepper’s forms contain inner meanings, not just outer dressings.

The artist has denuded the rhetoric of the younger generation in the present-day art world while still availing herself of some formal practices. As if describing Pepper’s current situation rather than the mature lives of two characters, one recent novelist wrote: ”...we’re admirably estranged from reification hypotheses, polemical desiderate, metalanguage and alienating hierarchies of values.”

To be aware of the styles of art being made during one’s time and the means of production of an advanced society does not mean an artist must ignore the past with its grace and durability. So too, as Pepper has put it, in the Moline Markers, one finds “an inner vision rooted in reality. They take on a timelessness that has nothing to do with that reality.” We are richer for their evocations of humanism.

“The Moline Markers,” Davenport Museum Gallery, 1981.