When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”We had decided to meet as soon as the museum opened, when the gallery, at the far end of the Met, would still be empty.
Taking in the painting, Serra had the air of a caged lion, pacing back and forth, moving away, to see it whole, then back in to inspect some detail.
“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” he said.
For him, art was all or nothing.
Of course he wasn’t alone in his thinking among American artists of his generation, the offspring of postwar American power and arrogance, of titans like Pollock.
Persons:
Richard Serra, Clara Weyergraf, Jackson, Serra, ”, Pollock
Organizations:
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Locations:
German